iPandora

As usual I was browsing the news today (yes, it is thanksgiving, but I am over 2,000 miles away from my family and my adopted family hasn’t woken up yet) and I ran into this interesting article.

Just some basic concepts I pulled from the article.

• Although creativity is rarely a prerequisite from the presidency but it should have been in Mr. Obama’s case. By promising change, Mr. Obama was promising somoething new or atleast newer (because it is assumed that the old establishment cannot change). This would require creativity to look outside of Washington and find competent staff members who can fill national level positions. However, this creativity and change doesn’t seem to be happening.

Barack Obama defended his decision to pack his new Cabinet with veteran Washington insiders and former Clinton officials yesterday after a campaign in which he promised change.

• Mr. Obama doesn’t have a “New” plan. Throughout his campaign, Mr. Obama always said he had a plan, but never mentioned to show it. At the end he started listing steps of action that sounded a whole ton like core conservative values, however, no real plans, just promises to every person on welfare. Now, we are receiving evidence that he has no plan. As my point above mentioned, a plan for change would include reaching outside of Washington for influence and ideas. However, Mr. Obama is simply falling back on the core of his party, the Clintons. Hmm . . . is Mr. Obama a leader, or a mouthpiece?
• Despite the appointments of Rahm Emanuel (the single most dangerous person in the Democrat party) and Hillary Clinton, Mr. Obama’s party is still claiming he is center-right. What is scary is that they are saying this about their most liberal member. I believe that the Liberals believe that this last election, and the huge turnout, gave them a mandate (a word the Conservative movement started using first) to drag this country down to European standards. However, a closer look at the election will tell a different story. In fact, the turn out at this election was much less than expected. The turn out this election was only about 10% higher than 2004 while the 2004 turnout was about 17% higher than 2000. Also, once again, youth did not vote. In fact, the majority of the increase in voting was because people who had already voted before, but hadn’t recently, voted. On top of that, these “liberal” voters, voted for traditional marriage in every state where it was being contested (though now the California Supreme Court is deciding whether a Constitutional Amendment is Constitutional [um . . . duh . . . it is the Constitution]).
• One last point I really want to make. There are over 40 million people on welfare who can vote. Those people most likely voted their pocket books (which candidate will give me more), but, as my last point makes, I find it hard to say this about everyone else. I do though think I know why they voted. Here is my argument. Mr. Obama was constantly labeled as a great communicator (I am not sure how true this is because communicators actually communicate information). He was someone who spoke to the voters and kept them informed. The voters loved to listen to Mr. Obama, and I believe this is the Republican parties fault. The basics of leadership dictate that a leader must communicate with his followers. The leader must let the followers know what is happening, where they are going, and what they are to do. If a leader does this, they are halfway to success. This what Mr. Obama has done. He has said that the Democratic party needs to get to the White House, has to battle the Republicans, and needs support. Compare this to the Republican party. In the election we were told, we dont’ need the conservatives (till they realised that the conservative vote was their only vote), we dont’ have an enemy (after all, we want this to be a civil election), just get the White House, who cares what we do after that (maybe we can do what we have been doing, it has worked so far). However, even before the election, we the voters have not been led. After all, what is really happening in Iraq? And who is telling us what has happened? Oh, the media, why can’t the President tell us? Communicate with us and let us know that he needs our support? There was no communication about the financial crash. The Washington Insiders just got together and came up with a plan without communicating the situation to the voters. Sure, the Republicans have challenged the Democrats on their policies, but have they told the voters about the Democrat policies and how they could be countered? Although I do loath Mr. Obama’s rash of news conferences (he is not the President yet), he is fulfilling people’s basic needs, communication.

A common wish of many people voting for President is that he be one of “them”. A buddy/pal kind of person who they feel can relate to them and understand their pain.

This desire is closely related to the thought that the government is supposed to come along side us and assist us with many of our problems.

One thing I know about myself: I’m not presidential material. Not right now anyways (necessary caveat in case anything else on this blog is ever used to preclude my suitability to that office).

I don’t want someone like me in the Oval Office. I want someone stronger, wiser, more patient and cunning, more determined and shrewd. In short, someone very much not like me.

Some candidates may feel that appealing to voter’s humanity is the best way to win them: for many voters this is true. But I will try to support those who are independent, who have lived their lives and made no apologies for who they and and how they have achieved in life.

A candidate can appeal to my humanity be showing they love the less fortunate, not necessarily relate to them.

We are not all the same.

On another note, this Pro-Obama blog says that unless Obama is ahead by more than they are ahead by now, McCain wins by a landslide. Facts, figures, and honesty follow:

McCain Set To Win by Landslide! The Polls vs. Reality in Presidential Elections

…The people who will be shocked are those in the media. Even though they know the polling from the past juxtaposed with the actual election results is never very kind to the Democrats. They are so hyped on McCain losing and Obama winning, that they fail to be objective in the least.

Heh, I had to look up whether it was “vaccum” or “vacuum”… maybe it was “vaccuum”…

Driving home with my wife Wednesday evening, we were discussing political parties and issue importance. While both of us tend to side with the Republican party in our voting, we’ve both supported Democrat candidates at times when they were superior to the Republicans running. However, for me at least, those tended to be local candidates.

Given the current over-all state of American politics, the reason it will take a serious set of circumstances for me to vote for a Democrat, no matter how conservative, in a national election, is that the Democrat party as a whole, a generality, and a unit, supports immoral, unethical, and evil policies which figuratively and literally destroy individuals for the sake of a false ideal of innate human goodness and the hidden goal of concentrated totalitarian power.

While individually there are Democrats who espouse beliefs closer to mine (such as the so-called “Blue-Dog Democrats”) than those of some Republicans, the Democrat party requires loyalty of its members to a set of guidelines which include policies such as Abortion on demand, socialist welfare programs, income redistribution, to name a few.

Conversely, the Republican party platform has strong positions protecting the unborn and extending true human dignity in that way, minimizing socialist welfare programs, lowering taxes to allow me to choose how and where to spend my money.

Even if the individual person may be ideologically closer to my viewpoint than their opponent, the (D) following their name means they must follow at times their party calls. (Exception being Leiberman, the only man with cojones in his Party)

This is one more reason that in elections for national office, I do not foresee myself ever supporting a Democrat.

And if you’re sitting this one out: you’re wrong. With this election our choices are not obscure or difficult. There is the Socialist with the Liar at his side. And while McCain is no shining knight, he’s strong on foreign affairs, national security, and has been trumpeting for changes which would have averted this financial mess for years. And he showed he recognizes the validity of the Conservative position in his choice of Palin.

To sit out is to give up.

I don’t give up.

With the elections of November 2006, the overall victorious party, the Democrats, claimed they’d been given a “mandate” regarding many issues, particularly the War on Terror. They claim the American people have spoken and that the only allowable course now is withdrawal and defeat. Though they speak specifically of the Iraqi War, their master policy is reflective of their general disenchantment with the whole war against terror. This belief in a “mandate”, the word du jour for giving credence to the questionably credible, does seem to be born out by the recent polls, as reported on CNN and the BBC, showing 2/3 of Americans don’t see a good plan for winning the War in Iraq.

While it is only barely debatable that the Iraq War is not going the way we’d hoped, not even complete failure is a viable reason for ever giving up, especially in this war where it is our homes, families, businesses, our way of life, and our lives themselves which are at stake. After all, this war began, at least this current phase, with the enemy attaching us, on our turf, killing our husbands and wives, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, sisters, brothers, innocents all. Even many jihadists agree that non-combatants, civilians, and innocents are off-limits to any kind of attack. But attacked we were, and though it has now been several years since that attack we vowed we’d never forget, it was neither the first nor will it be the last, the danger is little abated. Is there then reason for throwing up our hands collectively, defeated?

Liberals would say emphatically “Yes!”

The current strategy, according to liberals, is not working, and therefore we must tuck tail and run. Defeatism leading to disengagement, with the ultimate goal of isolationism. An island we will be, literally and figuratively. And we having cried “uncle,” the rabid dogs hounding us around the world will allow us a gracious defeat and will let us be, alone. A final Vietnam this will be, America will no longer find the will to project itself and then indeed others will take the reins of power in the world. Except for several things, but first: Where in our governing documents and illustrious history do we the people determine the minutiae of war policy?

We expressly give the President power to direct and wage war as necessary and as he sees fit to protect our interests. This is, in part, why it is so very important that there be people of Character in high office leading this great nation. There cannot be a part-time person of character, for if at the first change of wind that person reassesses and changes their position, they are not truly a person of character. President Bush, for all anybodies disagreements with him personally and politically, has not changed course. He has stated his goal simply: to defeat terrorism whenever and wherever it is found, and has not changed. Whether agreeing with him or not, one can know what President Bush will continue to do. And the job is not finished. Far from it. The very fact of our experiencing difficulties in Iraq should be cause for us to redouble our efforts, reaffirming the need for such a battle now, before it is too late. And resolving to continue the fight we did not start in order to destroy the enemy who would destroy us.

For that is their goal whether we leave or not. The militant, radical, extremist Muslims, or Islamo-Nazis or Islamo-Facists, who began this war have a very public goal which they are not loath to tell, yet which we seem to have forgotten, it would seem. That goal is shouted by radical Imams (preachers or prayer leaders) and written officially as Fatwahs (edicts) and published to their adherents around the globe. America is the Great Satan and it and other nations which do not submit to their extreme Islamic theology, philosophy, and government must be destroyed, period. For them there is no discussion, no arguing the points and possibilities of peaceful coexistance. If we give up in Iraq and the other fronts of the War on Terror we are signing our own, our childrens’, and out entire futures’ death warrants. They will be utterly defeated or they will rule the world, there is no third option for them, and therefore there isn’t for us either.

So then, the only choice for us must be to continue to face them in classic American projectionism. To battle evil is the calling and constant duty of the good. Evil at different times and places takes different faces. Consider the World Wars of the last century. What if we’d given up because too many were dying? What if we’d accepted defeat at the hands of the Nazis? It is likely all of Europe would be enslaved to this day by them or another despotic regime along with most or all of Africa and the East. Prior to our engagement in that war it was the Republican Party arguing for isolationism against engagement, just to show how times and ideas change.

Just as in the World Wars, others are depending, both admittedly and unadmittedly, on our success. The United Kingdom continues to be our staunchest ally, showing classic British, Scottish, Irish and Welsh pluck and courage and an indomitable spirit. Mr. Blair has perhaps been more eloquent in his defence of the War and has used his bully pulpit more often explaining the rationale for our continued involvement in this fight than President Bush. Spain has given up after suffering great pain and loss of its own on its own shores. Instead of steeling its resolve as the London Train Bombings did for the United Kingdom, Spains’ Madrid Train Bombings broke the resolve of Castilla. Regardless of the allies individual or collective spines, though, if we fail, Spain will once again become a Moorish conquest, and this will not be an Islamic Kingdom such as that of the Moors of old who valued art and learning and to whom we owe a great debt for their careful preservation and translation of many priceless works of knowledge and beauty.

So if America were indeed to falter and fail, and retreat within its borders, who would then take the lead in the world? Who has the strength and ability, and more importantly the moral fiber and the national will?

There are few countries indeed who do not have the desire to lead the world the way America has led. The relevant question really is not would they, but could they and should they. The UK has perhaps the nearest moral fiber (nationally) to America. Willing to take unpopular stands around the world in what they see as preservation of good. However, by size they are physically unable to produce enough to lead economically. A leading nation must be able to produce enough to be nearly self-sufficient if necessary. They must be an economic powerhouse challenging all others to give it weight enough for it’s word to mean something. The European Union has shown it does not have the moral fiber to stand against evil at crucial times. Like the UN, when it comes to actual meaningful action, the EU is hampered by it’s own universality, someone is always involved with the enemy and therefore no one can do what must be done. Further, being based on “old-world” economies, it does not produce or consume enough, even collectively, to give it’s word weight beyond it’s member n ations.

In Asia, both China and India have the size, and economic and political/military might and/or potential. However, China is hampered by an immoral, communist quasi-dictatorship, and even if democracy or some less greedily repressive and philosophically backward form of government than comunism were to take over immediately, the people would not soon be ready for world domination and protection. India perhaps has the best chance of becoming a or the world dominant nation, post America, but even they suffer under a socially restrictive religion, social order, and government.

African and South American nations suffer almost universally under corrupt, despotic governments and appear too busy enriching their own upper crusts illegitimately to worry too much about their being the trailing end of the nations of the world. Russia seems unable to throw off cronyism and corruption in business or the siren song of a communist government.

Those nations among our allies in the Middle East have their hands much too full trying to set their houses in order without offending any of their geographical or theological brethren, and many of them officially support ideologies as destructive and evil as any of their more violent neighbors who we’re now in struggle against

So that leaves America. Oh, and not to offend anybody, but who’s heard anything out of our northern neighbor Canada recently? I’m told it’s a beautiful place and the people there are special and nice and kind, but they appear to be content, in a global perspective, being frosting, a whole lot of white stuff, on top of the United States. That and trying to win the title “More Socialist Than France While Still Drinking Beer (Wine Is For Sissies).” So here we are, the lone strongman holdout against the encroaching darkness, to whom all others cling. Some more grudgingly than others. But this is what we are fighting for, the whole world. This is the responsibility that comes with being the nice big kid on the block: We have to face every bully. And if we don’t win, this particularly bully is a rapist.

There are two things which I do not understand regarding this vomit-inducing spectacle which is the media frenzy regarding all things Obama:

First, that people still believe the media to be an accurate and unbiased representation of the facts of any matter.

Second, that people can still claim with a straight face that the media sides with McCain.

Glenn Beck (The Conservative CNN Can’t Fire): Obama coverage embarassing

As candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain are ironically a lot like the way the media treats them: Obama is the glitzy magazine cover that screams for people to buy the issue, and McCain is the fact-filled article buried inside that makes you glad you did.

Chicago Tribune: The Germans love him more than we do

Berlin police estimated more than 200,000 people attended the speech, more than twice as large a crowd as Obama has drawn at any event in the United States.

Chuck Raasch (possibly Another Fawning Groupie): Even though it’s a circus, it’s an important circus, dammit!

Obama did have shaky moments. In tough interviews with network anchors and correspondents, he looked evasive and irritated when pressed on his unwillingness to acknowledge the U.S. troop surge supported by McCain had been a success in Iraq. Some reporters blogged about Obama aides acting as if he were already president. There’s that presumptuousness again, enhanced by reports Obama had ordered presidential transition planning.

But this trip was about images, not words. In sideways glances at TV screens, Americans were able to take measure of a potential president on the world stage. The choreographed political diplomacy showed a confident-looking Obama on even platforms with heads of state. Obama can now sprinkle speeches with phrases like, “As I said to Hamid Karzai.”

What if all this crowning doesn’t mean anything?

And what if California goes Red?

Obama is a pompous and arrogant man. If only so many weren’t so blind.

A friend’s status on Facebook spotted by American Texan caught my attention.

Now that we know who the two main options are in the United States presidential election, we need to know where they stand. This election will be, for conservatives, very much a lesser of two evils election.

I’m not one who likes to use that phrase, and I did not believe the GW Bush was a lesser evil in his elections. But given two people with very obvious track records, we are now faced with such a choice: between liberal McCain and socialist/communist Obama.

This gives conservatives a distinct disadvantage in this election: Democrats and Liberals and old hippies and young communists in the college systems of America have their perfect candidate and will be excited and mobilized easily. We have a lesser of two evils and will be dragging out feet. Thank you Mr. Medved.

Obama is pro post-birth abortion

Search google for “Obama post-birth abortion” and you see the details.

Two Conservatives lay out the details: Obama has voted repeatedly and consistently against so-called “born alive infant protection” acts which state that any homo sapien who is outside of the mother and alive is afforded all the protections of any other normal human.

Even the extremely liberal Senator Boxer from California has stated that such provisions do nothing to limit the rights defined by Roe v Wade and supports such measures.

If the stated purpose of regular and common abortion is to protect the health of the woman, then Obama is pro-murder and infanticide, not just abortion. By voting “present” and “no” in such votes, he has stated rather clearly his intention to support all forms of killing the innocent and weak among us for no greater purpose than convenience.

He has said he’d support such provisions when they include language specifying they do not infringe on the “rights” defined in Roe v Wade, but such provisions have also been before him to vote, and he has again voted “present” and refused to support them.

He wants to have his cake and eat it too, he supports one position  verbally but in action and application he has made his true intent and heart known very clearly.

For more information see Laura Echevarria’s list of Obama quotes on abortion.

I like this part of him, and for this reason we conservatives ought to do what we must to quell our gag reflexes and vote McCain into office.

In a speech on his philosophy and standards regarding the Supreme Court of the United States, John McCain specifically referenced Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr, and the late Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist as epitomes of those he’d choose.

He called them:

“jurists of the highest caliber who know their own minds, and know the law, and know the difference.”

What a concept: “know their minds, know the law, and know the difference”.

A liberal sees their mind as the law. If man is the chief end of himself, he is his own highest law. If that man is one of authority and power, his mind is the law of those he rules.

Whim and feeling have greater weight than principle and immutable law.

Rush Limbaugh, in a “Pearl of Wisdom” included in his latest Show Notes email explained the how the liberal ideal actual creates dystopia instead of the utopia they desire:

Liberals stand up for principles, but they never stand up for people. People always suffer when liberalism succeeds — and when people are suffering, I don’t think you can shout the warning too loud that it needs to stop.

With the whim and feeling of liberalism leading us by our noses, we cry “Foul!” when shown stories like this one from Indiana last night titled “Indiana’s primary turnout high, despite photo ID law“:

About 12 elderly Roman Catholic nuns were turned away Tuesday from a polling place because they didn’t have state or federal identification bearing a photograph.

Sister Julie McGuire said she was forced to turn away her fellow members of Saint Mary’s Convent in South Bend, even though they had been told earlier that they would need to get such an ID to vote.

“One came down this morning, and she was 98, and she said, `I don’t want to go do that,’” McGuire said. Some showed up with outdated passports. None of them drive.

Elsewhere across the pivotal state, voting appeared to run smoothly, despite the fears of some elections experts that the photo ID law could cause confusion at the polls.

The money line is at the end of a picture description in the sidebar of the story:

McGuire said most of the nuns were in their 80s or 90s, and the other nuns had spoken with them frequently about the need to get out to a Bureau of Motor Vehicle branch for their free ID.

A practical and normal person led, not by whim and feeling, but by a reasonable balance of justice and mercy would see those old ladies and think “they were warned, others offered to help, there was no fee, they knew better”.

Instead, with the leading title, we are coerced into thinking how mean and ugly those conservative leaders in the Indiana State House who had it out to get these poor old ladies who just wanted their voice to be heard *sob*.

Come on people, do we expect nothing from anybody or anything except the government?

People are capable. People have will and ability. People are free moral agents, with choice and consequence set before them.

The creeping liberal ideology seeks to devalue individuality by removing all force of will from individual people. By passing the place of moral agent from an individual to a group they steal all originality and identity.

And changing the government is not the only answer.

It is more important to work in individual people’s lives, showing them the increased labor of individuality is worth while for the increased liberty it provides.

Samuel Adams put it this way:

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

Because I don’t take politics too seriously.

I sympathize with Ms. Green: there is nobody I really like out there right now.

I am a moral absolutist, an incurable optimist, and purist, and an artist. I deal in complex absolutes and relish it.

Politics is not about absolutes though. Politics is the business compromise.

The goal of politics is to use relationships of convenience and shared purpose to achieve and incremental and gradual change to return America to where it ought to be.

The enemies of right and good have used this same tactic to pull us away from our mooring, setting us adrift on the sea with a gale wind blowing towards the shoals of socialism.

But politics has a problem: it is only a mirror of the culture.

Americans are finding it is good to vote money to themselves from the pot.

Elections are becoming more and more about what we can vote for ourselves. More about campaign promises and less about the right and good and correct path. More about self and me and less about us and them.

So what will fix the problem?

Christ.

Only in the redemptive and heart-changing work where the heart and mind of the person is changed is true change that has a likely chance of lasting beyond the next feel-good and gimme-gimme sessions.

So I vote, not to get my will exactly produced in my elected leaders, but to give me time to work the sea change from the bottom up.

This is why I find world-view classes and training to be so very important. So many Christians vote against God without knowing it. There are many deluded and deceived and yet redeemed souls who do not realize the err of their way.

So I will vote, not for Mr. or Mrs. Right, but for the one who is best.

I can vote for the lesser of two evils with a clear conscience and redouble my efforts next time to continue to fight the fight, first for the hearts and souls of men, and second for the hope of the world through this great land.

Does the truth we find in this humor scare anyone else?

I’ve had the following images floating around on my computer for a while, waiting for me to actually post them. It seems to me, in their attempt to paint the liberal and Democrat as the loving, caring, truly human leadership, anybody with a mind will recognize the fallacies and dangers of the blanket statements made in this children’s book.

Children reading this book will be cursed with the feeling there is actual truth to be found in the ideas. They will accept without thinking the lies of socialism and liberal socio-political theory and practice.

Read and weep for America.

What parent wants their children to hurt?

What parent tries to protect the children from the pains of life?

What parent can?

Laudable.

But given the current state of Political-Business relations, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say: “Democrats give the Police Officers’ and Firefighters’ Unions the tools they need to keep dead weight and stupid policies in place hampering the heroes efforts, abilities, skills, and desires to serve as they are called”?

And I would want my children to go to those war-zones, indoctrination facilities, stupid-makers, great-levellers of the people they call schools?

I know what they mean is that we can all go to college. But 1) where is that a constitutional right or a universal requirement, and 2) aren’t there plenty of great colleges for cheap?

There are plenty of jobs in which one can work their way up to a comfortable level of pay which require no college. And the government has neither interest nor right to take money from those who aren’t going to college to give to those who are.

Maybe if there were less “free” money floating around from the government, the cost of education would come down, and only those dedicated and intelligent people would stay in teaching as it became less of a lucrative career option.

Democrats are government, not Mommy. This is a legitimate role for Mommy, not government.

To the extent that Democrats seek to usurp this role, they confuse the nature of society and culture. This is immoral.

Pompous, self-aggrandizing, megalomaniacal do-gooders!

Show me someone who believes this and I’ll show you someone certifiably insane.

First, there is no proof the Earth is “sick” with Global warming. There is proof there are regular and natural cycles of warming and cooling, and there is not proof we are even in a warming cycle.

Second, the temerity of the writer and those who agree with him in assuming a political party which has existed a mere 200 years has the might to enact significant change in an entire planet which they believe has existed 4.5 Billion years.

Someone call the nice men in white coats.

False.

The truth is, Democrats make sure schools cannot fire bad teachers. Democrats make sure children know all about condoms and how to have sex with each other, leaving it to the parents to teach reading and writing and true morals.

Individually, Democrats are generally caring people. But are they busy loving people to hell?

UPDATE:

These are not parodies, these are selections from one of two books for children:

Why Mommy Is A Democrat & Why Daddy Is A Democrat