Happy Thanksgiving

I was awakened this morning by the sounds of a truck's gears grinding. The truck was in my driveway (we live on a country road) so I went down to see what the problem was. Max, the gentleman driving the truck, told me in very broken english that his clutch was out. Max, a Mexican, was on his way to work on a home a mile or two down the road. I asked Max if he wanted a ride to work and he said "No....one man work me drive here.......Thank you, thank you very much". It seems Max is thankful. So am I.

I'm thankful for many things, which I could list, but the idea of saying "I'm thankful for my wife........who is beautiful........loving.........kind and generous..........my traveling companion........." seems so obvious. Who wouldn't be happy and thankful to have such a friend? Or I could talk about how thankful I am for my children, who have brought me so much happiness, and challenged me to be a better man. But again, who wouldn't be happy and thankful to be their dad?

So what then? What is it that I'm thankful for that I wish to express in both my words and deeds? I'm thankful that I know God, my creator, the creator of all things, and that he loves me..........a sinner.........a man who has fallen so short so many times. Yet no matter how short..........for God does not measure sin...........God provided for my salvation by dying on the cross for me. He could have lived eternally with His angels and whatever other perfect beings he has created, but he chose to live eternally with sinners saved by grace. Saved by Grace!!!

That's what I'm thankful for.

Time to call the Democrat's bluff

Every day some Democrat politician calls for repeal of the Bush tax cuts. Usually those calls are sandwiched between the words "taxcuts for the wealthy" and "leaving the bill for our children to pay". Today is Barack Obama's turn (read it here). Mr. Obama is positioning himself as a reasonable Democrat in order to appeal to centrist voters. But the code words in his comments give away the fact that he is just another Democrat that thinks the government knows best what to do with your money. He begins by saying he wants to cut pork. Anyone who doesn't own pigs would agree with that approach. Obama claims that delaying or repealing the tax cuts for the wealthy (primarily millionaires) could save the nation tens of billions of dollars. He believes tax cuts, which have stimulated our booming economy (raising tens of billions in tax revenues), are "fiscally irresponsible policies", creating debt just as pork projects like Alaska's "Bridge to Nowhere" do. He equates Republican hesitance to raise taxes with the politicians love of pork.

I say it's time to call their bluff. President Bush should announce a new "Get America Out Of Debt" program...................call it "Millionaires Saving America's Future" and appoint former Presidents Carter and Clinton as co-chairpersons. Those two pillars of truth would call on any and all "rich" persons who do not like their tax breaks to give the money to the treasury where it would be recorded as "Payment Against America's Debt". The only catch would be that all payments must be accompanied by a declaration of how rich the donor is and the donor's political party affiliation........sort of a "put up or shut up" policy.

Democrat millionaires are always saying they pay too little in taxes. Let's make it easy and attractive for them to pay more.............but on a volunteer basis. Then allow Vegas to fix odds and take bets on whether Republicans or Democrats gave more.

On and on it goes

This morning I read a commentary written by Jimmy Carter and my stomach turned at the blatant falsehoods he presents. Tonight I read a commentary by Cathy Young in which she presents outright falsehood as "fact". Why should it surprise and upset me so much that main stream media is so willing to print such garbage? I wish I had an answer. I wish it didn't upset me so much, but it does. Maybe I just place too much value on the truth.

In the Jimmy Carter piece, titled "This isn't the real America", Jimmy makes the claim that America is becoming a repressed totalitarian state (funny, I sort of felt that way when he was president) where the rich steal from the poor.....legally of course with help from Bush's tax cuts........Big Brother is invading our privacy.........the water, air and earth are deadly environmental abominations, and torture of innocents is rampant (sort of like Iraq before we invaded and set 25 million people free).

This is the Jimmy Carter who as President of the United States in 1979-80 allowed 66 Americans to be held hostage in Iran for 444 days. It was a sad time for the U.S., but apparantly a time Jimmy is proud of. Here is how his Presidential Library describes Carter's lack of action......." He pursued a policy of restraint that put a higher value on the lives of the hostages than on American retaliatory power or protecting his own political future." Talk about understatement. All of America was held hostage by a few radical students in a less than two bit middle-eastern nation, but Jimmy was showed "restraint" by doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about it. Now, 26 years later, one of the hostage takers, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, emboldened by Jimmy's restraint, is President of an extremely militant and ever increasingly anti-American Iran, and is boldly calling for the destruction of America.

In Jimmy's world America would sit back after an incident like 9/11, smoke a Cuban cigar, ask Kofi Annan if he would please help us recover, request that all Americans go into poverty so we can build up a warchest just in case we need it, then sit and hope it doesn't happen again, all the while proclaiming the need for restraint in order to keep the honor of America clean.

Jimmy's distortion of the truth goes far deeper than his mischaracterizations of the current state of affairs in the world. His library makes the claim that "President Carter's actions brought freedom for the hostages with America's honor preserved." The hostages were released upon the innauguration of Ronald Reagan as President. Apparently the Ayatollah Khomeini had reason to fear the new president of the U.S. (maybe he had visions of cruise missiles entering his bedroom)

But Jimmy's biggest concern is "a fundamentalist shift in many houses of worship and in government, as church and state have become increasingly intertwined in ways previously thought unimaginable". Man, me too!! As an example of this unimaginable mixing of church and state he cites...............NOTHING. NADA. ZIP. ZERO. But he really doesn't need to, because he's Jimmy Carter, the most caring man in the entire universe, and everyone knows that if he says it it's the gospel.

America thought it was cute to elect a peanut farmer from Georgia President. I guess we got what we deserved.

In the Cathy Young piece, titled "Fact and fiction on evolution" fiction is presented as fact as though nobody might notice. She turns the current state of reality in "the evolution debate" into a simple game of "It's true because I say so". Yes Mommy!! NOT!! She makes the absurd claim that "The evolutionary theory of origins of species is supported by abundant evidence from the fossil record and genetics research" OH REALLY? So the "missing link" has been found? This is such a highly debatable point that it's incredible anyone would make that statement. Of course no missing links have been found. Something Darwin said would happen thousands of times over in just a few years after he first proposed his theory. She makes the bushleague mistake of presenting the evidence for "micro-evolution" as proof of "macro-evolution". In essence she believes that since there is adaptation within specie, one specie could easily become a different specie given billions of years. Of course the more we learn about DNA and the formation of all living things the more we can believe that no specie can become another specie and reproduce similar offspring. DNA dictates the specie, not the other way around.

Later in her hit piece on evolution theory dissenters she claims that Darwinian Evolution cannot be a "vehicle for atheism and materialism" because "Darwin was a Christian". No, Darwin was not a Christian, nor did he claim to be. Whoever Cathy Young is, she is lazy minded beyond belief. A google search of the words "Charles Darwin Christianity" offered up many sources that point to Darwin's lack of belief in Jesus Christ as Savior (the definition of being a Christian). Here's a quote from Darwin's autobiography she could have found in 45 seconds of searching..........."I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so, the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. This is a damnable doctrine...". Darwin was a very mixed up man who, after coming up with the theory of evolution, pointed to the fact that evolution cannot explain the creation of complex things when he said "to suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances....could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree."

She goes on to name many Christian groups that say "evolutionary science is not incompatible with the basic tenets of religious faith". True enough. But it is incompatible with the Biblical account of creation, which is a basic plank of Christianity. Obviously Christians are not afraid of science as we believe if it proves anything it will prove that the world is "wonderfully and fearfully made", obviously by someone vastly more wise than random chance.

I'm not against peoplelike Jimmy Carter and Cathy Young having their say, I'm just so tired of hearing it stated as such rock solid truth, as though any discussion of the facts they propose is heresy. And they say is the fundamentalist Christians who lack tolerance. Oh my!!

What creates Bush hatred?

***UPDATE***

Read this Powerline post on the insanity of Bush Hatred (they call it Bush Derangement Syndrome). I especially like their presentation of the opposite of the insanity of Bush Hatred, and use Bruce Willis as an example of "sanity". Think about that for a momment...........Bruce Willis is sane..................at least where Bush and the war or terror are concerned.

Make sure you read the comments at the bottom of this post. They really help drive home what the insanity of Bush Hatred is all about.

ORIGINAL POST IS BELOW

I have known for a long time that Bush haters also hate all conservative Christian republicans, and anyone with any two of those three traits. The Bush haters will tell a person to their face that they don't hate them, then start spewing venom about all the other "lying, hatemongering Nazi like religious rednecks that want to shove their religion down our throats and put storm troopers in our bedroom". But I have never quite figured out how this hatred got it's strength.

An incredibly arrogant opinion piece from Naomi Wolf in The Guardian sheds a little light on the subject. I suggest reading it for the purpose of understanding the cultural war Americans are facing.

Her premise is that Bush supporters have now "had enough" of his lies and are now just waiting for the next president.............Democrat or republican it doesn't matter. She thinks that Bush supporters were "sedated" by the "intoxicant of ruthless jingoism". For those who don't know what "jingoism" is yet (the left has been using it more and more over the past two years to describe Bush's speeches) it is an appeal to emotional patriotism, or nationalism. I guess she means when Bush stood on the rubble at ground zero and said "we will rebuild" or when he said "You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror" as he tried to build a coalition to invade Afghanistan and crush the Taliban. I don't really remember being sedated or intoxicated, but she thinks I was.

She thinks most of Bush's supporters are white men who the rest of America had left behind, and as such they are social and economic couch potatoes waiting for the next Clancy book turned movie (because they can't read) to give them a sense of justice in the world.

She makes so many rude comments about America that I wondered if she's French. She inflates the Katrina response to the level of holocaust, complete with "black and brown bodies" floating in the streets and black "babies crying for water". She reduces the Iraq war into Cheney's "Halliburton cronies carving up Iraq" and enshrines "2000" as though it came from the Biblical book of Numbers. She claims the U.S. is no longer a democracy, the press is no longer free, judges are oppressed,

She closes with this......."Bush will never recover his swagger in our eyes: he was our dealer....." I doubt Naomi ever bought anything from Bush........not the least his swagger.

So what is it about the origins of Bush hatred that I have induced from the rant of Naomi Wolf? Nothing. It's as insane as any other Bush hating rant I've heard in the past 6 years (acutally, in my family Bush hatred goes all the way back G.H.W. Bush's presidency). It's insane to hate the man and it's insane to hate those of us who love him. I take Ms. Wolf's diatribe as proof of that statement.

Time for a 51st state.....Southern California

When teachers, firefighters and other public employees become union thugs it's time for a change. Perhaps that change should be my family and I leaving California, the state I was born and raised in, but I think a better idea would be for southern California to secede from the rest of the state and become the 51st state.

The results of yesterday's election here have driven home the sad reality that California is run by public employee unions, primarily the teacher's unions, firefighter's union and the prison guards union. These three pump so much money into the Democrat's campaigns that only bazillionairs like Arnold can run against them. Those Democrats want (and the unions support) higher taxes, more public employees, more casino gambling, less stringent drug laws, gay marriage, illegal alien rights (including voting rights and drivers licenses), less private land development, increased access to abortions, "free" health care for everyone, and the list goes on and on.........including teenage abortions without parental notification.

It's sick and sad that those who are supposed to protect and teach our youth care so little about families and the health of young women that they would vote to defeat Prop. 73, a bill that would have required parental notification before a child could have an abortion. But that's the reality here in CA.

But the reality here in San Diego county is quite different, as is Riverside county, Orange county, San Bernadino county. Imperial county. Those counties, along with many in the central valley (Kern, Fresno, Inyo, Mono, Merced) have traditional conservative values, and vote those values. I have not yet seen the election results from yesterday, but I'm guessing it will show that those counties voted overwhelmingly to approve Props 73, 74, 75, 76 and 77, while the rest of the state, including the humongous Los Angeles county, voted to defeat them. It's always this way. We vote, but get nowhere because the rest of the state is incredibly liberal. Red/Blue county maps show a perfect division in our state. I think that division should be made permanent by creating a state called Southern California.

Why should we in Southern California be represented by the likes of Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi? Why should our futures be directed by the people who live in Los Angeles, who need the taxes we pay to survive and can demand more from us any time they want to?

I think the time to create the 51st State in the United States is now, and Southern California is the place.

An honest Democrat tells the truth about Plame/Wilson

Zell Miller tells the truth like nobody else I know. By that I mean to say that he does it with wit and zeal. Today he lays out the CIA/ValeriePlame/JoeWilson affair as though it was a spy thriller showing on the silver screen. His "opinion" of Plame and Wilson is right in line with mine and his facts are completely correct.

Unfortunately Miller's commentary is in the Alanta Journal and Constitution, which means that if you want to read it you need to register (it takes about 1 minute). Here's the opening line.........

"It's like a spy thriller. Institutional rivalries and political loyalties have fostered an intelligence officer's resentment against the government. Suddenly, an opportunity appears for the agent to undercut the national leadership. A vital question of intelligence forms the core justification for controversial military actions by the current leaders. If this agent can get in the middle of that question, distort that information and make it public, the agent might foster regime change in the upcoming election."

Here's another bit that tell's where Miller is coming from..........

"No one seems to care that our intelligence agency has crippled our president. Certainly not the media. They are determined to make Wilson a hero. Recall the dozens of times the Washington Post and The New York Times carried his lies on the front page, above the fold. The conclusive story discrediting Wilson was buried 6 feet deep, back by the obituaries."

Zel Miller is an outstanding American whose love of country, family and traditional values drove him to part ways with democrats and vote for President Bush. He's witty and wise and writes great commentaries about current issues. I suggest everyone also read this one titled Iwo Jima, If Covered By Media Today

Also read Powerline's post titles "My Favorite Democrat...Part 2"