Another Front in the War on Christianity

This is getting rather absurd:

Faith and begorrah, is nothing sacred?

Some folks are trying to transform the name of Tuesday’s holiday from St. Patrick’s Day to “Shamrock Day.”

Card shops have banners proclaiming the occasion; the Disney Channel is using the term; and some places in this country have changed the name of their community celebrations of Celtic heritage to the “nonoffending” terminology.

And that offends some folks.

I’m telling ya, good people, eventually someone kook leftist is going to notice that “Corpus Christi” means “Body of Christ” and they’re going to insist that Corpus Christi, TX change its name. And just what are we to do with St Louis, MO and St Paul, MN? And lets not forget that city in California which is named in honor of the Blessed Virgin, the Queen of the Angels.

Look, leftists, this is our civilization – you’re welcome to live in it, but it has some ground rules. Among these rules is that Christians built the civilization and you can’t have said civilization without it remaining Christian in its fundamentals. Look what is happening in post-Christian Europe; ever more kowtowing to radical Islam and an increasing demand that basic liberties be curtailed because said radicals say it offends against Islam. If the people of Europe were majority Christian they would tolerate the Moslems and politely tell them to take their Islamism and get stuffed…in other words, if you want to preserve your ability to have gay pride parades, you’d better ensure that your civilization remains Christian because its only us Christians who are easy going enough to allow such nonsense to carry on in public.

Specter Open to Independent Senate Bid

Please, do, Senator:

Sen. Arlen Specter said Tuesday that he will not run for reelection in 2010 as a Democrat, but might run as an Independent.

The Pennsylvania Republican has been under tremendous pressure from the GOP base since being one of just three Republicans to vote for the Democratic-led stimulus package last month…

…Specter said he is open to the possibility of running as an Independent with the understanding that he would caucus with Republicans, just as Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) did with Democrats in 2006.

Though he left that option on the table, he suggested it would be a last resort.

Senator Specter is a fine man and from what I understand a very nice guy – but he’s not a Republican. Not even close. He’s a Democrat who did a bit of political calculus and figured that he’d have a better chance winning election way back when as a Republican. But we of the GOP just don’t need him in our party – much better to have him as an Independent we can work with from time to time. And, of course, there is just that chance that a more solid GOP could slip through with the Democrat and Specter splitting the mush-minded semi-liberal vote, especially in 2010 when things are likely to be very favorable to the GOP, unless Obama’s plan to spend us into prosperity works.

A bit of a lesson here, boys and girls: the reason we have political parties is so that on some basic, crucial issues there is a clear choice for the American people. While a GOPer and a Democrat can both be in favor of, say, increasing funding to the National Park Service, when it comes down to whether or not we should increase spending, per se, it is good for the GOP to be known as the watchdog of the Treasury and the taxpayer as opposed to the Democrats being tagged as the party of taxing and spending. But we’re not going to get anywhere on this if people like Specter, wearing the GOP label, continually cut us off at the knees when the chips are down. In the long run, it will be better for the GOP even if it gets a little smaller if by so doing it becomes a more cohesive entity able to battle for clearly defined ideals. Winning isn’t worth it if all we’re doing is getting into office – we want office for a purpose.

Our purpose, as GOPers, is to reform America – to restore those constitutional provisions which have been eroded by decades of liberal usurpation; to put America on a sound financial footing where we live within our means and only tax as necessary for the basic functions of government; to ensure that the American military is second to none; to stand firm with all people who are free or who aspire to be so; to work for a public square which is decent and home to all Americans, not the plaything of the most depraved. There is in this much room for difference – a pro-choice and a pro-life Republican will both agree that Roe is a legal abomination, while they will differ in whether or not a law should be passed to make abortion legal or illegal. A libertarian GOPer and a social conservative GOPer will disagree on what level of regulation should be placed on the availability of pornography, but both will agree that local standards must dictate such availability in each particular community. On and on it goes – room in the tent for a diversity of opinion, but agreement on core principles. And fighting for such will remain impossible if there remain in senior GOP ranks people who agree with the liberal worldview of Statism, licentiousness and group rights over individual liberties.

I hope that Specter does decide to go Independent – he’ll be in his proper element, and we’ll have a better chance of advancing our cause.

Obama Hires Criminal Organization for 2010 Census

He’s going to try and gerrymander the entire United States:

The U.S. Census is supposed to be free of politics, but one group with a history of voter fraud, ACORN, is participating in next year’s count, raising concerns about the politicization of the decennial survey.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now signed on as a national partner with the U.S. Census Bureau in February 2009 to assist with the recruitment of the 1.4 million temporary workers needed to go door-to-door to count every person in the United States — currently believed to be more than 306 million people.

A U.S. Census “sell sheet,” an advertisement used to recruit national partners, says partnerships with groups like ACORN “play an important role in making the 2010 Census successful,” including by “help[ing] recruit census workers.”

What ACORN’s assignment will be is to ensure there is a large over-count of population in Democrat-heavy areas of the country so that in both the US House and in State legislatures, Democrats get more safe seats. Proof? If you don’t believe this assertion then you’re either a blind partisan, or a complete fool. ACORN is a leftwing tool of the Democratic party and its sole purpose is to increase the power of the left – it doesn’t do anything else, it never has done anything else, it won’t ever do anything else. Eventually, when we get a properly courageous GOP government in office, we’ll have to shut it down via criminal prosecutions – meanwhile, Obama is going to use it to corrupt the American political process just as he did in the 2008 campaign.

We’ll have to fight twice as hard in 2010 and 2012 because Democrats will use every dirty trick in the book to thwart us – we’ll need 60% of the vote just to counter-act the votes Democrats will manufacture. Get ready for the battle, fellow GOPers and conservatives.

Obama Bails Out His Donors

Geesh:

While $58 billion of your tax dollars — or more accurately, your children’s tax dollars — are being used to pay foreign banks, a substantial portion of that money ($43.5 billion) is being used to pay American banks, including Goldman Sachs, Merill Lynch, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wachovia, Morgan Stanley, AIG International, and JP Morgan.

The following recipients of President Obama’s trickle-down-to-my-donors bailout plan rank among his top 20 contributors to his 2008 presidential election campaign, according to Open Secrets:

Goldman Sachs: $955,473

Citigroup: $653,468

JP Morgan Chase & Co.: $646,058

Morgan Stanley: $485,823

Three other banks that were significant contributors to Obama received money through AIG:

Bank of America: $274,493

Wachovia: $214,151

AIG: $112,170

Lehman Brothers, which did not survive long enough to join the list of banks leaching off the work of the American taxpayer, also gave the Obama campaign $276,088.

Individuals identifying themselves as working for the banks above gave Barack Obama’s presidential campaign $3,617,724. In other words, more than 3.6 million reasons for the president to help focus the media’s glare on the relatively minuscule $165 million in AIG executive bonuses, and away from their $43.5 billion portion of $100 billion of taxpayer dollars the administration, by design or incompetence, filtered to other banks through AIG.

In receiving $43.5 billion for their investment of just over $3.3 million, it looks like the banks that gambled on Wall Street certainly got their money’s worth out of their investment in Barack Obama.

And those executive bonuses which Obama is now complaining about? It was inserted into the Spendulus – an exemption which allow executive bonuses provided they were contracted prior to the Spendulus was passed. Obama signed the bill – and its clear he didn’t know what he was signing…or, perhaps he did?

Tuesday Morning Open Thread

Discuss how happy you are as you contemplate the coming melt-down of Obama and his Democrats. Alternately, you can discuss how miserable liberals must be now that even the densest of them are realizing they’ve been had.

Have at it.

Socialized Medicine Fails, Again

Like a broken record:

Three years ago, Massachusetts enacted perhaps the boldest state health care experiment in American history, bringing near-universal coverage to the commonwealth with Paul Revere speed.

To make it happen, Democratic lawmakers and Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican, made an expedient choice, deferring until another day any serious effort to control the state’s runaway health costs.

The day of reckoning has arrived. Threatened first by rapid early enrollment in its new subsidized insurance program and now by a withering economy, the state’s pioneering overhaul has entered a second, more challenging phase.

Thanks to new taxes and fees imposed last year, the health plan’s jittery finances have stabilized for the moment. But government and industry officials agree that the plan will not be sustainable over the next 5 to 10 years if they do not take significant steps to arrest the growth of health spending.

“Arrest the growth of health spending” means “health care rationing” – it is always the result of socialized medicine. When you undertake to promise everyone a thing, everyone will want that thing, and want it really well done. If you are offering people whatever free car they desire, how many people are going to choose the Kia and how many the BMW? As you don’t have an endless supply of BMWs, you’re eventually going to have to work out a system where some people get BMWs, and some get Kias…and as the guy who writes your budget wants a BMW, I think you can see what goes into which parking lot.

There are only so many doctors out there, and among doctors only so many who have a particular specialty. There is only so much money in the budget for overhead, and the budget director can buy another ultra-sound machine, or give a pay raise to the workers whose union is pestering him day in and day out for a raise. Meanwhile, seeing as a doctor or nurse gets paid the same whether they see one or ten patients a day, there’s really no incentive to squeeze that extra appointment in.

And so – you get waiting lists, substandard care, uncaring service providers and bloated administrative budgets, and a lot of people don’t get the care they need because if everyone who needed a kidney transplant got one, it’d bust the budget, even if there were enough staff and equipment to meet the need. But liberals consider this fair – especially liberal leaders, who are sure to set up the system so that they and their families and friends are very well treated by the health care system (in nations with socialized medicine, can any of you out there really imagine the local Prime Minister or even junior legislative back-bencher waiting in line with the unwashed masses for health care?).

Obama now wants to bring this thing nationwide – and he may very well have the votes to carry it through Congress. If we does, we’ll all have health care – if we don’t die before our turn in line comes up.

What is a Christian To Do?

An interesting article about the “buyer’s remorse” being felt by some Christians who signed on to Obama during the campaign and are now finding that Obama’s talk about reaching out to Christians, pro-lifers and others on the center and conservative side of the social debate was just that: talk. Within the article is this quote from a pastor who is having second thoughts:

But this kind of calculation is precisely what has gotten Christian political activists in trouble in the past, not just for 40 years but for 1,600 years. We gain access to Caesar in order to affect policy; we hold onto access even if it involves compromising some of what we want in policy; in the end, we can easily forget what policies we were after in the first place. I think this definitely happened to the Christian right. It doesn’t need to be repeated by the Christian center or left.

The “Christian left” doesn’t have to worry about becoming the tool of one political party – it is a tool created by a political party and its sole purpose is to cast a patina of Christianity over operationally anti-Christian policies. As for the “Christian right”, we debate as to whether the GOP has captured it, or that it has captured the GOP. The “Christian center” I know not, but worry that any such thing is bound to eventually fall to the “Christian left” because anything which is not explicitly conservative winds up liberal in the long run. But Christians, right left and center, have a vital role to play – actually, they have the role to play because it is only Jews and Christians who provide a sturdy center for a society to revolve around. Given that Jews make up only a tiny minority of Americans, it is up to Christians to do, or not do, what is necessary.

What are we Christians to do? As the late, great John Paul II put it, “be not afraid”. Very important to understand this – we’ve been afraid, and afraid for far too long. Time to be a bit fearless. We’re either people of a faith which believes that Christ has redeemed us, or we’re not. If we’re not, then we might as well give up the whole thing – but if we are, and I am, then its time to fearlessly confront the world. Paul didn’t ask politely to be heard – he shouted from the rooftops, as it were, what needed to be done. Yes, he lost his head over it – literally; but he gained an Empire. What should we care what they might do to us? Especially from the cowards we for the most part face? But even if they are able, as some point, to cut off our heads, then so be it. We’ll win, in the End.

We must not fall into a debate about Christian left, right and center – we must be Christian, and demand the world bend to our will. Get out of the left/right dichotomy – we want a Judeo-Christian society; nothing more, nothing less. What does a Christian really care about the ability of a person to make money off pornography? Capitalism is fine, as long as we don’t take it too far – and it has been taken entirely too far. What does a Christian really care about when someone says their God-given individual rights mean they can sh** in our public square? Free expression is fine, as long as we don’t take it too far – and it has been taken entirely too far. A right to abort children; a right to become drug-addled; a right to pile up money far beyond any reasonable need; a right to live off the work of others, the demand to preserve a forest “forever”; the claim that one may do whatever one wants with one’s own, the claim that one’s property is actually the property of the group…such conceptions are contemptible and unworthy of a serious, adult human being. Unworthy, that is, of a Christian.

Love is not soft and mushy – that is what weak-kneed men say it is; but real men – and real women – understand that love is hard as diamonds, yet far more beautiful and precious. If you love a thing, do you allow it to be wrecked? If you love a person, do you wish for them to live in filth? In the name of love a person will allow himself to be killed for a place, to die for a friend. What is soft about that? Why do we expect the soldier to show his love by standing bravely against the enemy, while we allow a man back home to say his love means he has to divorce his aging wife to marry some younger woman? If the soldier runs away from the enemy, we might even go so far as to shoot him for cowardice – if a man runs away from his wife, we’ll say that it was better than being in a difficult marriage. Just what kind of nonsense is that?

Courage is what we need – the courage of our ancestors who called folly and wickedness what they were, and demanded that people stop being fools and criminals. Everyone can be forgiven and, indeed, we must be ever ready to forgive at the drop of a hat – but the sinner must crave pardon, or all the forgiveness in the world will be wasted on him. We must have the courage to say that everyone who is suffering will be embraced, while also saying that everyone who is suffering from personal folly will have to stop being fools. No more excuses, no more soft-peddling and for the love of God, no more refusal to judge actions.

We must call Caesar to repent, not beg for crumbs from Caesar’s table. And if Caesar, for a while, takes a hammer to us, then that is fine – eventually, like the Caesars of old, he will bow down before our God, and beg forgiveness.

Laughable Daily Kos

Here is a laughable quote from Mr. Daily Kos himself:

We have to show we are different than Republicans by refusing to tolerate any corruption in our ranks.

Is he joking? Democrats have a long history of not only tolerating but condoning corruption in their party. Murtha himself has a long record of corruption that has been excused by the Democratic Party. There is, of course, rampant corruption in the Democratic Party that Daily Kos has most certainly turned a blind eye to or made excuses for over the years. Even now, Obama can’t seem to nominate anyone who pays their taxes, and that is barely the tip of the iceberg.

Republicans have a much better record of weeding out the corrupt elements of their party than the Democrats do. A Democrat under federal investigation is more likely to be offered a powerful chairmanship than to be ousted by this party leaders. A Democrat who has an affair with an underage campaign worker is more likely to be reelected than incarcerated. 

Sorry Kos, abandoning a sinking ship because you have no choice doesn’t give you the high ground on ethics. Applying the same standard to both parties would give you more credibility.

Obama Gives Zero For Heroes

For someone who has tripled the national debt in a matter of weeks, he is apparently doling out loads of cash for everyone but those who have been wounded fight for their country…

The leader of the nation’s largest veterans organization says he is “deeply disappointed and concerned” after a meeting with President Obama today to discuss a proposal to force private insurance companies to pay for the treatment of military veterans who have suffered service-connected disabilities and injuries. The Obama administration recently revealed a plan to require private insurance carriers to reimburse the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in such cases.”It became apparent during our discussion today that the President intends to move forward with this unreasonable plan,” said Commander David K. Rehbein of The American Legion. “He says he is looking to generate $540-million by this method, but refused to hear arguments about the moral and government-avowed obligations that would be compromised by it.” 

Just goes to show you how little Obama cares about our military.

Barack Obama: Not Ready for Prime Time

Yep:

…the heart of the matter: the doubts about Obama himself. His famous eloquence is wearing thin through daily exposure and because his actions are often disconnected from his words. His lack of administrative experience is showing.

His promises and policies contradict each other often enough that evidence of hypocrisy is ceasing to be news. Remember the pledges about bipartisanship and high ethics? They’re so last year.

The beat goes on. Last week, Obama brazenly gave a speech about earmark reform just after he quietly signed a $410 billion spending bill that had about 9,000 earmarks in it. He denounced Bush’s habit of disregarding pieces of laws he didn’t like, so-called signing statements, then issued one himself.

And in an absolute jaw-dropper, he told business leaders, “I don’t like the idea of spending more government money, nor am I interested in expanding government’s role.”

No wonder Americans are confused. Our President is, too.

Obama can get past all this – but it will take a radical change of view; and therein lies our real problem: I doubt that Obama even realizes that he’s got a problem. Product of liberal education and locked within the liberal ivory tower, Obama seems entirely unaware that there is something other than liberalism in the world. If Obama lacks the courage and judgment to change course as necessary, then he’s just going to keep bulling ahead regardless of consequences, and that would be disastrous for us, and for the whole world.

This is what we get when we vote for “hope and change” rather than actual policies. The youngsters who so ardently supported Obama have the excuse of youth and ignorance – but for all of those who have taken an adult’s place in the world over the past 10 years, to vote for Obama was to vote for the man obviously unready to be President of the United States. This is not to say that Obama isn’t a smart man, nor to say that he doesn’t have the stuff of Presidents within him – its just to say that he wasn’t ready. Perhaps after a full term in the Senate, or maybe had he become governor of Illinois, or a cabinet secretary in someone else’s Administration – then he would have obtained that practical experience which would, if he’s as smart as people say he is, modified his worldview to admit that, just perhaps, what sounds good in a college lecture might not be entirely applicable to real life.

An unready, inexperienced man in the White House surrounded by political sharks who do, indeed, know how things work – a recipe for disaster, unless Obama finds some wellspring of strength and some people who will be unafraid to tell him the worst. It could get rather ugly over the next four years.