2-Year Anniversary of Harry Reid's Act of Treason

Today marks an infamous date in history: The day when a highly placed elected U.S. official, with U.S. men and women in harm’s way (including my son, at the time), declared that we lost the war in Iraq:
He did this, of course, to give aid and comfort to those fighting our soldiers, ahead of the Bush-led surge in Iraq, so as to effect more U.S. troops coming home in body bags, so he could turn it to his and his party’s political advantage.

Why this traitor hasn’t been removed from a high-ranking leadership position in the United States Senate, or better yet, placed in a stockade, is beyond reason.

What a scumbag.

Old, White Guys at the Tea Party Demonstrations

That is how our liberal friends describe the Tea Party crowds…and our liberals are right about everything, so the picture of “Black People Against Obama” poses a real difficult problem for us. We’ll have to just shove it down the Memory Hole as we daren’t have such double-plus-ungood thoughts….

Dodd's Hock Shop Investors

Hey, they’re just buying shares in one of the best Senators money can buy:

U.S. Sen. Christopher Dodd, who has won praise from consumer groups for taking on credit card providers over predatory lending practices, has collected thousands of dollars in donations from people affiliated with the so-called payday loan industry.

The Democratic senator raised more than $44,000 from pawnshop owners and other businesses that provide high-interest loans, often to those with bad credit, according to campaign finance reports. The amount, while a fraction of the $1.05 million that Dodd brought in during the first quarter of 2009, nevertheless raises questions among those who scrutinize the link between fundraising and public policy.

Dodd is chairman of the Senate banking committee, and a bill being fought by the industry that would cap the annual interest rate on consumer loans at 36 percent has been referred to the committee.

I work in the credit card industry and the highest I’ve seen on any of our credit cards is about 33%…so, capping us at 36% wouldn’t actually cause a problem and that, of course, brings into question whether Dodd is fighting for the little guy or fighting for his usurious donors? Given the amount of donations Dodd has received from the financial and loan-shark industry, I’m going to tend towards it being an eyewash for the people, payoff for the donors effort.

There certainly does need to be a major overhaul in how lending institutions do business. From my experience with my employer I figure the major problem is that the corporate bosses are frightened rabbits. Under desperate pressure to produce profits or lose their cushy jobs they try expedient after expedient to squeeze every penny they can out of the borrowing public. This resulted, ultimately, in the practice of sub-prime lending which wasn’t just confined to home loans – banks were also issuing credit cards to people with 500 FICO scores (during the worst part of this lending spree I was tempted many times to ask some of our “valued clients” if they realized that when a bill comes, payment is expected…)…charging them fees out the wazoo and essentially making glorious profits by soaking the poor. Now that things have gone south, the frightened rabbits are trying desperately to cut losses (while our formally “valued clients” with the lousy credit are laughing at us when we expect repayment)…and so, scattergun, they are shutting down accounts willy-nilly for the most trivial of reasons. Which means that clients with decades of good payment history can lose their credit if they are late a day or two.

I’m so disgusted with my industry that I’d like to quit – but jobs are scarce and the bills do have to be paid. So, I’ve got a couple irons in the alternate employment fire, but for now I’m stuck trying to clean up the mess created by fools afraid of cretins. And, of course, said cretins do decide where the big political bucks go, and so their goal is to ensure that whatever happens they are protected in their ability to demand that high quarterly profits remain the holy grail of American corporate life. So, regulate the heck out of them, right? Are you kidding? You want to change profit-motivated cretins for power-motivated bureaucrats? Where’s the upside?

The key to success is to get the Dodds out of the mix and get the banks to cease being multi-national conglomerates and become, once again, the servants of local business enterprise. We won’t have to regulate Citi if it ceases to exist and becomes, instead, a score of regional and local banks looking after local and regional interests rather than trying to compete with other global monstrosities (whom do you think I trust more – Bank of America, or Nevada State Bank?). As long as we keep going down the route of more government regulation, the longer things will get worse. Dodd isn’t going to fix things – he doesn’t know how and isn’t interested in that, anyway. His only concern is getting himself re-elected next year and he figures that if he builds up a large enough war chest he’ll be able to demonize his opponent, put out huge amounts of BS about what a swell guy he is and then count on the special interests who’ve bought him to do the rest. Waiting for Dodd to help the people is like waiting for organized crime to voluntarily go out of business in a fit of public spirit.

Subversive Phrase of the Day

Rightwing extremist? Heck, this is the thinking of a madman:

Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery. – Calvin Coolidge

Minnesota Senate Race

Al Franken and his Democrats are 90% complete with stealing this seat, but its not quite over, yet:

…after the recount and panel-findings, the 312-vote margin separating the two men equals about .01% of the 2.9 million votes cast. Even without any irregularities, this is as close to a “tie” as it gets. And there have been plenty of irregularities. By the end of the recount, the state was awash with evidence of duplicate ballot counting, newly discovered ballots, missing ballots, illegal voting, and wildly diverse standards as to which votes were counted. Any one of these issues was enough to throw the outcome into doubt. Combined, they created a taint more worthy of New Jersey than Minnesota.

The Coleman camp pushed for resolution of these problems during the recount, but it was stymied by a state canvassing board that cared more about preserving its “Minnesota nice” reputation than about making tough calls. The state Supreme Court also punted difficult questions. The mess then landed with the three-judge panel overseeing Mr. Coleman’s contest trial, a panel that seemed out of its depth.

Case in point: the panel’s dismal handling of absentee ballots. Early in the recount, the Franken team howled that some absentee votes had been erroneously rejected by local officials. We warned at the time that this was dangerous territory, designed to pressure election officials into accepting rejected ballots after the fact.

Yet instead of shutting this Franken request down, or early on issuing a clear set of rules as to which absentees were valid, the state Supreme Court and the canvassing board oversaw a haphazard process by which some counties submitted new batches to be included in the tally, while other counties did not. The resulting additional 933 ballots were largely responsible for Mr. Franken’s narrow lead.

In the end, I expect that Franken will get the seat – Minnesota is a pretty Democrat-heavy State and thus the State Supreme Court is almost certain to have a majority in favor of the Democrat winning, come what may (in long research into politics one of the few absolutes is the certainty that any leading Democrat will be primarily motivated by increasing Democrat power). The fact that Fraken – a nasty, bitter partisan who claims we GOPers are relentlessly dishonest – will likely win by cheating is just one of those ironic things…of course the irony will be lost on Democrat rank-and-file who were easily convinced that Gore’s attempt to steal Florida was an attempt by Bush to steal what he already had.

Democrats get away with this sort of thing because the MSM is friendly to them (and thus won’t expose them for the election cheats they are) and because Democrats are relentless and brazen…if they’ve got a close race, they’ll never really quit and if they have to manufacture votes in extremely absurd ways, they’ll just go right on and do it, feeling no shame at all. What this points out is that once we GOPers do regain national power, we will have to force through a modification of the Voting Rights Act to require, at least for Federal office, that those who vote prove they are eligible to vote as well as enacting very severe penalties (we’re talking at least 20 year sentences) for anyone who in any way, shape or form (ACORN, we’re looking at you) in putting fraudulent voters and votes into the electorate.

The only way democracy can work is for the voters to feel reasonably certain that the vote is fair – Democrats have a long and exceptionally dishonorable history of ballot box stuffing but of late it has become worse than ever, and the very foundations of our republic are being shaken…merely in order to allow an extra Democrat or two to hold office. We can’t shame them into stopping (might as well try to shame a whore about dressing like a slut), so we must bring the hammer of the law to bear on them.

Divine Mercy Sunday

Its a Catholic thing – but its not something that you non-Catholics can’t understand. Essentially, Divine Mercy Sunday is a feast of God’s mercy. I pray that all will turn towards God and allow his endless flood of mercy to overcome all those things which hold a person apart from God.

Eternal Father, I offer You the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Your dearly beloved Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world.

For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.

God bless one and all.

Liberal Government Enters the Bedroom

Via Mark Steyn at NRO’s The Corner – one of the liberal complaints about conservative Christians is that we are, allegedly, trying to tell them what to do in the bedroom. This is an absurd accusation – if we were telling them what to do, they’d be doing it properly and we’d have a higher birth rate…but, still, it is what they say we are trying to do. So, imagine the shock liberals will get out of this:

Pierre Lemieux is an economist whose most recent book, Comprendre l’economie, just won the prestigious Prix Turgot in Paris. When it comes to guns, he’s a hobbyist, not a lobbyist, but in his spare time he has been trying to make the authorities comprehend something about the relationship between public safety and his love life. Not because he thinks there’s a nexus, but because the government does.

Before renewing his gun permit in 2007, the authorities decided to inquire into Lemieux’s bedroom history. Did he divorce anyone in the last two years? Did he break up with a girlfriend? If yes, use a separate sheet to explain.

Pardon me? Explain?

Well, it was nothing personal . Apparently, Canada’s government feels it ought to know the romantic status of all firearm owners. Hmm. Didn’t someone say the state had no business in the nation’s bedrooms?

Yes, liberals did – and do; endlessly. Actually, they are rather tiresome about it. But here come the liberals sticking their nose into a citizen’s bedroom because he wants to have a weapon. If M. Lemieux was proposing to have a mass orgy with goats in his bedroom, he’d probably get an award from some liberal group…but because he wants a gun, liberals want to know all the details, just in case there’s something in his sex life which can be used to justify denying him a permit.

Mark Steyn goes on to note how the pervasive ability of government to pester us runs the risk of just grinding us down. Because Lemieux essentially told the Canadian government – in a letter to the Prime Minister – to jump in a lake, the government denied his permit. M. Lemieux is still fighting, but how many people are really willing to go to the bother of fighting off Big Brother? Just as in that famed and prescient novel by Orwell, its not that the thing wanted is illegal, but government wants to know why you want it…and in the asking of why, you can find yourself caught in the jaws of a government meat grinder. For Lemieux, if he really loved Big Brother, he wouldn’t want to have a gun because he knows that BB will protect him…its rather double-plus disturbing, this desire to own a gun, isn’t it?

Canada is, of course, Canada – but Canada’s ideas of government is precisely what President Obama wants to bring to the United States. Will we fight it off, or just give up because tedious bureaucrats can just endlessly annoy us? Time will tell.

An Atheist Comes Home

Just another example of why we should never, ever give up on those who don’t believe – after all, God never does:

British intellectual A.N. Wilson, by his own admission, was a member for many years of the company of smug mockers of religion that dominates Britain’s chattering classes.

Not any more.

Writing in Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper, Wilson recounts why he has abandoned the trendy atheism of which he was formerly a prominent apostle.

Raised a Christian, Wilson’s faith weakened as he matured and collapsed completely by the time he was in his 30s.

And by the 1990s, he had authored a book, titled Jesus: A Life, that denied the divinity of Jesus and the miraculous aspects of his birth, life and death.

“Why did I, along with so many others, become so dismissive of Christianity?” Wilson writes in his Daily Mail article, Religion of hatred: Why we should no longer be cowed by the chattering classes ruling Britain who sneer at Christianity.

“Like most educated people in Britain and Northern Europe (I was born in 1950), I have grown up in a culture that is overwhelmingly secular and anti-religious. The universities, broadcasters and media generally are not merely non-religious, they are positively anti.

“To my shame, I believe it was this that made me lose faith and heart in my youth. It felt so uncool to be religious. With the mentality of a child in the playground, I felt at some visceral level that being religious was unsexy, like having spots or wearing specs.

“This playground attitude accounts for much of the attitude towards Christianity that you pick up, say, from the alternative comedians, and the casual light blasphemy of jokes on TV or radio.

It is very hard to cut through the morass of lies and nonsense which has been erected for the purpose of keeping people away from God. But the trick can be done – God is always calling to us, and if anyone who does not try to live by God’s will decides, even for a moment, to be still and listen, the call will become irresistible. I know that some of my “born again” brothers and sisters have it that a radical change was made, but I think that most of us who turn our lives over to God will state that it was a slow, at times halting, process. For me, it has taken years just to get to the point where I really consider myself a Christian, though one with a very long way to go before I’m worthy to stand with the least of Christ’s servants (this isn’t false humility – once one does turn towards God, one of the more stunning discoveries is just what a creep one has been…the atheists and agnostics don’t comprehend this; neither the fact of their creepiness nor the liberation which comes with understanding what one is, and what one is leaving behind). While the acceptance of Christ was the work of a moment, the act of becoming like Christ is a much longer process.

My fellow believers can speak for themselves here, but one of the things I’ve noted since turning towards God is that I have less and less attachment to – or, indeed, tolerance for – popular culture. I’m no longer even remotely interested in the nauseating parade of pop-culture glitz and glam. I understand there is a show called “American Idol” where people attempt to sing their way to fame while subjecting themselves to various forms of public humiliation…I’ve never sat and watched the show: the whole concept is a horror to me. Meanwhile, when a pop-culture event becomes so large that literally everyone has to hear about it – such as the case a year or two ago of Britney Spears’ meltdown – I’m moved to pity for the poor people involved. The people who get caught up in such social meat grinders could have had such wonderful lives and done so much good…but now they’re just the fodder for incorrigible gossipers.

And all of that is just the noise – the screaming shout of “look at me!” which distracts the human mind from family, home, Church…and faith. How can a pastor who is only a so/so speaker compete with the titillation of, say, some bottom-feeding celebrity show dredging up the worst behavior possible? How can a devoted wife attract the attention of her husband while he’s wrapped up in the day to day affairs of some Hollywood freak show? What chance has a troubled child to get parental attention form parents who spend their time discussing the vagaries of celebrity divorce and scandal?

But it can be got around, as Mr. Wilson has shown. There must have been, God be praised, some quiet corner where he could think undisturbed and where the example of real Christians could be pondered in opposition to the shallow anti-Christianity of modern pop culture. Our greatest hope, as believers, will have to be in our ability to convince people to shut off the TV, and listen to the call of God.

Obama Mindlessly Repeats Stupid, Dishonest Leftwing Talking Point

More and more I’m convinced that we shouldn’t describe Obama as the smartest man in the room but, more accurately, as not being the sharpest knife in the drawer:

On his recently concluded first visit to Mexico as president, a week after telling Europeans that his country had been at times arrogant, President Barack Obama blamed his own country for providing 90% of Mexico’s recovered crime guns.

According to a report by the independent FactCheck.org this afternoon, that’s incorrect. By a, uh, long shot.

The president’s assertion, also cited by Mexican President Felipe Calderon during their joint news conference in Mexico City, and the reported inaccuracy seems likely to fuel the eternal American gun-control debate, especially as it relates to the U.S. role in Mexico’s deadly drug world.

Which, of course, is why the left has created the talking point – they want an excuse for gun control and as Mexico spirals further out of control, gun control could be imposed as a national-security issue (“we have to ban these guns to protect Americans living on the border from being killed by Mexican gangs armed with US weapons”, or some such nonsense). The problem is not really the talking point – as far as lefty lies goes, this is just regular stuff – the problem comes in when we have a President of the United States who lacks enough wit to have a BS-detector strong enough to realize that some lies are so enormously stupid that only a lefty will believe them. In other words, all Obama did was allow the corrupt and incompetent Mexican government lay the blame for violence on us, while making himself look like a fool to any American with the sense God gave little, white mice (which, of course, excludes liberals, for the most part).

We’ve got Jimmy Carter on dimwit steroids here, boys and girls…

Obama Requested Georgetown Hide Christ

And the sad thing is that they agreed:

Georgetown University’s decision to comply with a White House request to cover up the “IHS” monogram representing Jesus’ name at President Obama’s speech on Wednesday is drawing fire from the Cardinal Newman Society and Georgetown students, who are charging the university with “sacrificing” its “Catholic and Jesuit identity.”

Reports surfaced today from attendees at President Obama’s speech on the economy that the White House asked Georgetown University to cover up several emblems, including an IHS monogram above the president’s head during his speech at the Jesuit university.

Although President Obama focused his speech on his administration’s plans to spur economic growth, some in attendance noticed that the IHS monogram—an early 3rd century abbreviation for the name of Jesus—was covered up for the speech.

…Julie Green Bataille, associate vice president for communications at the university, told CNSNews.com that the covering up of Jesus’ name was prompted by “logistical arrangements for yesterday’s event.” …

She said the “signage and symbols” were covered up because “the pipe and drape wasn’t high enough by itself to fully cover the IHS and cross” and that it seemed more “respectful to have them covered” so that viewers wouldn’t see them “out of context.”

Patrick Reilly, the President of the Cardinal Newman Society, reacted to the report by telling CNA that Georgetown’s decision is another “outrageous example of a Catholic university sacrificing principle for prestige.”

He wondered what the White House will request next month at Notre Dame’s commencement and said, “Christians simply cannot hide our faith in a drawer to satisfy an American president who shows no respect for Catholic identity or values.”

Obama would be “out of context” if a Christian symbol was visible while he was making a speech? If Christian symbols are inappropriate, then why did Obama agree to speak at an allegedly Catholic college? And why did the college agree to such an absurd request? First Notre Dame, now Georgetown – its getting a little embarrassing to be a Catholic these days! But, in the end, the gates of hell will not prevail against it, so all is well.

The liberal fear is of Christ and his Body – and that, dear friends, is our greatest strength. As long as we rely on God and the liberals rely on political correctness, there’s no chance we’ll lose.