Head-in-the-sand

Does the mental health industry have its head-in-the-sand when it comes to acknowledging the correlation between violence and schizophrenia? D.J. Jaffe thinks so, especially when substance abuse is also involved. He is an advocate for Assisted Outpatient Treatment.

Can a plan be devised to improve whom we select as candidates?

Mona Charen writes that it may be time to reconsider how we nominate candidates for president.

The result is a carnival that is absurdly long and demanding. Serious candidates commit to no less than two years of full-time fundraising and campaigning. This ridiculous schedule virtually excludes candidates who have important jobs (governors, cabinet secretaries), and it offers unfortunate advantages to the independently wealthy and those with connections to the wealthy, and also to the new mandarin class: the consultants.

The endless string of debates, presided over by the liberal press, also lays traps for Republican candidates and draws the campaign away from issues Republicans care about.

Charen notes that Jeffrey H. Anderson and Jay Cost have developed a plan that

would revitalize local Republican parties, marginalize the hostile press, permit strong candidates to emerge as the choice of the grass roots, eliminate the tremendous waste of money the long primary campaigns require — freeing more funds for the general election, where Democrats have consistently outspent Republicans in recent years — and reduce the intra-party bloodletting that arguably damages the Republican image.

Charen gives a brief summary of their plan here.

There is a vacuum between his speechmaking and his governing

Mickey Kaus writes about disconnects between what Obama has been doing, and what Obama is now speechifying about. The two main things Obama has been trying to do, gun control and immigration, are not mentioned, as he now tells us that what he has really been doing is working on improving the economy. Obamacare, gun control, immigration reform and climate change are the

highest priority of Organizing for America, the potentially transformative, slightly Chavez-y extra-party grassroots lobbying group Obama established after the 2012 campaign.

Kaus again:

nothing the President is currently promoting comes even close to reversing “the forces that have conspired against the middle class for decades.”

Unfortunately, the “immigration reform” bill championed by Obama–the biggest item on his domestic legislative agenda–would make sure this tight labor market never returns. Indeed, that is part of its appeal to business. First, it would legalize 8 million or so previously undocumented immigrants who are now living here but aren’t now free to compete in every field of employment. Second, it would encourage many more foreign workers, mostly unskilled. to cross the border illegally–after all, those that went before were legalized in order to appeal to Latinos, and there will be more Latino voters in 2020 than today. Third it would explicitly expand the legal unskilled immigrant and temporary workforce by several million (increasing by 10 million the number of U.S. residents, excluding the legalized illegals).

Put all these together and you have an unskilled labor pool flooded with newcomers. in which wages for those who sweep floors will predictably fall. Economists heatedly debate whether, overall, unskilled workers might benefit by, say, supervising the work of cheap foreign floor-sweepers. But there’s little debate that the least skilled unskilled workers–e.g. those who remain floor sweepers–will fall further behind. Meanwhile, the profits for those who hire them, who tend to be at the top of the income pile, should be healthy.

Income inequality, in short, will rise. Obama’s “legacy’ achievement would make the trend he wants to “reverse” worse. Even jobs that can’t be “outsourced” will be subject to newly “insourced” foreign labor competition. Call it Bringing Globalization Home.

Kaus notes,

there’s a vacuum between his speechmaking and governing.

via Instapundit

Basic kindness

Should chivalry die, be brought back, or evolve into a more inclusive ethos that is appropriate for 2013? Emily Esfahani Smith writes,

a major study of more than 10,000 people from around the world — one of the largest studies of its kind — found that the No. 1 attribute that both young men and women seek in a mate is not money or beauty or intelligence, but kindness, which lies at the heart of the chivalrous act.

Go here for a debate on the subject of chivalry.

The Clintons are never going away

The National Enquirer has a cassette tape of Monica Lewinsky leaving a message for Bill Clinton. Ann Althouse has excerpts from it here. Surf-ed says this in the comments:

Actually, it's kinda' sweet in a 1990's sort of old fashioned way. Besides, the Prez usually has a lot going on so if someone else can take, ahem, the load off and put it on her, ahem, shoulders well all the better.

Oh, and remember this?

Via Instapundit

Confessing sins, asking forgiveness, and celebrating grace

Ann Voskamp introduces us today to Kara Powell, a member of the faculty of Fuller Theological Seminary. Kara is concerned about what we can all do to help our kids find the treasure of life-long faith. She writes,

Study after study indicates that almost half of kids from great families will drift from God and the church after high school.

As we have examined 500 youth group graduates to see how families and churches can build a faith that lasts—or what we call “Sticky Faith”—it’s become clear that most kids equate faith with a list of “do’s” and “don’ts”.

When (note I said when and not if) young people fail to live up to those behaviors, they run from God and the church—just when they need both the most.

Because of our Sticky Faith research, our family is hoping that talking (and laughing) about our mistakes will make our home a safe place to confess our sins and celebrate the grace that erases them all.

If I were flawless, I would need no Savior.

Before Obama and Holder

This case didn't receive anywhere near the attention that the Zimmerman/Martin case got. And it was not reported as being racial, even though the murderers were all black and the victims white.

Via Instapundit

Welcome to Chattanooga!

President Obama took his campaign gave a speech on the economy in Chattanooga, Tennessee yesterday. Here is how the local newspaper welcomed him.

President Obama,

Welcome to Chattanooga, one of hundreds of cities throughout this great nation struggling to succeed in spite of your foolish policies that limit job creation, stifle economic growth and suffocate the entrepreneurial spirit.

That’s because your jobs creation plans so far have included a ridiculous government spending spree and punitive tax increase on job creators that were passed, as well as a minimum wage increase that, thankfully, was not. Economists — and regular folks with a basic understanding of math — understand that these are three of the most damaging policies imaginable when a country is mired in unemployment and starving for job growth.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 helped fund the Gig to Nowhere project, a $552 million socialist-style experiment in government-owned Internet, cable and phone services orchestrated by EPB — Chattanooga’s government-owned electric monopoly.

While the Smart Grid will cost taxpayers and local electric customers well over a half-billion dollars when all is said and done, there has been little improvement in the quality of EPB’s electric service. Worse, despite being heavily subsidized, EPB’s government-owned Internet, cable and telephone outfit that competes head-to-head against private companies like AT&T and Comcast is barely staying afloat, often relying on loans from electric service reserve funds to afford its business expenses.

As a result, Chattanooga has remained a relative ghost town for technological innovation. Almost no economic development whatsoever has resulted from the gig.

Thanks to Hot Air

Technology marches on

Found here

Maybe people really do support Obamacare

Mark Dice interacts with some low information voters. I think this guy is very funny. Here he suggests that the best idea is just to put senior citizens to sleep and save health care costs. Many of the idiots go right along with him.

Found here

Relax a moment with Ronald Reagan

Found here

Deceit

Robert Spencer writes about how the liberal media are in love with a new book about Jesus entitled Zealot. The author of the book, Reza Aslan, is a devout Muslim, and a member of a lobbying group for Iranian mullahs. Spencer points out numerous incidents of dishonesty in Aslan, but then reminds us that Aslan's prophet said, "War is deceit."

Excusing evil and gaining control

Excusing evil. Thomas Sowell writes about it here.

At least as far back as the 18th century, the Left has struggled to avoid facing the plain fact of evil — that some people simply choose to do things that they know to be wrong when they do them. Every kind of excuse, from poverty to an unhappy childhood, is used by the Left to explain and excuse evil.

Sowell explains and gives examples showing that it is all about gaining control of government and institutions.

Obama's anti-suburbs policy

Stanley Kurtz writes here about the Obama administration's anti-suburb policy.

The Obama administration is using traditional anti-discrimination language as a cover for a re-engineering the way we live. The real goal is to Manhattanize America, and force us out of our cars.

HUD will use data on access to housing, jobs, and transportation to press densification on both urban and suburban jurisdictions. With the new HUD rule in place, municipalities will be under heavy pressure to allow multifamily developments in areas previously zoned for single-family housing. The new counting scheme, which measures access to housing, jobs, and transportation, will simultaneously create pressures to push businesses into the newly densified areas, and to locate those centers near transportation hubs. In effect, HUD’s new rule gives the federal government a tool to press ultra-dense Plan Bay Area-style “priority development areas” on regions across the country.

So even in states without California-style regionalist legislation in place, a federally-funded structure with the potential to override local control, block suburban development, and force densification will be created.

Obama isn’t actually out of bold ideas. They’re simply too controversial for him to discuss. The time has come for a national debate on the Obama administration’s regionalist policies.

Prospects for a state of Palestine

Barry Rubin asks,

Will the Obama administration recognize a state of Palestine not achieved through negotiation with Israel?

Rubin reminds us that

Kerry’s last Middle East negotiation was when he thought he would easily wean away Syria’s dictatorship from Iran.

Nothing phony about these guys

Found here

Don't answer that question!

Found here

Food stamp Presidency

Found here

Reject it!

Senator Jeff Sessions writes about the Gang of Eight's immigration bill:

And so, with unanimous Democrat support, the Senate adopted a bill that adds four times more guest workers than the rejected 2007 plan at a time when 4.3 million more Americans are out of work and 20 million more Americans are on food stamps. The proposal also grants immediate work authorization to those here illegally while dramatically boosting permanent levels of annual legal immigration in the future. Based on Congressional Budget Office data, the bill would grant permanent residency to 46 million mostly lower-skill immigrants by 2033.

The result? CBO says wages would fall for the next dozen years, unemployment would rise, and per-capita GNP would be lower for the next quarter century.

The Senate immigration bill — written by the White House, Democrat leadership and supported by the entire Democrat conference — sacrifices the economic interests of these Americans in deference to the politicians and business interests who want lower-cost labor.

The GOP is presented with such a moment now. The White House has made its central legislative priority a bill that would result in decades of stagnant wages, stubborn unemployment, and increasing poverty. Instead of joining in that destructive effort, the GOP should reject it and demand reforms that encourage self-sufficiency and promote rising wages.

Both as a matter of economic policy and social policy, the best course for America is one that helps more of our residents move off of welfare, off of unemployment, and into good-paying jobs. We can’t simply ignore the large number of chronically underemployed Americans. Immigration policy should promote — not inhibit — individual opportunity and community confidence.

The Senate immigration bill is Obamacare’s 1,200-page legislative cousin. It is a disaster on every level. Republicans should make no effort to salvage it or to offer even the slightest hope of revival. Instead, we should draw sharp and bold contrasts that earn the loyalty of our faithful supporters and the newfound respect of the millions of working Americans who have turned away.

thanks to Michael Brown

Why would a "justice system" refuse to test DNA evidence?

Conor Friedersdorf asks,

What Kind of 'Justice System' Refuses to Test DNA Evidence?

He goes on to tell the story of Sharon Snyder, who was fired for helping to exonerate an innocent prisoner.

Robert Nelson, 49, sought DNA testing to overturn his rape conviction in 2009 and again in 2011, but Judge David Byrn denied both requests because he hadn't crafted the motion properly. "After the second motion failed in late October 2011, Snyder gave Nelson's sister, Sea Dunnell, a copy of a motion filed in a different case in which the judge sustained a DNA request," AP reports. Using that public document as a guide, Nelson finally won the right to have the DNA evidence tested on February 22, 2012. Last month, that DNA test proved him innocent.

Why deny any inmate a DNA test that could definitively prove that he was innocent, especially in a country where DNA evidence has led to the post-conviction exoneration of 310 people? On average, those wrongfully incarcerated men served 13.6 years in prison.

When an inmate is exonerated by DNA, the most important consequence is the release of an innocent man or woman from prison, but that isn't all that happens. Taxpayers need no longer pay for room and board. Family members and friends stop suffering an absence. And in roughly half of DNA exonerations to date, the true perpetrator of the crime has been identified by the evidence. Everyone wins, save for the police, prosecutor, judge, and jury who put the innocent man away. They ought to admit their mistakes. Many do. But sometimes they keep fighting.

Addiction, shame, and narcissism

Anthony Weiner continues to provoke lots of discussion. Joseph Burgo asks in The Atlantic

What does the addict seek to avoid when he turns to his drug of choice, be it pharmacological, relational or sexual?

If Anthony Weiner needs continual admiration and reassurance from a variety of sexting partners, he must feel bad about himself on some level. As Nathanson has noted, a struggle with profound shame lies at the heart of a broad range of addictive behaviors such as over-eating, alcoholism and sexual compulsivity.

In other words, addictive behavior is a defense against unconscious shame.

Instead of facing himself and learning something about what drives him, Weiner resorted to his familiar, self-destructive defenses to escape from shame.

Only an in-depth examination of his complete shame-ridden character – where sexting addiction, narcissism, and political ambition all serve as psychological defense mechanisms – will allow Anthony Weiner to grow into the sort of person he (and the rest of us) could truly respect.

Bowing low for Saudi dough

Have you ever thought about the "coincidence" that Obama's energy policies have protected Saudia Arabia's power? Keystone pipeline anyone? Ulsterman writes,

It should also be noted that the Obama regime has since DAY ONE of taking the White House worked to protect the interests of the Saudi oil powers. If not for private industry working hard to bypass federal controls, the Obama administration would have succeeded.

Ulsterman entitles this photo "Obama bows low for the Saudi dough"

A Saudi prince has warned that his oil-reliant nation is under threat because of fracking technology being developed elsewhere around the world.

Going down the drain of ideological purity

Roger L. Simon is one of my favorite writers. He weighs in on the debate between Rand Paul and Chris Christie:

I admit to having a strong attraction to libertarianism domestically, especially in this era of monumental deficits, pervasive bureaucracy, and endless government spending, but I find it almost absurd as a basis for foreign affairs.

In the real world the wise man or woman confronts his enemies or suffers greatly for it. Who wouldn’t want to replay the Munich Conference of 1938 and actually stand up to Hitler, rather than appease him?

It’s time to think about walking and chewing gum at the same time. In other words, why can’t we lean libertarian on some issues and not on others? Life doesn’t have to be that simple and classifiable with buzz words. In fact, to be ideologically rigid in any way is not, well, libertarian.

However, Rick Moran writes that

the Republican Party is in the process of reinventing itself. And the debate now underway between the two dominant strains of conservative thought will not only determine the future of the Republican Party, but also have a great impact on who will be the GOP standard bearer in 2016.

Perhaps the biggest story in Republican politics in 2013 has been the rise of the libertarian right in the Senate and the man who has shown genuine leadership ability in facilitating that rise. Rand Paul has stepped into a leadership void created by the ineffectiveness of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and altered the tone and tenor of Senate debates. The power axis of Paul, Mike Lee of Utah, and Ted Cruz of Texas has given Senate Republicans something they haven’t had in years: voices that speak with a passion and coherence about principles while pushing a recognizable, consistent agenda.

Will the "nudge" turn into a "shove?"

From Fox News:

The federal government is hiring what it calls a "Behavioral Insights Team" that will look for ways to subtly influence people's behavior, according to a document describing the program obtained by FoxNews.com.

Such policies -- which encourage behavior subtly rather than outright require it -- have come to be known as "nudges," after an influential 2008 book titled "Nudge" by former Obama regulatory czar Cass Sunstein and Chicago Booth School of Business professor Richard Thaler popularized the term.

Jerry Ellig, an economist at the Mercatus Center, said that some "nudges" are reasonable, but warned about a slippery slope.

"If you can keep it to a 'nudge' maybe it can be beneficial," he added, "but nudges can turn into shoves pretty quickly."

Via Instapundit

The President's intellectual rigidity

President Obama is giving another speech today, this time in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He gave another one in Galesburg, Illinois earlier this month. Richard Epstein takes a look at that speech here, and pinpoints the problems in the President's thinking.

The President, who has never worked a day in the private sector, has no systematic view of the way in which businesses operate or economies grow. He never starts a discussion by asking how the basic laws of supply and demand operate, and shows no faith that markets are the best mechanism for bringing these two forces into equilibrium.

He constantly thinks of his greatest regulatory failures as his great successes. No other president has “saved the auto industry,” albeit by a corrupt bankruptcy process, or “taken on a broken health care system,” only to introduce a set of unworkable mandates that are already falling apart, or “investing in new technologies,” which tries to pick winners and ends up with losers like Solyndra. The great advances in energy have come from private developments, most notably fracking, and not from the vagaries of wind and solar energy, which no one has yet figured out how to store for future use when needed.

The President seems utterly incapable of seeing the downside to any of his policy choices. They are announced from on-high as all gain and no pain. In the face of stagnant growth, weak corporate earnings, and continued high unemployment, he shows not the slightest recognition that some of his programs might have gone amiss.

It is easy to see, therefore, why people have tuned out the President’s recent remarks. They have heard it all countless times before. So long as the President is trapped in his intellectual wonderland that puts redistribution first and regards deregulation and lower taxation as off limits, we as a nation will be trapped in the uneasy recovery that will continue to dog us no matter who is chosen to head the Federal Reserve.

Via Instapundit

The most expensive city in the world

What city would you guess is the most expensive to live in? I would have never guessed. It is Luanda, Angola in southern Africa. I have never even heard of Luanda. You can get a nice apartment there for $6,500 per month.

Go here to read about the next nine most expensive, three of which are in Switzerland.

thanks to Maggie's Farm

If he had a city...

found here

He couldn't even find his bike

Need a laugh today? How about this from Willie Nelson:

"I think it is just terrible and disgusting how everyone has treated Lance Armstrong, especially after what he achieved, winning seven Tour de France races while on drugs.

When I was on drugs, I couldn't even find my bike."

found here

Ask!

Birddog from Maggie's Farm posts this scripture from Luke for us this morning:

11:8 I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.

11:9 "So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.

11:10 For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.

11:13 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!"

The party of blacks is now also the party of women

Andrew Klavan:

It’s always a little galling (not to mention hilarious) for those of us on the right to reflect that the Democratic Party — the party of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and family-destroying social programs — the party of Detroit, New Orleans, Newark, and Baltimore — the party that facilitates a black abortion rate that would bring a smile to the face of Planned Parenthood’s genocidally racist founder — has somehow managed to sell itself to African Americans as the friend of black people!

But it’s beginning to be equally galling (and equally comic) to reflect that the Democrats have also contrived to present themselves as the party of women.

This is the party whose most powerful senator left his probable mistress to drown after a car accident; the party whose most popular living president is a serial philanderer and accused rapist; the party whose most prominent woman rose to that prominence by virtue of her stand-by-your-man loyalty to a louse; and now the party of Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer, two men who have humiliated their wives with truly creepy behavior and yet seek to continue their political careers regardless.

We all make mistakes and it’s not that the GOP hasn’t got its share of sexual shenanigans, but the Republican establishment doesn’t routinely make excuses for its recidivist miscreants or make icons of their victimized spouses. The Dems…? They seem to think their political agenda somehow excuses their personal behavior. I joked on the Ricochet podcast last week that the party’s new slogan should be, ”Women — We Treat You Like Dirt, But At Least You Can Kill Your Unborn Children!”

Ladies, maybe it’s not a coincidence that the same men who want to ensure your unborn child can be turned into medical waste — or who feel your vote (not to mention your sexual favors) can be bought in exchange for “free” birth control — are the very men who treat you like a collection of damp holes into which they can stick themselves without regard for your feelings, their principles, or basic human decency. The Kennedys, the Clintons, the Weiners, the Spitzers — maybe they have a natural home in a party that is always thinking of ways to transform female sexuality into a meaningless mechanism, and devising ways to fund that transformation with other people’s money.

Thanks to Instapundit.

Stonewalling, obfuscation, and obstruction

Tom Blumer writes that Obama's scandals are very real; it is Obama's economy that is "phony." Blumer focuses on the fact that Eric Holder signed the search warrant to try to criminalize reporting by Fox News' James Rosen, and Holder subsequent lying to Congress, and James Clapper's lying

about the extent of the National Security Administration’s collection of data on the activities of everyday Americans. Go one step, further, and ask how scandalous it is that even though Clapper has admitted to his egregious lie, he appears to have suffered no negative consequences for his deception.

Then, there is the IRS scandal:

As to the IRS scandal, it primarily involved but was by no means limited to the targeting of not-for-profit status applications from conservative and tea party groups for harassing scrutiny and inexcusable delays. At this point, it’s beyond meaningful dispute that the enterprise’s deliberate mission was to mute opposition efforts during the 2010 congressional and 2012 general elections. The targeting’s comprehensiveness during the year or so before 2012 balloting — along with the fact that its existence, though common knowledge in the White House in early 2012, was not disclosed until this year — for all practical purposes has delegitimized Obama’s 2012 electoral victory as a genuine expression of the will of an informed electorate.

On July 17, Ben Bernanke testified before Congress, and in the question and answer session made this statement:

I don’t think the Fed can get interest rates up very much, because the economy is weak, inflation rates are low. If we were to tighten policy, the economy would tank.

Blumer asks,

What kind of economy needs continuous artificial injections of $85 billion out of thin air every month to be kept from “tanking”?

Via Instapundit

Why you need a gun

Rebecca Fishbein reports that

A man who was brutally stabbed by Brooklyn subway slasher Maksim Gelman two years ago had his negligence case against the city dismissed in court yesterday, despite the fact that two transit officers had locked themselves in a motorman's car only a few feet from him at the time of the attack.

Gelman stabbed Joseph Lozito in the face, neck, hands and head on an uptown 3 train in February 2011, after fatally stabbing four people and injuring three others in a 28-hour period. Lozito, a father of two and an avid martial arts fan, was able to tackle Gelman and hold him down, and Gelman was eventually arrested by the transit officers. Lozito sued the city, arguing that the police officers had locked themselves in the conductor's car and failed to come to his aid in time.

The city, meanwhile, claimed that the NYPD had no "special duty" to intervene at the time, and that they were in the motorman's car because they believed Gelman had a gun.

Instapundit writes,

This is why you need a gun.

What will it be, Barack: tennis or golf?

Who will Obama appoint to head the Federal Reserve when Ben Bernanke's second four year term ends in January? Will it be Larry Summers, the polarizing consultant who has been working for Citigroup since he left his post as head of Obama's Council on Economic Advisers, or will it be the first woman, Janet Yellen, who is currently the Fed Vice Chairman?

Hans Nichols reports that

about a third of the Senate's Democratic caucus wrote Obama endorsing Yellen. At a 2007 Fed meeting, she said the biggest risk to economic growth was housing, which she called the “600-pound gorilla in the room.” She was right.

Heating up the discussion over gender is Summers’s history before he joined the Obama White House. He resigned as president of Harvard University in 2006 after apologizing for remarks in which he hypothesized that women might inherently be weaker than men in the sciences.

The current 7.6 percent jobless rate is little changed from when Summers took over in January 2009 as Obama’s top economic adviser. In that role for two years, he gave Obama a daily briefing. They also played golf and tennis, forging their personal relationship.

While Summers antagonized some White House officials, including senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, he has far more internal advocates than Yellen, who lacks personal ties with Obama’s inner circle.

I feel certain that I could beat Obama in a game of golf and in tennis. I would not even ask for age adjustments, as Summers did after a tennis match at Camp David. I am less sure as to whether I might be qualified to be appointed head of the Federal Reserve, although I do know that one cannot spend more money than one has.

How to make government the enemy of the people

Angelo Codevilla writes at the Liberty Law blog that the international contempt of America by people such as Russia's Putin and Iran's mullahs has its roots in US domestic policy.

The U.S. government did not have to spend billions to record metadata on every American’s phone calls and to access the rest of our electronic communications. It chose to do this because it had decided to deal with the threat of terrorism primarily by policing Americans rather than by forcing the Muslim world’s despots (that world is run exclusively by despots) to suppress anti-American incitement and activities rather than fostering them.

Perhaps, however, the very ludicrousness of being lectured on civil liberties by Russia, one of history’s paragons of despotism, and on tolerance by the Islamic Republic of Iran for which oppression of any and all diversity is the very definition of justice, may cause our ruling class to reflect on its errors and on the truths of national existence.

1. However convenient it may be not to constrain the Muslim regimes that foster terrorism as well as to focus on their domestic sympathizers, treating all Americans as if any is as likely as not to be an enemy ends up making the government into the enemy of all Americans.

2. However politically convenient it may be to raise the consciousness of any group of Americans against any other group, the resulting national division will make all groups, together, playthings of foreign enemies.

via Instapundit

A life that counts blessings

Ann Voskamp tells about a recent Bible study get-together at her mama's house. Her mama serves fresh fruit as the Canadian sun rises.

The four women open their Bibles to John 21.

Ah, yes, this passage — the Scriptures about Jesus at dawn and the disciples at sea with their nets and He’s already got the fire kindled and He beckons, “Come and have breakfast.”

It’s when you count blessings — you see Who can be counted on.

It’s when you count the ways He loves, that your life multiplies joy.

It’s a life that counts blessings — that discovers it’s yielding more than it seems.

“The secret to joy — is to keep seeking God where you doubt He is.” {excerpted from One Thousand Gifts }

Stay awake!

Stay awake.

Don't close your eyes.

Though your pillow is soft and deep

Stay awake.

Don't nod and dream.

Found here

Cowardice

Ann Barnhardt could never be accused of being a coward. She writes here about cowardice, prudence, kindness, and meekness. What is meekness?

Meekness is POWER UNDER CONTROL. Hence, Christ is perfectly meek, because as the Second Person of the Triune Godhead He is infinitely powerful, but yet so under control of His power that He freely chose to be crucified.

Cowardice is putting your own immediate and superficial desires above everyone and everything else. Cowardice is indifference to your fellow man, and to God, and as we have already established, indifference, not hate, but INDIFFERENCE is the opposite of love.

Prudence is being able to discern the right, see the big picture and then DO WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE. Many people think that they can “legally” dodge this by simply doing nothing. Ah, but they forget that to NOT act is to act, to NOT speak is to speak, to quote Bonhoeffer. It is impossible to avoid action, because inaction is itself an action. When prudence truly dictates that something MUST be said or done, inaction then becomes a sin, no matter how one might try to justify that inaction as prudence. That sin is called COWARDICE.

Barnhardt then adds some statements of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

To stand up for truth is nothing. For truth, you must sit in jail. You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.

The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world.

In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.

If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.’

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage . . . . Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elite, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

Now and then there's a fool such as I

found here

Benghazi survivors signed non-disclosure documents?

Fox News is reporting that Rep Wolf of Virginia has written to Secretary of State John Kerry, asking him to explain why the Benghazi survivors have all been asked by the Obama administration to sign non-disclosure agreements. What happens if they don't sign? No retirement pension? Supposedly, there are 33 federal employees who survived the September 11, 2012 attack.

What is the truth about domestic violence?

Dalrock writes,

The Daily Beast has an article by Philip W. Cook titled In Cases of Domestic Violence, Men Are Also Victims (H/T Dr. Helen). Cook explains that despite the perception crafted by domestic violence advocacy groups, women commit domestic violence as often if not more often than men:

Straus and his colleagues found that in minor violence, the incident rates were equal for men and women. In cases of severe violence, more men were victimized than women, with 1.8 million women victims of severe violence and 2 million male victims of severe violence a year. Women suffer a greater amount of total injuries ranging from mild to serious, but when it comes to serious injuries where weapons and object use come into play, the injury rate may be about the same.

Hundreds of scientific studies support what every experienced law-enforcement officer knows: half the time, it is a case of mutual combat; a quarter of the time only the woman is violent; a quarter of the time only the man is.

Out with the biblical view of marriage; in with the feminist view

Dalrock writes about the fact that

divorce reform is all about redistributing power from the spouse who wants to honor the marriage vows to the spouse who doesn’t.

When discussing the topic of changes in divorce law we typically talk about divorce theft and how this causes men to be understandably hesitant to marry, as well as the impact it has on men and their children who are directly victimized by the new regime. However, divorce “reform” is as much about manipulating the power balance within marriage as it is about ensuring that women can frivolously divorce while collecting cash and prizes.

Christians are actively reinforcing these legal and social changes by abandoning the biblical view of marriage in favor of the feminist view. While the old paradigm was that a woman who couldn’t keep a man was a failure, feminists and Christians have turned this around and now view a husband who can’t keep his wife haaapy as a failure. At the same time, the wife who kicks the father of her children out of the house is now seen as heroic. This idea that husbands must grovel to their wives to stave off her ever threatened unhaaapyness is so ingrained in modern Christian thought that there was no meaningful backlash amongst Christians when this was made the central plot of the movie Fireproof. Tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of Christians watched the movie and delighted in its presumed Christian message on marriage. We saw proof of the same thing with the women of christianforums.com going on for over 40 pages passionately arguing the morality of frivolous divorce.

While I agree with Dalrock that husbands and children are most often the victims of new divorce regimes, I caution these husbands and children not to indulge in self-pity. Allowing oneself to engage in self-pity is the worst choice anyone can make.

We have a tail!

Did you know that our solar system has a tail? Neither did I.

Found here

It's about what we do

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

—Aristotle

found here.

Is there a dog?

Are you a dyslexic agnostic insomniac? If so, you are probably lying awake at night wondering if there is a dog.

One galaxy or two?

From W.J.J. Hoge:

Is this one galaxy or two? That question came up back in 1950 when astronomer Art Hoag (a very distant relative) found this unusual extragalactic object. The ring full of bright blue stars surrounds a center of older, redder stars. The gap appears almost completely dark. How Hoag’s Object formed is unknown, but similar objects have now been identified and collectively labeled as a form of ring galaxy. Best guesses include a galaxy collision billions of years ago and the gravitational effect of a central bar that has since vanished. This photo was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2001 and shows unprecedented details of Hoag’s Object. It spans about 100,000 light years and is around 600 million light years away toward the constellation of the Serpens (the Snake). Another ring galaxy is visible in the gap (at about one o’clock).

Image Credit: NASA

Responsible? Who? Us?

The Syrian rebels have a huge demographic advantage over the government forces. The rebels are Sunni, which comprise two-thirds of Syria's population. The government draws its support primarily from the Alawites, which comprise one-eighth of the population. The problem is the rebels don't have any money.

The various Arab regimes in the region are waiting for America to step in, like we did in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so they provide the rebels

with enough arms and financing under the table to win their respective loyalties and keep them fighting until America steps in, but not enough to enable an outright rebel victory.

Although Arab leaders are telling Washington that a larger American footprint in Syria will facilitate a peaceful solution to the war, their privately expressed faith in the palliative impact of U.S. intervention in the Arab world is disingenuous. Arab leaders aren't waiting for Captain America because they think he will save the day. They are waiting because they want someone else to take responsibility for the horrific violence they know will yet be required to decisively defeat their enemy.

Read more here.

Japan taking a lesson from Israel

It looks like our friends in Japan are taking a lesson from our friends in Israel. Richard Fernandez writes,

Two years into the Obama administration, a Japanese Prime Minister made a little noticed statement. “I do not believe that it is a good idea for Japan to depend on the United States for her security over the next 50 or 100 years.” Toward that end the Japanese have redesigned their forces to be deterrents in themselves, capable of pro-active and offensive operations. Tokyo sees China’s challenge over its sovereignty to the outlying islands as one of the most immediate challenges.

From its preparations it appears Japan to be preparing to look after itself. Japan, ever mindful of its experience against the USN during World War 2, is well aware of their strategic shallowness. It has no confidence in winning a protracted fight with China. It prefers to deter a fight and if forced into conflict, to win it by aggressive tactics. Japan is to China what Israel is to its Arab neighbors, a sprinter as opposed to a distance runner. This means Japan will either seek to acquire nuclear weapons for deterrence or transform its navy into an Israeli-like offensive sword.

Mexico's war against cartels and vigilante groups

The Mexican government continues its fight against drug cartels, but now is also trying to curb vigilante groups that have sprung up to defend communities against cartels. Read about it here.

Americans keep going to Mexico for vacations. I think I would be a little nervous, even lying in the sun on a beach.

Equal treatment, or Special rules for certain categories of Americans?

Do we need tougher standards for self defense? Megan McArdle does not think so.

The law will always have some sad cases that can’t be prosecuted, or some cases where someone doing something understandable gets jail time for breaking the law. Laws written in response to public outcry about those hard cases are usually bad laws. They are the equivalent of deciding to give everyone an ANA test because of the tragic death of someone with undiagnosed lupus.

Should the prosecution be able to send them to prison for decades because it’s possible that they were the aggressor — not even likely, just possible? Should they have to wait until they have suffered life-threatening damage in order to justify protecting themselves?

That seems insane to me.

Instapundit responds,

Which is why you’ll never get a gig at MSNBC. But, to be fair, many of these people would be happy with special rules for black youths, or battered women, or whatever, so that they get the result they want. And if the categories don’t fit, well — you can always re-arrange them ad hoc, as the media did when they turned part-black, part-hispanic George Zimmerman into the reincarnation of Bull Connor.

Weiner to stick it out

Even though many are urging him to drop out of the New York mayoral race, Anthony and Huma have no plans to go limp.

Okay, I admit it, I just wanted to use that headline.

They don't make them any better than this woman

found here

What makes you think the parents won't do it again?

Watch More News Videos at ABC | 2012 Presidential Election | Entertainment & Celebrity News

found here

A brush with tragedy

found here

Very accomplishing, indeed!

Found here

Would you sign his petition?

Dan Joseph is funny! See if you agree!

Naive, counter-factual, and just plain pandering

Obama says Ho Chi Minh was an admirer of Thomas Jefferson, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence. Did Thomas Jefferson slaughter a half a million Americans? "Morally flexible?" Yes, I think you could say Obama is morally flexible. Ho Chi Minh was a brutal dictator, the kind of tyrant Thomas Jefferson warned against.

She is still telling it like it is

Sarah Palin: "We weren't allowed to tell the truth about Obama." Plus, she's got her own version of Karl Rove's whiteboard.

Racist?

Tom Maguire asks, If buckling a seat belt is a good idea even though the risk of an accident is low, why is crossing the street to avoid a group of street youths a bad idea?

Financier

This photo was taken yesterday in Tahrir Square.

Thanks to Weasel Zippers

No health benefits for these Obamacare call center employees

Weasel Zippers brings to our attention the fact that Obama has opened a call center in California for persons wanting to ask questions about Obamacare. 7000 people applied for 204 jobs, but only half of those hired will be eligible for health care benefits, because they are working less than 30 hours per week.

As good as it gets

Spengler writes,

Earlier today, Egypt’s military government arrested former prime minister Mohammed Mursi on charges of conspiring with the terrorist organization Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian affiliate. That is as good as it gets in this part of the world. Hamas has murdered 457 Israelis and wounded more than 3,000 since 2000, according to the Israeli government. It is an implacable enemy of the United States as well as the State of Israel. Since taking power, the Egyptian military has shut down illegal tunnel traffic with Gaza, Hamas’ stronghold, and strangled its economy.

Gen. Abdulfatah al-Sisi, the Egyptian military commander, is doing the dirty work of the West. Yet both the Obama administration and the Republican mainstream have denounced the military-led government and demanded the Muslim Brotherhood’s return to power.

It is the world turned upside down, foreign policy as Mel Brooks might have scripted it.

Obama and the Republican mainstream — John McCain and the Weekly Standard — united in their misplaced enthusiasm for the so-called Arab Spring in early 2011, as I reported in a Tablet magazine essay May 20 titled “Dumb and Dumber.” They have learned nothing from the collapse of the so-called “Spring” into civil war in Syria, Islamist terrorism in Tunisia, and state failure in Egypt.

The Saudis and other Gulf states refused to bankroll the Muslim Brotherhood, which is seeking to overthrow the Arab monarchies, but immediately lent $12 billion to Morsi’s successors, averting starvation in Egypt for the next year.

Thanks to Instapundit

He must be a white Hispanic

According to the Omaha World-Herald, Sergio Sergio Martinez-Perez "is in the United States illegally." While here, he got mad at women. He took his anger out on a 93-year-old woman, beating her, raping her, and killing her. Read the story here.

Best enabler of a sociopath

Andrew McCarthy is one of the most knowlegeable people about Islamic supremacists and their connections. About Huma Abedin he writes,

Sorry to interrupt the Best Enabler of a Sociopath Award ceremony but, to recap, Ms. Abedin worked for many years at a journal that promotes Islamic-supremacist ideology that was founded by a top al-Qaeda financier, Abdullah Omar Naseef. Naseef ran the Rabita Trust, a formally designated foreign terrorist organization under American law. Ms. Abedin and Naseef overlapped at the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (JMMA) for at least seven years. Throughout that time (1996–2003), Ms. Abdein worked for Hillary Clinton in various capacities.

What a racket. The marriage to Huma Abedin, a Clinton insider, enables Anthony Weiner to resurrect a debased career and deflect attention from his psychotic antics even as he continues them. The marriage to Anthony Weiner, a prominent Jewish progressive, enables Huma Abedin to deflect attention from her associations with various Islamic supremacists even as, during her tenure as a top State Department official, American policy embraces Islamic supremacists.

But let’s not discuss that.

A first amendment violation

Ten College Republicans were dubbed a security threat and refused admittance to President Barack Obama’s speech at the University of Central Missouri on Wednesday.What should people do? (1) Sue. (2) Demand that colleges not host Obama for speeches in the future. If he’s not safe around the College Republicans, he shouldn’t be on campus at all. If they do have him on campus, protest noisily outside — and file lawsuits trying to injoin his appearance. On public university campuses, barring people based on political affiliation — which is what’s going on here — is a first amendment violation. (3) Make a stink to the university’s big donors.

Despite the fact that the students had tickets to the event, security personnel turned them away at the door to the recreation center where Obama gave a speech on economic policy, telling the group it wasn’t about their politics but the president’s safety, State Treasurer of the College Republicans Courtney Scott told The College Fix.

The students, some of whom donned Tea Party T-Shirts and others who wore patriotic or Republican-inspired clothing, had protested the president earlier in the day on campus, but had put away their signs and said they were ready to simply listen to Obama when security shut them down – and even told them to leave the vicinity and stay several hundred yards away from the rec center.

The students had waited in a long line and under the hot sun to wind their way to the front of the line two hours in advance of Obama’s scheduled 5:30 p.m. remarks. Still, they were rejected.

Instapundit has some thoughts on this:

What should people do? (1) Sue. (2) Demand that colleges not host Obama for speeches in the future. If he’s not safe around the College Republicans, he shouldn’t be on campus at all. If they do have him on campus, protest noisily outside — and file lawsuits trying to injoin his appearance. On public university campuses, barring people based on political affiliation — which is what’s going on here — is a first amendment violation. (3) Make a stink to the university’s big donors.

Keep your mouth shut? No way!

Oh, oh. This article in the New York times shows that older workers better not be assertive at work.

Too late for me. I already have a reputation for being assertive, and I wouldn't want it any other way..

via Instapundit

Where do I apply?

The Obama Administration will hire tens of thousands of health care professionals, union workers and community activists as “navigators” to help Americans choose Obamacare options. The “navigators” will be paid $20 to $48 per hour plus benefits. Read more here.

Via Instapundit, who calls it A SLUSH FUND FOR DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL CANVASSING. I agree. They do it every year.

Outrageous!

Declan McCullagh reveals,

The U.S. government has demanded that major Internet companies divulge users' stored passwords, according to two industry sources familiar with these orders, which represent an escalation in surveillance techniques that has not previously been disclosed.

If the government is able to determine a person's password, which is typically stored in encrypted form, the credential could be used to log in to an account to peruse confidential correspondence or even impersonate the user.

Via Instapundit

Go down to Alabama, where your Mercedes-Benz is probably being made!

There is a growing world-wide demand for cars and trucks. So, where are the auto companies building plants? Detroit? No, Tennessee, Alabama, and Kentucky are the three leaders. Note that each of those states are right-to-work states.

Your Mercedes-Benz, Honda, and Hyundai? Probably made in Alabama! Your Volkswagen, Chevy, and Nissan? Tennessee! Your Ford and Toyota? Kentucky!

Via Instapundit

IRS employees want out of Obamacare!

IRS employees want out of Obamacare!

IRS employees have a prominent role in Obamacare, but their union wants no part of the law.

National Treasury Employees Union officials are urging members to write their congressional representatives in opposition to receiving coverage through President Obama’s health care law.

Read more here.

via Instapundit

Obama better watch out for Petraeus

Joseph Curl writes in the Washington Times that Obama better watch out for Petraeus as more facts are brought to light on the Benghazi scandal.

How the IRS has responded to requests of Congress

Found here on a link from Instapundit

It is a scandal!

Lots of famous conservatives are in Denver today and tomorrow for the Western Conservative Summit. I heard Fox News correspondent KT Mc Farland interviewed on the radio this afternoon. She was taking Obama to task over his "fake scandal" reference to Benghazi. She says one of the ringleaders of the terrorist attack that killed four Americans on September 11 resides in a Benghazi hotel, and gives interviews to journalists, bragging about his terror exploits. None of the terrorists have been brought to justice. It is a scandal.

Who is out of step?

Glenn Reynolds agrees that somebody is out of the mainstream on the gun rights issue. It's just not the advocates of gun rights.

The NRA more closely reflects the views of most Americans on gun issues than do Democratic pundits — or Barack Obama.

65% of Americans see gun rights as a protection against tyranny. And only 17% say they disagree. Once again, it's the critics who appear to be out of the mainstream.

The Earth and Moon from 61 million miles up

From the Messenger spacecraft:

Charlie Martin published this photo yesterday, which was linked by Instapundit.

Pranked in the newsroom

Captain Sum Ting Wong

Wi Tu Lo

Ho Lee Fuk

Bang Ding Ow

This journalist is being pranked by somebody in the newsroom.

Debra Saunders wonders,

When I make my next mistake, will management pick me up, dust me off and tell me not to screw up again? Or will they cut me loose?

How long do you want to live?

How is you in-built self repair mechanism doing?

Are you keeping your foot down on the pedal of life? Walter Bortz, an 83-year-old marathoner and physician says,

And keep your RPMs at a certain level. I’ve described what I call a metabolic field that has metrics—it has parameters to it. And there is this range of optimality. If you go too fast, that’s stress. But on the other hand, there’s frailty: the result of ineffective, insufficient energetic stimulus. Stay in between those two extremes. The golden mean. I think that gets us to 100. After 100, it’s negotiable. Maybe we can go on to 120. But I still think the average human life span is energetically ordained around 100.

I think that came down genetically. That’s what we were given. It’s a measure of use and disuse, repair and disrepair. One hundred is a legitimate medical goal based on what we have now. We know enough to live 100 healthy years, but we screw it up.

Exercise is the current anti-aging process. The most powerful thing we can do today is to get people to take a walk.

Aubrey De Grey:

At the moment, there is far too much emphasis on treatment and far too little on prevention. Essentially the psychology of addressing aging now revolves around waiting until people are already sick and then doing your best to fix them up for as long as you can—which isn’t very long. It’s pathetic.

Take molecular garbage in the cell. The problem here is that we’ve got really versatile garbage-destruction machinery, but it’s not completely, 100 percent versatile. There is some stuff it can’t break down. So what we’ve been doing is actually looking for bacteria in the environment that can break down substances in the body that cause age-related ill health. And we’ve found that it’s rather easy to discover such bacteria. What we do then is find the genes and enzymes those bacteria have that allow them to actually destroy the substance, and we incorporate those genes and enzymes into human cells so as to augment the destruction machinery of the cells.

When we can do this, we will have a therapy that can truly eliminate cardiovascular disease. No one will need to get heart attacks and strokes anymore, because we will be able to stop fatty deposits from accumulating in the arteries.

Read more here

High price

Inside a glass case in a “secret” CIA museum is a swastika-emblazoned letter written on Adolf Hitler’s personal stationery that was delivered to the museum the day after Osama bin Laden died.

NBC's Richard Engel gets a tour of the greatest museum you will never see: the CIA museum, where items like Osama bin Laden's personal AK-47 rifle and some of the agency's most high-tech gadgetry are on display.

The handwritten letter, sent by future CIA Director Richard Helms to his 3-year-old son at the close of World War II, may not be as ominous as bin Laden’s AK-47 featured in this exclusive NBC News report, which rests in another of the private museum’s display cases. But it too serves as both a trophy of war and a reminder of evil.

“Dear Dennis,” reads the letter from Helms, then a spy stationed in Germany. “The man who might have written on this card once controlled Europe – three short years ago when you were born. Today he is dead, his memory despised, his country in ruins. He had a thirst for power, a low opinion of man as an individual, and a fear of intellectual honesty. He was a force for evil in the world. His passing, his defeat – a boon for mankind. But thousands died that it might be so. The price for ridding society of bad is always high. Love, Daddy."

found here

Via Instapundit

Incredible

Loco? No, not loco. Very patient. Keen mind. Incredible? Yes.

Thanks to Ann Voskamp

One last dance

Their embrace swallowed any sadness, conquered all worries. This bond was not yet ready to be broken.

Especially not before one last dance.

Relationships are the only real thing. Everything else is an illusion.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Thanks to Ann Voskamp

More than just a golfer

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Should we try classical schools?

Classical schools are less concerned about whether students can handle iPads than if they grasp Plato. They generally aim to cultivate wisdom and virtue through teaching students Latin, exposing them to great books of Western civilization and focusing on appreciation of "truth, goodness and beauty." Students are typically held to strict behavioral standards in terms of conduct and politeness, and given examples of characters from history to copy, ranging from the Roman nobleman Cincinnatus to St. Augustine of Hippo.

Read more here.

Thanks to Ann Voskamp

It just takes one person to lead the way

Dolphins get washed ashore by strong waves. One or two guys instinctively realize the dolphins are in trouble. They go right in the water to help the dolphins. More men join in, until all the dolphins are rescued.

Thanks to Ann Voskamp

Have I told you lately?

There is a Love that's Divine.

At the end of the day we should just kneel and pray.

And thank the Lord.

Have I told you lately that I love you?

There's no one above you.

Now read this story about this song.

Ann Voskamp linked us there.

Finally, a politician who keeps his promises!

No means no!

found here

The era of comebacks for unfaithful husbands

Elliot Spitzer, Mark Sanford, and Anthony Weiner; who's next? Don't rule out John Edwards!

Needed: better care in packaging

A woman in Arizona was shopping, looking for chicken breasts in Safeway. There were breasts in this package, but also a foot. The woman says it made her throw up, and she wants Safeway to give her free ice cream for life. Here is the photo she posted of the package.

The Mafia goes green

The Mafia is cashing in on the eco-friendly trends. Trash disposal, wind farms and other government-subsidized alternative energy companies, and carbon-tax initiatives are some of the scams they pursue.

Crime syndicates tend to squeeze out legitimate businesses by operating initially at a loss to corner the market. Also, Europol fears the groups will use their green acquisitions to launder illicit proceeds from other criminal enterprises like drug trafficking, counterfeiting of products and extortion. That would allow the groups to move further into the mainstream financial system, giving them more room to grow, and more avenues to evade the law.

Adolescents need to stay away from marijuana

Researchers at the University of Maryland think that adolescents who smoke marijuana are at greater risk of permanent brain damage than people who begin smoking marijuana as adults. Even if they later stop using, the changes are not reversed. Very severe deficits, as well as reductions in intelligence, as measured by I.Q. tests.

Read much more here.

How do you choose the right doctor?

How do you know when you are choosing the right doctor? Should you go with the one who refuses to give you the drugs you want, but instead tells you that you need to change the behavior that caused you to have to go see him in the first place?

Or do you choose the one who will give you the drugs you want, has a fancy big screen t.v. in the waiting room, and has a reputation of being the doctor that all the right people go to?

Here is another example.

Tomorrow I will have skin cancer surgery. The doctor will be the same one I have been using for many years. He is a calm man with a gentle touch and an easy smile. But, most of all, it is his competence I seek. I have been to two other dermatologists, one who left ugly scars after surgery, and breathed heavily in my face while doing the surgery. The other railroaded us patients through like we were on the train to Auschwitz.

Another thing I like: there is no t.v. in the waiting room, just magazines.

He still has the same group of employees he had when I first came to him twenty years ago. They are like family to this fair-skinned man who spent his whole childhood outside in the sunshine, and now has the skin cancers to prove it.

Courting disaster

Yesterday in the supermarket I saw a mom with a toddler. Mom was paying the cashier. Toddler was climbing out of the shopping cart. Instead of fastening the toddler in with the cart belt, the mom conversed with the toddler as if the toddler were an adult, asking him questions like, "Do you want to hurt yourself?"

I didn't find it amusing. To me it was like the toddler was testing the mom. He would raise his leg over the cart, then look at her to see how she was going to react. Each time he would go a little further over the edge. Fortunately, the cashier gave her the change and receipt before the toddler could end this interaction in disaster.

Here is another reason to keep your child fastened in the cart belt:

Shot in the face while sitting in his stroller

You won't recognize me, of course. My name was Antonio West and I was the 13-month old child who was shot at point blank range by two teens who were attempting to rob my mother, who was also shot. A Grand Jury of my mommy's peers from Brunswick GA determined the teens who murdered me will not face the death penalty ... too bad I was given a death sentence for being innocent and defenseless.

My family made the mistake of being white in a 73% non-white neighborhood, but my murder was not ruled a Hate Crime. Nor did President Obama take so much as a single moment to acknowledge my murder. No one from the Department of Justice organized any demonstrations for me.

I am one of the youngest murder victims in our great Nation's history, but the media doesn't care to cover the story of my tragic demise, President Obama has no children who could possibly look like me - so he doesn't care, and the media doesn't care because my story is not interesting enough to bring them ratings so they can sell commercial time slots.

There is not a white equivalent of Al Sharpton because if there was he would be declared racist, so there is no one rushing to Brunswick GA to demand justice for me. There is no White Panther party to put a bounty on the lives of those who murdered me. I have no voice, I have no representation and unlike those who shot me in the face while I sat innocently in my stroller - I no longer have my life.

So while you are seeking justice for Trayvon, please remember to seek justice for me too. Tell your friends about me, tell your families, get tee shirts with my face on them and make the world pay attention, just like you did for Trayvon.

found here

Fascism for food

Did you know that, thanks to the power of Monsanto, farmers are faced with the choice of either planting government-approved GMO crops or going bankrupt? Fuzzy Slippers explains in detail here what Monsanto is doing and invites her readers to stand up against Monsanto.

If not today, then in the near future, before we are all dependent on “public-private partnerships” (aka fascism) for our food.

Fading hope

Fuzzy Slippers gives us her perspective of what the Obama presidency has brought to America.

By spring 2009, the hopeychangey stuff wasn’t working out so well, and the shiny, happy faces sort of froze into a grimace. A grimace that still held hope in its eye. A hope that started fading in 2010 and was pretty much extinguished by 2012. That’s the year Obama ran not as the messiah who could stop the oceans from rising and heal the planet while simultaneously eliminating poverty, inequity, and those horrible boils unicorns sometimes get, but as the exact opposite. He ran in 2012 as the divider: everything is about race, class, gender, sexual orientation, red state, blue state; everything is about ensuring that each voting bloc stays not only separate but feeling the Obama “love” (which is very like the Obama “hate” except that with the former he’ll smile at you indulgently and condescendingly as he bankrupts you. If you’re a particularly good Obot, he won’t send the IRS after you. Or the ATF, FBI, EPA, DOJ, etc. Yay!?!). And now, here we are in 2013, and some of us are still feeling the pain and disillusionment from the last election. But here’s what I learned from my foray into the recent past: there is absolutely no comparison between today’s Obama and the 2008 Obama. Not only has he shown his true tyrannical and treasonous colors but even his Obots have an inkling that all is not what it seemed with their messiah, their chosen one. His star is falling and falling fast. Whatever his plans were, he will never be able to fulfill them because there is no way in hell he’ll ever again reach the exalted high he enjoyed in ’08. America knows him now and has his number; it will take a great deal more than fake Greek columns, phony presidential seals, and dramatic readings of other people’s scripts to get those faces shiny and happy once more.

Read the whole thing here.

Ask not what the candidate can do for you. Ask what you can do for the candidate. Or else we lose!

Here is the man who warned us that we have a radical in the White House. Andrew Breitbart gave his heart to encourage us to stand up and fight the "totalitarian freaks." He also reminded us that these radicals "pal around" with "our friends" in the mainstream media. No longer are they objective journalists; they are "playing for the other side." They wanted to create their own version of the Tea Party, and they did: the Occupy movement!

Ask not what the candidate can do for you, ask what you can do for the candidate! Get behind our candidate, or we lose!

Is America leaderless?

Fuzzy Slippers is tired of the claim that we have a leaderless White House.

If one more person tells me some variation of “there is no leader in the WH,” my head may explode. Of course there is. This idea that Obama is somehow removed from, above, or not up to his scrawny neck in what his administration is doing must be dispelled. Now, do I think he’s the brains behind the operation? No way, I don’t think he’s that bright, but I do think he’s surrounded himself with people who have plenty of brains and plenty of nefarious, traitorous plans. I also believe that he’s well-aware of and ideologically happy with every single thing that has led to the myriad scandals that stink up our White House. Do I think that he gets his hands dirty (beyond going out and spreading vile lies, doubts, and suspicion of the TEA Party and conservatives more generally), that some “smoking gun” will be found tying him directly to the IRS, DOJ, AP, Rosen, NSA, or any other scandal we currently know about or ones that may yet be revealed? Nope.

She goes on to point out that

It’s no mistake that his czars and other appointments are a rag-tag assortment of dirty dealers, traitors, commies, anti-Semites, radicals, and fascist zealots. Those people didn’t just materialize around him; remember, he sought out this type of person all the way back in college. That never ended, as we can see all too clearly.

We may not be able to connect the dots yet, but it’s becoming pretty clear that it’s all of one piece, including what he’s been doing right here in America. To Obama, the nation’s real enemies, his real enemies, are people who “want to make America a better place to live,” people who support the 10th Amendment, people who are pro-life, Christian, Jewish, white, patriots. He’s made this crystal clear since practically Day One with every appointment, every czar, every policy, every word.

Read more here.

Where's the daddy?

Bill O'Reilly does his best to get the President of the Urban League to discuss solutions to the "catastrophe" facing children growing up in African American houselholds.

Some immigration issues are not being talked about

Laura Ingraham is pointing out on her radio program how the big national media outlets, except Fox News, are advocates for open borders, and therefore do not report on crimes committed by people who are in this country illegally. They may report the crime, but not the fact that the people committing the crimes are here illegally. There are the criminal gangs operating in Los Angeles and other places, such as northern Virginia. There are also many instances of rape. A thirteen year old girl was gang raped by a group of men recently. All the men were here illegally. Many people are killed by people who are here illegally who are driving drunk.

Laura also makes the point that our middle class is shrinking, because of our open borders. Those who are here illegally are "flooding the job market with cheap labor," according to Laura.

Afraid to be left out of the loop

Daniel Greenfield notes that

Rarely has there been a policy as universally supported in Washington D.C. and as universally rejected by Americans of all ages, races, genders, incomes and religions as the proposal to send weapons to the Syrian terrorists.

At least those are the results of a recent Quinnipiac poll, which found that sizable majorities of Republicans, Democrats, men, women, whites, blacks and Hispanics (and possibly even the mysteriously reclusive white Hispanics) all opposed the proposal to send arms to the rebels; even without being told that rebel is a polite term for Islamic Jihadist and Islamic Jihadist is a polite term for the guy wearing explosive underwear next to them on their vacation flight.

The weapons smuggled into Libya, with the complicity of Uncle Barack, and the ones looted from Gaddafi’s ample storehouses, have already shown up in Gaza, led to the Islamist conquest of Mali (requiring French military intervention), and have, naturally, shown up in Syria.

Officially we are supporting the Syrian rebels because we support democracy, even though the vast majority of the rebels are Islamists and the only democracy they want will disenfranchise Christians, Shiites, women and anyone else left standing after the black flags sweep into Damascus. Morsi also deserves our support because he was democratically elected, even though during his time in office, he tried to amass total power and tortured his opponents.

Washington, D.C. is full of Ivy League grads that have spent a lifetime reading about the Middle East, but lack the most basic sort of common sense. It’s not that they can’t comprehend the risks; it’s that they have been taught to think that either they support the Syrian rebels or the whole thing will happen without them and they will be left out of the loop.

And what could be worse than that?