Thursday, March 26, 2009

RTZ


Today marks a two year mile post for me. I'm so much better now. I want to thank God for yoking with me and carrying me through the rough times, but even more, I am thankful He abides even as I wonder or slip. My work at Permico and Living Waters Assembly Of God is taking everything I have. But I must admit, it's gotten a little easier, thanks to Jesus and His Love.

I also thank my wife for staying and fighting for the marriage. She is my comfort and my bride.
I know how bad I was. I see what damage and heartache I caused. The thing that has helped me and moved me forward is His forgiveness and the forgiveness I gave myself. That may sound odd and selfish, but one must forgive themself to ever hope to move to a better place.

This is a simple post from a very complicated man. I must return to zero to find the right perspective and purpose.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

WE ARE NOT WHAT THEY THOUGHT WE ARE

I want to go through this little quote from John Adams, one of the Founding Fathers once again. He said, "We," meaning the Founding Fathers, the United States, "We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions which are unbridled by morality and true religion." Meaning, we have not written a Constitution, we do not have a government here that is capable of dealing with the kind of human emotions that are found outside morality and true religion. "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." That's John Adams, one of the founders. Now, of course, people who are unbridled by morality or the immoral, if you will, and the people who are not truly religious, this Constitution -- and he's dead right, I mean he was one of the founders -- this Constitution is a restriction to them. I mean it is punitive to them. And he said this Constitution cannot deal with people like that.

It's an interesting prophecy he had essentially here because the very people trying to undermine the Constitution because it's an obstacle to them are the very people that we put in power lately over the years, both at the state level, in some places the city level, and in some instances at the United States government level, the federal level, the Constitution is under assault by people who find it restrictive and unpalatable. This is one of the great battles in which we find ourselves today. How do you come to a compromise with people like that? Everybody said, "We ought to compromise, bipartisanship, we gotta all get along." How do you do that? How do you compromise good versus evil? How do you compromise victory with defeat? Should Jesus have made a deal with Lucifer? Should Jesus have made a deal with Satan? How would that deal have come out? What would the compromise there be? So it's a great illustration.

The best thing about this country is the God we believe in.

Friday, January 16, 2009





The postmortems on the presidency of George W. Bush are all wrong. The liberal line is that Bush dangerously weakened America's position in the world and rushed to the aid of the rich and powerful as income inequality worsened. That is twaddle. Conservatives--okay, not all of them--have only been a little bit kinder. They give Bush credit for the surge that saved Iraq, but not for much else.

He deserves better. His presidency was far more successful than not. And there's an aspect of his decision-making that merits special recognition: his courage. Time and time again, Bush did what other presidents, even Ronald Reagan, would not have done and for which he was vilified and abused. That--defiantly doing the right thing--is what distinguished his presidency.

Bush had ten great achievements (and maybe more) in his eight years in the White House, starting with his decision in 2001 to jettison the Kyoto global warming treaty so loved by Al Gore, the environmental lobby, elite opinion, and Europeans. The treaty was a disaster, with India and China exempted and economic decline the certain result. Everyone knew it. But only Bush said so and acted accordingly.

He stood athwart mounting global warming hysteria and yelled, "Stop!" He slowed the movement toward a policy blunder of worldwide impact, providing time for facts to catch up with the dubious claims of alarmists. Thanks in part to Bush, the supposed consensus of scientists on global warming has now collapsed. The skeptics, who point to global cooling over the past decade, are now heard loud and clear. And a rational approach to the theory of manmade global warming is possible.

Second, enhanced interrogation of terrorists. Along with use of secret prisons and wireless eavesdropping, this saved American lives. How many thousands of lives? We'll never know. But, as Charles Krauthammer said recently, "Those are precisely the elements which kept us safe and which have prevented a second attack."

Crucial intelligence was obtained from captured al Qaeda leaders, including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, with the help of waterboarding. Whether this tactic--it creates a drowning sensation--is torture is a matter of debate. John McCain and many Democrats say it is. Bush and Vice President Cheney insist it isn't. In any case, it was necessary. Lincoln once made a similar point in defending his suspension of habeas corpus in direct defiance of Chief Justice Roger Taney. "Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?" Lincoln asked. Bush understood the answer in wartime had to be no.

Bush's third achievement was the rebuilding of presidential authority, badly degraded in the era of Vietnam, Watergate, and Bill Clinton. He didn't hesitate to conduct wireless surveillance of terrorists without getting a federal judge's okay. He decided on his own how to treat terrorists and where they should be imprisoned. Those were legitimate decisions for which the president, as commander in chief, should feel no need to apologize.

Defending, all the way to the Supreme Court, Cheney's refusal to disclose to Congress the names of people he'd consulted on energy policy was also enormously important. Democratic congressman Henry Waxman demanded the names, but the Court upheld Cheney, 7-2. Last week, Cheney defended his refusal, waspishly noting that Waxman "doesn't call me up and tell me who he's meeting with."

Achievement number four was Bush's unswerving support for Israel. Reagan was once deemed Israel's best friend in the White House. Now Bush can claim the title. He ostracized Yasser Arafat as an impediment to peace in the Middle East. This infuriated the anti-Israel forces in Europe, the Third World, and the United Nations, and was criticized by champions of the "peace process" here at home. Bush was right.

He was clever in his support. Bush announced that Ariel Sharon should withdraw the tanks he'd sent into the West Bank in 2002, then exerted zero pressure on Sharon to do so. And he backed the wall along Israel's eastern border without endorsing it as an official boundary, while knowing full well that it might eventually become exactly that. He was a loyal friend.

His fifth success was No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the education reform bill cosponsored by America's most prominent liberal Democratic senator Edward Kennedy. The teachers' unions, school boards, the education establishment, conservatives adamant about local control of schools--they all loathed the measure and still do. It requires two things they ardently oppose, mandatory testing and accountability.

Kennedy later turned against NCLB, saying Bush is shortchanging the program. In truth, federal education spending is at record levels. Another complaint is that it forces teachers to "teach to the test." The tests are on math and reading. They are tests worth teaching to.

Sixth, Bush declared in his second inaugural address in 2005 that American foreign policy (at least his) would henceforth focus on promoting democracy around the world. This put him squarely in the Reagan camp, but he was lambasted as unrealistic, impractical, and a tool of wily neoconservatives. The new policy gave Bush credibility in pressing for democracy in the former Soviet republics and Middle East and in zinging various dictators and kleptocrats. It will do the same for President Obama, if he's wise enough to hang onto it.

The seventh achievement is the Medicare prescription drug benefit, enacted in 2003. It's not only wildly popular; it has cost less than expected by triggering competition among drug companies. Conservatives have deep reservations about the program. But they shouldn't have been surprised. Bush advocated the drug benefit in the 2000 campaign. And if he hadn't acted, Democrats would have, with a much less attractive result.

Then there were John Roberts and Sam Alito. In putting them on the Supreme Court and naming Roberts chief justice, Bush achieved what had eluded Richard Nixon, Reagan, and his own father. Roberts and Alito made the Court indisputably more conservative. And the good news is Roberts, 53, and Alito, 58, should be justices for decades to come.

Bush's ninth achievement has been widely ignored. He strengthened relations with east Asian democracies (Japan, South Korea, Australia) without causing a rift with China. On top of that, he forged strong ties with India. An important factor was their common enemy, Islamic jihadists. After 9/11, Bush made the most of this, and Indian leaders were receptive. His state dinner for Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh in 2006 was a lovefest.

Finally, a no-brainer: the surge. Bush prompted nearly unanimous disapproval in January 2007 when he announced he was sending more troops to Iraq and adopting a new counterinsurgency strategy. His opponents initially included the State Department, the Pentagon, most of Congress, the media, the foreign policy establishment, indeed the whole world. This makes his decision a profile in courage. Best of all, the surge worked. Iraq is now a fragile but functioning democracy.

How does Bush rank as a president? We won't know until he's judged from the perspective of two or three decades. Hindsight forced a sharp upgrading of the presidencies of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. Given his achievements, it may have the same effect for Bush.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

There He Goes Again....


You know God is good when patience pays off.
You know God is Great when he sends people your way to sooth your soul
When God works with you, you know your headed in the right direction.
When His Truth and Will are obvious, your faith is fortified.
God is Good. All The Time.

Friday, October 24, 2008

IT'S YOUR PROBLEM...FIX IT!!!!


It’s not up to McCain. It’s not up to Obama. It’s up to you and me.

Do we want:
Smaller limited Constitutional central government
Stronger military
A dwindling welfare state
A capitalist system
National Security

We have to fight for this country. Ronald Reagan’s ideals are not dead. He laid the predicate for modern conservatism. Conservatism does not change. No upgrade is needed. It is based on thousands of years of human experience. What works and what does not work. Experimentation is liberalism. Liberalism is a lurch in the dark and it must be repelled. Conservatives work hard every day to get things done.

GET OUT THERE AND TAKE OUR COUNTRY BACK NO MATTER WHO WINS THIS HELLATIOUS EVENT NOVEMBER 4TH.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

The Obama/Pelosi Early Agenda





Here are some of the changes that are likely to occur if Barack Obama is elected and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid get their super-majority, and Washington is a solidly liberal town again. I tried to limit the list to only the items that they would be likely to either pass, or attempt to pass, based on common beltway wisdom and campaign statements. For example, a Democrat dominated D.C would be ominous for second amendment supporters. Yet, there are no specifics on how a President Obama and a Democratic super-majority would try to regulate handguns, so it doesn’t make the list.


Democrats and Liberals will applaud many of these. Conservatives and the GOP will be gnashing their teeth. Either way, most, if not all, will be attempted.


1. Union card check would certainly pass and be signed into law. This is the Employee Free Choice Act would convert workplaces into union shops merely by gathering signatures from a majority of employees. It would eliminate the final secret ballot vote.


2. Obama has vowed to fight to ban companies from hiring permanent replacement workers during a union strike, assuring all union workers will get their jobs back if they just walk out and picket.


3. Obama promises to move us toward government run healthcare, even if he stops sort of proposing universal healthcare. He is promising a public insurance program modeled after Medicare and open to anyone of any income. According to the Lewin group, it could cause as many as 52-million Americans to move from private coverage to public entitlement.


4. Obama and Pelosi both want to increase the minimum wage to at least 9.50 an hour by 2011 and index it--tie it to the rate of inflation--so it will increase as inflation does.


5. President Obama will be appointing at least one, maybe two appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court.


6. Obama and Pelosi have both vowed to renegotiate NAFTA and stand against other free trade agreements. Imagine, they want to limit trade with our allies and neighbors, Canada and Mexico.


7. Obama and Pelosi would almost certainly implement cap and trade taxes, imposing them on businesses to combat global warming. These would drive up the cost of energy and adversely impacting the economy. This is trillions of dollars that congress could grab by selling carbon credits, which it could then use to play favorites and pick winners and losers in the energy business and across the economy. It would be a new way for congress to regulate business, punish those industries they don’t like and reward those they do.


8. Obama and Pelosi want to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050, which is impossible, but we’ll lose a lot of freedoms and spend a lot of taxpayer money trying. They will almost certainly pass the bill making this vow, anyway.


9. Democrats in congress vow to attempt to reintroduce the Fairness Doctrine and stifle conservative talk radio. Obama has said he has no interest in doing so, but if congress passed it and it ended up on his desk, would he sign it?


10. President Obama has vowed a quick troop exit from Iraq. Pelosi and the anti-war crowd will hold him to it.


11. President Obama will have to make good on his promise to hold personal President-level talks with the Castros, Chavez, and other dictators, with or without precondition.


12. Pelosi, Obama, Shumer, and virtually all democrats of note talk about windfall profits taxes on oil companies. They will pursue them. Other industries the left has traditionally disliked could be in for new scrutiny, regulation and profit grabs, including telecom, biotech and (almost certainly) drug makers.


13. Obama has vowed raise the top income, dividend, and capital gains rates for ‘the rich’, increasing the cost of new investment in the U-S.


14. Obama’s 95 percent tax cut for all Americans would turn the IRS into a new

welfare agency. Forty percent of American families don’t pay taxes, so they’d

receive yearly rebates, money they never paid in and don’t deserve.


15. A liberal supermajority would move quickly to impose procedural advantages that could cement democratic rule for years to come, including national Election Day registration, something ACORN has been pushing for years. It would make it easier to stack the voter rolls.


16. Felons may get the right to vote nationwide. Democrats must figure felons are more likely to vote democrat, because they have been pushing this for years.


17. The District of Columbia would be given a voice, and votes, in congress- democratic- of course.


18. The No Child Left Behind education standards would be watered down or dropped. Teacher’s unions don’t like them.


19. Terrorists at Guantanamo Bay would probably be afforded the right to have trials in civilian courts with all of the protections and rights afforded to American citizens.


20. Obama and Pelosi would pass the so-called Fair Pay Act which would set salary standards for women doing certain jobs that would be overly simplistic and would allow trial lawyers to dream up all sorts of new discrimination claims while adversely affecting employers.


21. Obama has vowed to expand and toughen federal hate crimes laws, which many people find ridiculous. A crime is a crime.


22. Obama and Pelosi support amnesty for illegal aliens. Rahm Emmanuel has said it won’t be attempted until a second Obama term, but it could be coming under the democrats. It is a vow they’ve made to illegal alien advocacy groups.
23. Obama has told Planned Parenthood that, as one of his first acts, he will pass the Freedom of Choice Act, which would overturn the partial birth abortion ban and overrule parental notification laws.

Monday, October 6, 2008

THE NONSENSE OF GLOBAL WARMING

This artical by Paul Johnson in Frobs magazine was a wonderful read. Let me share it with you.

The Nonsense of Global Warming

Paul Johnson 10.06.08, 12:00 AM ET

August was one of the nastiest months I can remember: torrential rain; a hailstorm or two; cold, bitter winds; and mists. But we are accustomed to such weather in England. Lord Byron used to say that an English summer begins on July 31 and ends on Aug. 1. He called 1816 "the year without a summer." He spent it gazing across Lake Geneva, watching the storms, with 18-year-old Mary Shelley. The lightening flickering across the lake inspired her Frankenstein, the tale of the man-made monster galvanized into life by electricity.

This summer's atrocious weather tempted me to tease a Green whom I know. "Well, what about your weather theory now?" (One of the characteristics of Greens is that they know no history.) He replied: "Yes, this weather is unprecedented. England has never had such an August before. It's global warming, of course." That's the Greens' stock response to anything weather-related. Too much sun? "Global warming." Too little sun? "Global warming." Drought? "Global warming." Floods? "Global warming." Freezing cold? "Global warming."

I wish the great philosopher Sir Karl Popper were alive to denounce the unscientific nature of global warming. He was a student when Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity was first published and then successfully tested. Einstein said that for his theory to be valid it would have to pass three tests. "If," Einstein wrote to British scientist Sir Arthur Eddington, "it were proved that this effect does not exist in nature, then the whole theory would have to be abandoned."

To Popper, this was a true scientific approach. "What impressed me most," he wrote, "was Einstein's own clear statement that he would regard his theory as untenable if it should fail in certain tests." In contrast, Popper pointed out, there were pseudo-scientists, such as Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Marx claimed to be constructing a theory of scientific materialism based on scientific history and economic science. "Science" and "scientific" were words Marx used constantly. Far from formulating his theory with a high degree of scientific content and encouraging empirical testing and refutation, Marx made it vague and general. When evidence turned up that appeared to refute his theory, the theory was modified to accommodate the new evidence. It's no wonder that when communist regimes applied Marxism it proved a costly failure.

Freud's theories were also nonspecific, and he, too, was willing to adjust them to take in new science. We now know that many of Freud's central ideas have no basis in biology. They were formulated before Mendel's Laws were widely known and accepted and before the chromosomal theory of inheritance, the recognition of inborn metabolic errors, the existence of hormones and the mechanism of nervous impulse were known. As the scientist Sir Peter Medawar put it, Freud's psychoanalysis is akin to mesmerism and phrenology; it contains isolated nuggets of truth, but the general theory as a whole is false.

The idea that human beings have changed and are changing the basic climate system of the Earth through their industrial activities and burning of fossil fuels--the essence of the Greens' theory of global warming--has about as much basis in science as Marxism and Freudianism. Global warming, like Marxism, is a political theory of actions, demanding compliance with its rules.

Those who buy in to global warming wish to drastically curb human economic and industrial activities, regardless of the consequences for people, especially the poor. If the theory's conclusions are accepted and agreed upon, the destructive results will be felt most severely in those states that adhere to the rule of law and will observe restrictions most faithfully. The global warming activists' target is the U.S. If America is driven to accept crippling restraints on its economy it will rapidly become unable to shoulder its burdens as the world's sole superpower and ultimate defender of human freedoms. We shall all suffer, however, as progress falters and then ceases and living standards decline.

Out of Balance

When I'm driving to my country home in Somerset, I pass two examples of the damage Greens can cause when their views are accepted and applied. Thanks to heavy government subsidies, many farmers switched from growing food to biofuel crops--perhaps the most expensive form of energy ever devised. The result has been a world shortage of food, with near starvation in some places, and a rise in the cost of food for everyone. We're now getting wise to this ridiculous experiment; shares in biofuels have fallen, and farmers are switching back to their proper work. But the cost has been enormous.

The other thing I pass is a new windmill, spinning slowly around. Windmills were the great invention of the early Middle Ages--man harnessing nature and using it to replace muscle power. When I was a boy more than 70 years ago there were still a few windmills, but nobody doubted they were on their way out. The thought of going back to wind power would have seemed preposterous. Nevertheless, under pressure from Greens this has happened. Wind power is a grotesquely expensive and inefficient form of energy, and the new windmills are hideous things, ruining the landscape and making an infernal noise.

Marxism, Freudianism, global warming. These are proof--of which history offers so many examples--that people can be suckers on a grand scale. To their fanatical followers they are a substitute for religion. Global warming, in particular, is a creed, a faith, a dogma that has little to do with science. If people are in need of religion, why don't they just turn to the genuine article?

Friday, August 22, 2008


Obama's got a lot of ground to make up following that performance last weekend at the Saddleback presidential forum with pastor Rick Warren.

Obama's defenders spin his abominable performance in the Saddleback forum by saying he's just too smart to give a straight answer. As Rick Warren charitably described Obama's debate performance: "He likes to nuance things ... He's a constitutional attorney." The constitutional lawyer "does nuance," as Bill Maher said on "Larry King Live," "and you saw how well that goes over with the Rick Warren people."

If that's Obama's excuse, he ought to know a few basics about the Constitution.

Did the big constitutional lawyer whose "nuance" is too sophisticated for Rick Warren's audience see the letter his wife sent out on his behalf in 2004? Michelle Obama denounced a federal law banning partial-birth abortion, writing that "this ban on a legitimate medical procedure is clearly unconstitutional." Clearly!

The Supreme Court later found the law not "unconstitutional," but "constitutional" -- which I believe may have been the precise moment when Michelle Obama realized just how ashamed she had always been of her country.

But most stunningly, when Warren asked Obama if he supported a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman, Obama said he did not "because historically -- because historically, we have not defined marriage in our Constitution."

I don't care if you support a marriage amendment or not. That answer is literally the stupidest thing I've ever heard anyone say. If marriage were already defined in the Constitution, we wouldn't need an amendment, no?

Say, you know what else was "historically" not defined in the Constitution? Slavery. The words "slavery" and "slave" do not appear once in the original Constitution. The framers correctly thought it would sully the freedom-enshrining document to acknowledge the repellent practice. (Much like abortion!)

But in 1865, the 13th Amendment banned slavery throughout the land, in the first constitutional phrase ever to mention "slavery": "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

On Obama's "historical" argument, they shouldn't have passed the 13th Amendment because the Constitution "historically" had not mentioned slavery.

Do we know for a fact Barack Obama has read the Constitution? Obama's Facebook profile: "I'm pro-infanticide, I love sunsets, and I don't get the 13th Amendment!"

This is the guy who thinks he can condescend to Clarence Thomas? Asked at the Saddleback forum which Supreme Court justice Obama would not have nominated, Obama said ... the black one!

In Obama's defense, he said he thought Thomas wasn't experienced enough "at the time." So I guess Obama thinks Thomas should have to "wait his turn."

By contrast, Obama has experience pouring out of those big ears of his. Asked last year by Robin Roberts on ABC's "Good Morning America" about his lack of experience in foreign policy, Obama took umbrage.

Swelling up his puny little chest, Obama said: "Well, actually, my experience in foreign policy is probably more diverse than most others in the field. I'm somebody who has actually lived overseas, somebody who has studied overseas. I majored in international relations."

He actually cited his undergraduate major as a qualification to be president.

But on Saturday night, Obama said he didn't think Clarence Thomas was a "strong enough jurist or legal thinker" to be put on the Supreme Court.

I bet Thomas has heard of the 13th Amendment!

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

OK....HERES THE 411


I LOVE GOD, PEOPLE AND POLITICS. YES, I DO LEAN TO THE RIGHT. WELL...OK...I'M TO THE RIGHT OF RUSH.... BUT I AM ALSO A GOOD LISTENER AND OPEN IDEAS AND POSITS OF OTHERS. LET’S TALK AND SEE IF TOGETHER WE CAN BUILD A BETTER LOCAL COMMUNITY OF BELIEVERS AND EXPOSE THE DECEIVES. THANKS. GOD BLESS AMERICA AND YOU.