Thursday, January 1, 2009

Happy New Year to you all!

The days top political news:

Government aid could save U.S. newspapers, the idea sparks debate

A Connecticut lawmaker says he sees saving the local newspaper as his duty. Others think he and his colleagues are setting a worrisome precedent for government involvement in the U.S. press.

Financial collapse of many daily newspapers is raising a call from some for government bailouts.  If its good for autos, why not a newspaper.

Such a concept provides an ominous potential for a media even more totally corrupted and serving as nothing more than mouthpieces for left wing politicians  It’s such an outrageous idea, it will likely be pushed to passage.
 
http://www.reuters.com/article/reutersEdge/idUSTRE4BU53T20081231?sp=true

Sen. Bill Clinton? Don't laugh – some suggest it.

The former president is among the names being suggested as possible "caretakers" for his wife’s New York's Senate seat.

If appointed by the governor, Clinton would serve until the 2010 elections but wouldn't be interested in running to keep the job.

The Clinton ploy would be one option to allow Democrats to side step the increasing embarrassing prospect of Caroline Kennedy being selected as many are fearing.

http://wcbstv.com/politics/ny.caretaker.senator.2.897875.html

Senate Democrats conspire to block the Illinois Senate appointment by Democrat governor facing federal criminal charges.

Roland Burris went to the Illinois Supreme Court on New Year’s Eve to try to get his Senate appointment certified.  Senate leaders in Washington scheme to keep from swearing him, regardless of what the court decides.

A major clash between Senate Democrats and the courts could result.

Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White has said he will not certify the controversial appointment by disgraced Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1208/16977.html

Opinion:
Happy New Year – but the news continues

It’s a holiday, after all, and I had intended to by pass today’s web updates by offering a simple “Happy New Year” then settling in for a feast of football.

But the fools abound and there are just too many stories that beg for posting.

The radicals at the ACLU continue their confrontation with the First Amendment guarantees as they continue their dedicated crusade to impose atheism as a national religion.  The ACLU assaults normal Americans (you know, those who cling to their bibles) at every opening.  They have no problem finding fools to serve as their cat’s paws in this radical endeavor.

Take the assault on an inaugural prayer at the upcoming Inauguration:

Michael Nedow, the atheist who unsuccessfully sued to remove the words "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance is now appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court his lawsuit to stop the inaugural prayer.

Michael Newdow's challenge to the prayer was rejected by a federal district court and a federal appeals court.

"It is unfortunate that Michael Newdow continues to pursue a flawed legal strategy that really has no chance of success," said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, which has challenged Newdow's lawsuits in the past.

Nedow filed his suit against inclusion of “under God” in the pledge – claiming his daughter was intimidated by the wording.  It turned out Nedow was  lying his head off and his daughter condemned his actions.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1162293

Nedow isn’t the only fool in the barrel, however.

Roanoke Vice Mayor Sherman Lea didn't actually mention Jesus Christ by name during his prayer at a city council meeting earlier this month. But his invocation, which referred to an "eternal God" and the "high and holy name of your son," raised the ire of at least one person, who in an e-mail to council members called the prayer "illegal and offensive to the many religions in Roanoke City."

Governmental prayers have been a hot-button issue this year. In July, a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court's decision that Hashmel Turner, a Baptist minister and member of the Fredericksburg City Council, did not have a right to say a sectarian prayer to open council meetings.

Lawyers for Turner are now trying to get the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case.

Later this year, a number of troopers who participate in the state police's chaplaincy program resigned because of a policy requiring them to offer only nondenominational prayers at department-sanctioned events. That policy was implemented in response to the 4th Circuit Court's ruling.

http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/189454

Thus does the conspiracy against decency and normal America continue – unabated.
Pray for sanity to rule the day.

Buddy

Now for some other blogs I just had to share:
First an overview:

1.

A private investigator in Hawaii has uncovered the divorce decree for Barack Obama's father and
mother, which indicates they had "one child under the age of eighteen, born
 in Kenya." That is the report of Ed Hale of PlainsRadio.com, an Internet radio site which has focused upon the natural born Citizen challenges to Obama's presidential eligibility.

2.

Obama’s Other Pastor Problem 

By Mark D. Tooley

Megachurch Pastor Rick Warren, Obama's pick to deliver his inauguration's invocation, has become controversial because, like most clergy, he opposes same-sex marriage. Getting almost no attention so far is Obama's choice to deliver the benediction, the far left, conspiracy-minded and verbally intemperate Rev. Joseph Lowery, who is an older version of Jeremiah Wright.

 

A venerated veteran of the Civil Rights Movement, Lowery followed the leftward trajectory of many civil rights colleagues, whose political alliances with white liberals yanked them away from the theological conservatism of traditional black churches. Although his United Methodist denomination prohibits it, Lowery supports same-sex unions. And he affirms abortion rights. Lowery has joined Cindy Sheehan's anti-war demonstrators outside President Bush's Crawford ranch, opining that Iraqi mothers believe U.S. troops are "terrorists." He once linked arms with PLO terrorist Yasser Arafat and sang "We Shall Overcome." He believes that the U.S. Government was complicit in Martin Luther King's assassination, and that the CIA has imported drugs from Central America. When Daniel Ortega headed the Sandinista Marxist dictatorship in Nicaragua, Lowery hosted a reception for him in Atlanta. He apparently was a formal advisor to the now defunct Christic Institute, a 1980's era litigator that alleged that the Iran-Contra episode was merely the cog of a 30 year long "secret team" conspiracy governing U.S. foreign policy.

3.

Now Sits Expectation In The Air
Tony Blankley
As President-elect Obama vacations with his family in Hawaii and publicly complains about the intrusiveness of the press pool and the intense scrutiny of his Secret Service team, I suspect about now Obama may be recalling George Bernard Shaw's heartless observation that: "There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it."

Now for the full stories:

1.

Obama's Kenyan birth evidence to be revealed Friday, online — update
By Arlen Williams

Permission to copy and post this article's text is granted.

(Update: Ed Hale has sent an email stating that his delivery has been delayed until Friday, 1/2. We wait another day for what he has to show. We can be patient in light of how long we wait for Barack Obama to admit the truth of his ineligibility per Article II — and show us the whole truth of his actual Hawaiian birth certificate, besides.)

A private investigator in Hawaii has uncovered the divorce decree for Barack Obama's father and
mother, which indicates they had "one child under the age of eighteen, born
 in Kenya." That is the report of Ed Hale of PlainsRadio.com, an Internet radio site which has focused upon the natural born Citizen challenges to Obama's presidential eligibility.

Hale announced this during his evening Internet broadcast on PlainsRadio.com, Tuesday, 12/30 and confirmed it with I.O. in an online interview, later that night. He reported that certified copies of this documentation have been sent from Hawaii by the investigator to himself and four others. Hale is to receive his copy today, Wednesday, 12/31 and plans to post it graphically on the site, during the day. He will also discuss this on a special Internet broadcast, between 6 pm and 10 pm Central Time, tonight. The site streams audio as soon as it is accessed via Web browser.

The Texan Internet entrepreneur relates he got fed up with the lack of documentation on Obama and decided to discuss ideas with his radio audience. His offer to hire an investigator was met with piecemeal sums of money from listeners to his broadcasts. Hale said some of the information one would expect to find was not available. For example, documentation from Obama's mother Stanley Ann's divorce to her second husband, Lolo Soetoro, had vanished. Hale speculates, the reason this forthcoming 1964 divorce decree had not also been "scrubbed" could be that the divorce had been filed not by Obama's mother, but by Barack H. Obama, Sr. Thus, it may have been overlooked by any plumbers for Obama.

Hale does admit to incomplete certainty of his investigator's work until he receives it, partially due to the PI's accent, the telephone connection, and his slight hearing impediment. However, he is very confident of what he will receive during the day. Mark S. McGrew, who writes about Obama's natural born Citizen problems for Pravda.ru, accompanied Hale in his broadcast and also expressed confidence. McGrew had sought publication in numerous American news outlets, but they turned down his articles referring to Obama's apparent ineligibility. Russia's Pravda however, decided his effort to find and report the truth was not to be redlined.

As often related, Barack Obama, due simply to his U.K. citizenship at birth via his Kenyan father, is not a natural born Citizen of America, by definition and the original intent of that term. The Supreme Court has turned down cases which make this point, but according to a September decision in a lower federal court (regarding John McCain's eligibility problem), this would be due to a question of jurisdiction, until Congress is to certify the Electoral College vote on January 8. Further action is to occur, after this date. You may read about this in previous I.O. articles and the sites linked in its sidebar.

Meanwhile, on the question of Obama's place of birth, professionals dealing with documents and forensic evidence have testified that the online "certificate of live birth" provided by Obama is not identifiable evidence of American birth. Now, if Obama's parents' divorce decree states that he was born in Kenya (as his Kenyan grandmother has repeatedly stated), the second epistemological wheel is coming off his vehicle to the White House.

Will Congress pay attention and do its Constitutional duty?

© Arlen Williams

2.

Obama’s Other Pastor Problem 
By Mark D. Tooley

FrontPageMagazine.com

Megachurch Pastor Rick Warren, Obama's pick to deliver his inauguration's invocation, has become controversial because, like most clergy, he opposes same-sex marriage. Getting almost no attention so far is Obama's choice to deliver the benediction, the far left, conspiracy-minded and verbally intemperate Rev. Joseph Lowery, who is an older version of Jeremiah Wright.

A venerated veteran of the Civil Rights Movement, Lowery followed the leftward trajectory of many civil rights colleagues, whose political alliances with white liberals yanked them away from the theological conservatism of traditional black churches. Although his United Methodist denomination prohibits it, Lowery supports same-sex unions. And he affirms abortion rights. Lowery has joined Cindy Sheehan's anti-war demonstrators outside President Bush's Crawford ranch, opining that Iraqi mothers believe U.S. troops are "terrorists." He once linked arms with PLO terrorist Yasser Arafat and sang "We Shall Overcome." He believes that the U.S. Government was complicit in Martin Luther King's assassination, and that the CIA has imported drugs from Central America. When Daniel Ortega headed the Sandinista Marxist dictatorship in Nicaragua, Lowery hosted a reception for him in Atlanta. He apparently was a formal advisor to the now defunct Christic Institute, a 1980's era litigator that alleged that the Iran-Contra episode was merely the cog of a 30 year long "secret team" conspiracy governing U.S. foreign policy.

In 2006, Lowery created media waves by exploiting Coretta Scott King's funeral to declare with his usual political banality: "We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there. But Coretta knew and we know that there are weapons of misdirection right down here. Millions without health insurance. Poverty abounds. For war billions more but no more for the poor!" Such verbiage has been common for Lowery, now age 87, at United Methodist and other church functions over the years. His oratorical blasts are always vapidly left-wing and assume America has only degenerated since 1968.

"You could get away with anything as long as you said you were fighting communism," Lowery exclaimed at a 2000 banquet of the United Methodist Board of Church and Society in Cleveland. "We demonized the saints and canonized the Devil!," is how he described America's role in the Cold War. "We've sown the seed and now we're reaping the whirlwind."

Dismissive of the then recent forcible return of little Elian Gonzalez to Castro's Cuba by the Clinton Administration, Lowery scoffingly asked: "What if Reagan had ordered the raid in Miami!" And he sarcastically complained, "We're still fearful of the great empire of Cuba." Lowery claimed conservatives would make God "male, white [and] racist," that affirmative action was "born in the New Testament, not the Nixon Administration," that America sends "smart bombs on dumb missions," that America's criminal justice system in 1999 was "almost a replica of the system of 1909," and that capital punishment by lethal injection was something the "Nazis started." Of America's military and its "don't ask, don't tell policy," he asserted: "If you deceive you can be a general, but if you're honest you can't serve."

Four years later, Lowery again spoke to the same United Methodist audience, this time in Pittsburgh, speaking just as incorrigibly as ever, urging the church to take a sinful America "down by the riverside." Repeating the usual bromides about the poorer getting poorer at the hands of the rich, he called low minimum wages and the absence of socialized medicine "weapons of mass destruction." And he urged beating missiles into "morsels of bread" and tanks into tractors. "Don't we have something better to offer the world than swords and missiles and smart bombs on stupid missions?" he asked. "The God I serve loves the motherless child in Baghdad as much as he loves the motherless child in Boston," he declared, implying that his targets do not care about Iraqi children.

Lowery blamed America's supposed "re-segregation" on "these judges appointed by [Presidents] Reagan and Bush." The 2000 election in Florida proved that some Americans are still denied voting rights, resulting in Bush's being "selected" rather than elected, he claimed. Denouncing the U.S. War on Terror, Lowery asserted: "We've done more to help Bin Laden in his demagoguery than anything I know of" by killing and outraging Muslims. After sarcastically asking if President Bush were a fellow United Methodist, Lowery smilingly responded to the left-wing crowd's audible disapproval: "Don't blame me; I didn't let him in!" And he incomprehensibly compared Bush to segregationist George Wallace.

Such high-toned comments earned Lowery the Robert O. Cooper Peace and Justice Award from the Human Rights Center at Southern Methodist University (SMU) earlier this year, which he received at Munger Place United Methodist Church in Dallas by delivering his usual rambling and politicized sermon. According to the Dallas Morning News, United Methodist and SMU reports, he was dismissive of Christians who affirm traditional teachings about marriage and the sanctity of life, preferring ostensibly more important causes, like opposing the Iraq War. "We have lost too many Americans (in the Iraq war)," he proclaimed. "There are too many Americans who have been injured ... millions of Iraqis have been killed, (and) you are worried about someone's sexuality?"
"We have to find out what really matters," Lowery insisted. "Too many of our people believe that propaganda of looking for weapons of mass destruction. Creating weapons of mass destruction keeps us from focusing on major issues like feeding the hungry and poverty." He condemned the Bush administration for making "God the god of war, and the god of the rich and powerful." Lowery evidently shares the typical Religious Left emphasis on political correctness over personal morality. "We need to be discerning about the major issues. Abortion -- that's a minor issue. I'm all for life, but I'm also for freedom of choice. We can't be the judge of what a woman does with her body. We have too many distractions."
Naturally, Lowery defended his kindred spirit, Jeremiah Wright. "What's wrong with Jeremiah Wright's preaching?" he wondered. "Prophetic preaching has been around in the black church for years. That's all I do. The only reason why no one says anything about me is because I don't have a member who is a presidential candidate."
Of course, Lowery did not then know he would serve prominently in Obama's inauguration. But rather than become the object of deserved controversy for his leftist theology and paranoid politics, he has been overshadowed by Rick Warren's conventional views on same-sex marriage. Perhaps the public will awake to the reality that it is Lowery and not Warren who is the clerical oddity.
________________________________________
Mark D. Tooley directs the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy.
  
http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=4EB0434E-5002-41DD-A5FC-476EC530C371
 
3.

Now Sits Expectation In The Air
Tony Blankley

As President-elect Obama vacations with his family in Hawaii and publicly complains about the intrusiveness of the press pool and the intense scrutiny of his Secret Service team, I suspect about now Obama may be recalling George Bernard Shaw's heartless observation that: "There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it."

This last week of December 2008 is a strange moment for the country. It must be positively bizarre for our president-elect. It seems as if all the problems of the world are lining up and just waiting for our new president to handle. For every American but one, we are merely waiting to see what Obama will do in three weeks. For that one -- Obama -- he, presumably, is puzzling over finding the right policies -- if there are any right policies. Probably there are only terrible and catastrophic policies to pick from.

There are media reports that he is smoking more than usual. Who could blame him? For many of the rest of us, we wake up at 2 in the morning worried about our family's or our business's finances. Obama has to worry about the nation's and the world's finances -- and wars and threats of yet more wars.

Americans continue to not shop (until recently the world, including citizen of the world Obama, condemned Americans for shopping to the tune of 25 percent of world consumption. Now the whole world is begging us to buy more stuff to keep the world from going broke.) How long will it be before President Obama repeats Bush's advice to Americans after September 11 to go shopping.

The economy continues its downward track. The bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler have been delayed a couple of months -- to give Obama time to be sworn in as president before the real unpleasantness begins (or the really big bucks are spent to delay the unpleasantness by a few more months).

As Pelosi and her colleagues get ready to spend about a trillion dollars to try and stimulate the economy, Obama is going to have to start saying no to his friends on the Hill. Left to their own devices, that $1 trillion will fall well short of the spending urges that get larger by the day. It must be tough to spend a trillion dollars you don't have -- and be called cheap.

But even as he must worry whether even a trillion dollars of stimulus can ameliorate the precipitous economic contraction, he must also worry about the real possibility of double digit inflation hitting our economy in six to 18 months -- as a result of all these trillions of freshly conjured-up dollars that will be flooding our currency supply.

Beyond the little matters of either deflation or hyper-inflation, Hamas broke its ceasefire with Israel, and Israel started defending herself again last week. Muslims worldwide and our many anti-semitic European friends are crying out for Israel to show "restraint."

Nobody cares what lame duck Bush says about this anymore, but the whole angry world awaits the first presidential utterance of Barack H. Obama on the matter of putting the Jews in their place. Will he speak for all the Jew haters in Europe and the Middle East -- or will he speak as every American president since Harry Truman has, and defend Israel's right to exist and militarily protect itself when its civilians are attacked by yet more fanatic, Islamist bombs and rockets?

Down the road a piece from Gaza, the Pakistani and Indian fanatics in the subcontinent are gearing up for another of their regular flirtations with nuclear annihilation. As I write, the Pakistanis and Indians are rushing troops up to their mutual border -- but, of course, hope to avoid war. Unless they have backed down by Jan. 20 at noon, stopping war while not antagonizing either of those needed allies will fall to Obama and his vastly experienced Secretary of State (who once rode foreign elephants with Chelsea -- so is superbly equipped to manage Hindu/Muslim fanaticism).

And, oh, by the way, the Chinese are talking of building their first aircraft carrier to compete with our blue water navy.
To add to the burdens of our young president elect, reports from around the world suggest that the instinct to protect local economies is growing, thus putting more pressure on free trade. While strong arguments can be made in individual trade cases, history is unambiguous about the result of increased protectionism during a period of world economic contraction, just ask President Hoover.

Economically beggaring thy neighbor is a sure path to depression. Contrary to Obama's prior words and union allies's desires, he fails to champion world trade at the serious risk of repeating Herbert Hoover's catastrophic Smoot-Hawley protectionist mistake.

With history before Obama, I think of Shakespeare's young King Harry -- Henry V, the duties of fateful war falling on his inexperienced shoulders, the chorus early recites:

"For now sits Expectations in the air, and hides a sword from hilts unto the point With crowns imperial. Crowns and coronets, Promised to Harry and his followers."

Let us hope that the inexperienced Obama -- now with crowns and coronets and followers -- rises to his duty as young Harry did six centuries ago. 

 http://townhall.com/columnists/TonyBlankley/2008/12/31/now_sits_expectation_in_the_air
 
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