Wednesday, December 31, 2008

RAHM EMMANUEL'S MYSTERIOUS TRIP TO AFRICA EXPLAINED BY SHERLOCK HOLMES

******************
WATSON: The trip to Africa which Rahm Emmanuel is now making is a big mystery. What is your solution to this mystery, Holmes?

HOLMES: Elementary, my dear Watson! Emmanuel has gone to Africa in order to transact some business in Kenya.

WATSON: In Kenya? Why Kenya and what kind of business?

HOLMES: Again, elementary my dear Watson! Kenya is where Barack Hussein Obama was born and the Government of Kenya has been boasting about their native son who is about to become President of the most powerful nation in the world.

WATSON: Are you suggesting, Holmes, that Barack Hussein Obama has some connection with the Government of Kenya?

HOLMES: Most certainly, Watson. It was just a few years ago, while serving as a Senator in the United States Senate, Barack Hussein Obama travelled to Kenya and campaigned for the election of his uncle Odingo to be President of Kenya. It was a close election and Odingo lost, but he did not concede the election and Kenya was racked by violence as Odingo’s supporters rampaged, murdering many people. The man elected President compromised and made Odingo his Deputy and peace was restored to the country.

WATSON: Barack Hussein Obama must be proud of his Uncle Odingo.

HOLMES: Yes, and Kenya is proud of Barack Hussein Obama. His paternal grandmother has been interviewed and taped saying that she was present at his birth in Mombasa, Kenya.

WATSON: But Holmes, I do not understand what that has to do with Rahm Emmanuel’s trip to Africa.

HOLMES: Elementary, Watson! It is not in Barack Hussein Obama’s best interest for Kenya to be boasting so much about their favorite son, and so Rahm Emmanuel’s task is to shut them up and to try to destroy Obama’s birth record in Mombasa.

WATSON: How can he do that?

HOLMES: He can promise Kenya millions of dollars in foreign aid if they will just do as he asks them to do.

WATSON: But, Homles, why does Emmanuel have to go to Kenya to do that?

HOLMES: Do not be so naive, my dear Watson! It would be impossible to accomplish that from Washington without leaving a paper or electronic trail that could later be used to impeach Barack Hussein Obama. Witness the trouble Governor Blogojevich is in becuause he was foolish enough to try to sell the senate seat over the telephone.

WATSON: Thank you, Holmes. You have certainly solved this mystery!

HISTORY WILL BE MUCH KINDER TO GEORGE BUSH THAN THE MAIN STREAM MEDIA HAS BEEN

POWER TENDS TO CORRUPT AND ABSOLUTE POWER CORRUPTS ABSOLUTELY

********************

"The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position."

--George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796

I never cease to marvel at the wisdom of the Founding Fathers of our Nation.

God blessed America with men who were open to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit

and who left us in their words and actions a legacy which has made our Nation

the great Nation that it is today.

I hope and pray that this New Year of 2009 which begins tonight

may see America remain firmly rooted in the principles enunciated by

George Washington.

- Leo Rugiens


Tuesday, December 30, 2008

THE FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT AT BERKELEY IN THE MID-1960'S NO LONGER EXISTS

*******************

Whatever else it is, the pro-life movement of the last thirty-plus years is one of the most massive and sustained expressions of citizen participation in the history of the United States. Since the 1960s, citizen participation and the remoralizing of politics have been central goals of the left. Is it not odd, then, that the pro-life movement is viewed as a right-wing cause? Reinhold Niebuhr wrote about “the irony of American history” and, were he around to update his book of that title, I expect he might recognize this as one of the major ironies within the irony.

These are the issues addressed in a remarkable new book out this month from Princeton University Press, The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right, by Jon Shields, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College. The book is by no means a pro-life tract. It is an excruciatingly careful study, studded with the expected graphs and statistical data—but not to the point of spoiling its readability—in the service of probing the curious permutations in contemporary political alignments.

The Port Huron Statement issued by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1962 called for a participatory democracy in which, through protest and agitation, the “power structure” of the society would be transformed by bringing moral rather than merely procedural questions to the center of political life. Almost fifty years later, Shields notes, “some 45 percent of respondents in the Citizens Participation Survey who reported participating in a national protest did so because of abortion. What is more, nearly three quarters of all abortion-issue protesters are pro-life, an unsurprising fact given that the pro-life movement is challenging rather than defending the current policy regime. Meanwhile, all other social issues, including pornography, gay rights, school prayer, and sex education, account for only 3 percent of all national protest activity.”

Shields says there are three categories of pro-life politics: deliberative, disjointed, and radical. Representative of the “deliberative” are Justice for All (JFA) and the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR), which have trained thousands of young people to engage in nonconfrontational pro-life persuasion on college campuses. The “disjointed” politics includes innumerable and loosely organized activities such as sidewalk counseling, prayer vigils, marches, demonstrations, and counter-demonstrations. The “radical” includes what he calls “the broken remnants of the rescue movement,” focusing on civil disobedience and the closing of abortion clinics. “In many respects [the radical] is the exact opposite of deliberative politics, except for the fact that it too is highly coordinated and organized.”

He cites striking instances of the campus efforts of groups such as JFA and CBR meeting with frequently vicious hostility, often led by faculty members. The truth is that such hostility reflects vehement opposition to civil deliberation and argument about abortion. Pro-life students eager to engage others in serious discussion find this very frustrating, but it is not entirely surprising. Shields writes: “Such frustration is fueled by NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood, whose leaders discourage their campus affiliates from debating or even talking to pro-life students. NARAL’s ‘Campus Kit for Pro-Choice Organizers,’ for example, gives this categorical instruction: ‘Don’t waste time talking to anti-choice people.’” The campus organizer for Planned Parenthood told Shields that she “discourages direct debate.” Feminists for Life has had more success on campuses, mainly because its members shake up conventional notions on the “woman question.” As leaders of the organization put it, the goal is not to “fit into a man’s world on men’s terms,” which means above all not “troubling employers with their fertility problems.” As they repeatedly assert, “Women deserve better than abortion.”

But pro-abortion intolerance of discussion or debate is sometimes given dramatic expression. In San Francisco, the city and county board of supervisors unanimously declared January 22, the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, “Stand Up for Choice Day” and officially declared San Francisco a pro-choice city. Supervisor Bevan Duffy declared that pro-lifers were “not welcome in San Francisco.” Supervisor Tom Ammiano complained about the audacity of pro-life activists who “think that they can come to our fair city and demonstrate.” The head of the Golden Gate chapter of Planned Parenthood was outraged that activists “have been so emboldened that they believe that their message will be tolerated here.” The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the mid-1960s has come to this.


The Pro-Life Movement as the Politics of the 1960s

by Richard John Neuhaus

Monday, December 29, 2008

OLIVER CROMWELL - MIGHT HAVE BEEN RIGHT FOR ONCE

*****************



Cromwell: 'I beseech you . . . think it possible you may be mistaken'

“I BESEECH YOU, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” So wrote Oliver Cromwell in 1650, and the world would be a better place if Cromwell's words were prominently posted over the desk of everyone who works in the pundit racket -- those who get paid to tell the world what they think, but too infrequently pause to consider, let alone confess, that they might not always know what they're talking about.

Like weather forecasters and economists, those of us in the commentariat get paid even when we're wrong. If we didn't -- well, just think of the political sages who would have been pounding the pavement after asserting confidently that Mitt Romney was sitting pretty in Iowa and New Hampshire, or that Barack Obama had no chance of defeating the Clinton machine. Fortunately, error -- even egregious error -- isn't usually a hanging offense in this business. Just ask Dick Morris, the Fox News/New York Post commentator, who wrote a book in 2005 called Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race. Or Shelby Steele, the Hoover Institution scholar and frequent op-ed essayist whose latest book, on the Obama phenomenon, was titled A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win.

BusinessWeek was chortling recently over a list of what it labeled “truly spectacular” wrong calls about 2008, such as President Bush's soothing analysis of the economy last March (“The market is in the process of correcting itself”) and Jim Cramer's response on CNBC's “Mad Money” to a viewer who was thinking of dumping his Bear Stearns stock (“No! No! No! Bear Stearns is fine! Do not take your money out . . . Bear Stearns is not in trouble!”).

But not every howler made the BusinessWeek list. For example, it didn't include this elaborate forecast, which proved to be mistaken in every detail:

“New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg will enter the presidential race in February, after it becomes clear which nominees will get the nod from the major parties. His multiple billions and organization will impress voters -- and stun rivals. He'll look like the most viable third-party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt. But Bloomberg will come up short, as he comes in for withering attacks from both Democrats and Republicans. He and Clinton will split more than 50 percent of the votes, but Arizona's maverick senator, John McCain, will end up the country's next President.”

That impressive string of blunders was one of “Ten Likely Events in 2008” foretold by -- yes -- BusinessWeek back on Jan. 2. Anyone can make a bad call, of course, but it generally takes a professional -- a paid journalist or expert analyst -- to be wrong about something so comprehensively (and publicly).

Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, nicely illustrates the point in the November issue of Commentary magazine. He rounds up the reaction of much of the punditocracy to the 2007 change of strategy in Iraq -- the “surge” that led to such remarkable progress in the war. As Wehner shows, one commentator after another expressed not just doubt about the surge, but utter contempt for it.

Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post assured readers that the surge “could only make sense in some parallel universe where pigs fly and fish commute on bicycles.” Time's Joe Klein derided it as “Bush’s futile pipe dream.” Former ambassador Peter Galbraith explained in the New York Review of Books that the surge “has no chance of actually working.” And Jonathan Chait announced in the Los Angeles Times that there was “something genuinely bizarre” about anyone who would support the new strategy. “It is not just that they are wrong -- being wrong happens to all of us from time to time. It's that they are completely detached from reality.”

Do tell.

(I was wrong, too. A month before Bush announced the surge, I wrote that his sagging approval ratings would surely revive if only he would “make it clear that he is serious about victory” in Iraq and “will do whatever it takes to achieve it.” Two years later, Iraq is in vastly better shape, but Bush's approval numbers are even worse.)

“Think it possible you may be mistaken.” My resolution for 2009 is to keep Cromwell's reproach in mind with every column I write. I'm not planning to get anything wrong, but it's been known to happen. Caveat lector.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

Don't believe everything you read

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
December 28, 2008

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/838/dont-believe-everything-you-read


Friday, December 26, 2008

WILL PATRICK FITZGERALD INDICT RAHM EMMANUEL?

***************

HUGH HEWITT (HH): Let’s begin with the issue of the (BLOGOVICH) report. I hate to bring politics into a holiday, but it seems to me that the Obama camp’s release of the report yesterday was designed to assure that no one talked about it, so we’re going to. What do you make about its timing and what it says?

MARK STEYN (MS): Well basically, this is an attempt at self-exoneration. I mean, this is slightly absurd. I mean, no one would take this seriously if George W. Bush was issuing reports on what he knew about Iraqi WMD. People would be mocking it and hooting it with derision. I think clearly, releasing it on the 23rd of December is a way to ensure that it stays buried all the way until Hogmanay at least. And they will probably be successful at that. People are not yet ready to hear bad things about the President-elect. That’s both not just a partisan thing. I think that is the natural optimism of the American people in some way.

HH: Now Mark, I got an e-mail, actually a number of e-mails from assistant United States attorneys around the United States, and I posted one at Hughhewitt.com, where he kind of walks us through what the U.S. attorney’s office is doing in Chicago. And it’s not good for Rahm Emanuel. It’s not particularly bad for the President-elect, but it’s the sort of thing, he describes in detail, that Fitzgerald has done in the past to get Scooter Libby tied up in a web of misstatements, any one of which to a federal person is a violation of 18 USC 1001, the False Statements Act.

MS: Yeah.

HH: Do you think Fitzgerald’s playing for keeps here?

MS: Well, my respect for Patrick Fitzgerald has gone up, having seen him put away my friend, Conrad Black, who is spending the first of what could be six Christmases in jail in Florida on a very thin chain of circumstantial evidence that was nevertheless piled up relentlessly and very effectively by Patrick Fitzgerald and his assistant U.S. attorneys in the northern district of Illinois. I regarded him with contempt over the Scooter Libby thing, but one can regard people with contempt and still nevertheless be impressed by their effectiveness. And I think the difficulty for Rahm Emanuel is that it’s really in the interest of every party here to, if you like, set him up as the fall guy. And there will be…he risks approaching a tipping point whereby Obama decides it’s actually better to toss Rahm Emanuel to the wolves, and leap to the clear himself. That’s the difficulty.

HH: Now do you see us getting clear of this? This is a very complicated scandal with Blagojevich about to be indicted and impeached, and he’s not going to go gently into the night. We’ve got a Rahm Emanuel on tape, we’ve got other people on tape. We’ve got Chicago. This makes, actually, Whitewater look tame in comparison when Bill Clinton entered office, and I’m not sure that the President-elect is dealing with it very effectively by not telling us, for example, that he was interviewed by the U.S. attorney’s office for five days. I’m surprised that Mr. Transparency didn’t come clean with that.

MS: Well no, and I think it was clear that this was going on from the moment he gave his first press conference, where there was no outrage. The normal person, if you’ve been the Senator representing the people of Illinois for the last 20 minutes, or however long he was a Senator before he became president, and it emerged that your seat was effectively being auctioned to the guy who could do Governor and Mrs. Blagojevich most good, you would be outraged. And the lack of outrage is what Sherlock Holmes would call the dog that didn’t bark. And the minute he did that, he set himself up for all this, you know, what did Obama know, has he been interviewed. And it’s more dangerous than Whitewater, because it’s understandable. It’s vivid. There are these transcripts of the Governor using the F word every 1.8 nanoseconds. That’s vivid in a way that some obscure, rinky-dink, nickel and dime land scandal in Arkansas isn’t.

HH: First request for a prediction for ’09. Do you think we will still be talking about Blagojevich and the President-elect, now the president’s ties to him and his staff’s ties to him this time next year, Mark Steyn?

MS: Well, we could well be talking about it. The question is whether Obama’s messianic status enables him to waft free and soar above it. And although he’s been, since the election, he’s been downplaying all his sort of healing the planet and lowering the sea level stuff. I think the minute he starts to look like a grubby, little politician, like everyone else from the Chicago machine. It’s really in his interest to become the messiah again and start talking about healing the planet, and if you like, get several thousand feet above this very Earthbound scandal.

HUGH HEWITT INTEVIEWS MARK STEYN

ON HEWITT'S RADIO PROGRAM

TOWNHALL.COM

25 DECEMBER 2008


THE HOLY GOSPEL OF LUKE ACCORDING TO MARK STEYN

****************

"But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John."

If you're one of the increasing numbers of Britons who have "some problems with conventional organised religion" (as JK Rowling puts it), you've probably forgotten that bit from the Christmas story. It's Luke 1:13, part of what he'd have called the backstory, if he'd been a Hollywood screenwriter rather than a physician.

Only two of the gospels tell the story of Christ's birth. Mark plunges straight into the Son of God's grown-up life: he was writing for a Roman audience and, from their perspective, what's important is not where Jesus came from but what He did once He got going. But Matthew was writing for the Jews, and so he dwells on Jesus and His parents mainly to connect the King of the Jews with all that had gone before: he starts with a long family tree tracing Joseph's ancestry back to Abraham.

Like Mark, Luke was writing for a gentile crowd. But, like Matthew, he also dwelt on Jesus's birth and family. And he begins with the tale of two pregnancies: before Mary's virgin birth, he tells the story of her cousin Elisabeth: Zacharias is surprised to discover his impending fatherhood - "for I am an old man and my wife well stricken in years." Nonetheless, an aged, barren woman conceives and, in the sixth month of Elisabeth's pregnancy, the angel visits her cousin Mary and tells her that she, too, will conceive. If you read Luke, the virgin birth seems a logical extension of the earlier miracle - the pregnancy of an elderly lady. The physician-author had no difficulty accepting both. For Matthew, Jesus's birth is the miracle. Luke leaves you with the impression that all birth - all life - is to a degree miraculous and God-given.

There's a lot of that in the Old Testament, too, of course - going right back to Adam and Eve, and God's injunction to go forth and multiply. Or as Yip Harburg explained in his Biblical precis in Finian's Rainbow:

Then she looked at him
And he looked at her
And they knew immediately
What the world was fer
He said 'Give me my cane'
He said 'Give me my hat'
The time has come
To begin the Begat.

Confronted with all the begetting in the Old Testament, the modern mind says, "Well, naturally, these primitive societies were concerned with children. They needed someone to provide for them in their old age." In our advanced society, we don't have to worry about that; we automatically have someone to provide for us in our old age: the state. But the state - at least in its modern European welfare incarnation - needs children as least as much as those old-time Jews did. And the problem with the European state is that, like Elisabeth, it's barren.

Collectively barren, I hasten to add. Individually, it's made up of millions of fertile women, who voluntarily opt for no children at all or one designer kid at 39. In Italy, the home of the Church, the birthrate's down to 1.2 children per couple - or about half "replacement rate". You can't buck that kind of arithmetic.

Israel's doing the numbers, too. If it doesn't unload the "occupied territories" soon, Palestinians will do their sums, quit asking for their own state, and instead demand a one-man-one-vote arrangement for the state they're already in. Last week, in a speech on the country's demographic difficulties, Binyamin Netanyahu conceded: "We do have a demographic problem, but it is with the Arab Israelis."

"The day is not far off," replied Ahmad Tibi, an Arab member of the Knesset, "when Netanyahu and his cohorts will put up roadblocks at the entrances to Arab villages to tie Arab women's tubes and spray us with spermicide."

Mr Tibi is correct to this extent. The problem is not tying Arab tubes, but metaphorically untying Jewish tubes. It's remarkable that, having survived the Holocaust, the Jewish people should now be in danger of not surviving their survival of the Holocaust.

Demography is not necessarily destiny. Today's high Muslim birthrates will fall, and probably fall dramatically, as the Roman Catholic birthrates in Italy, Ireland and Quebec have. But demographics is a game of last man standing. It's no consolation that Muslim birthrates will start falling in 2050 if yours are off the cliff right now. The last people around in any numbers will determine the kind of society we live in.

You can sort of feel that happening already. "Multiculturalism" implicitly accepts that, for a person of broadly Christian heritage, Christianity is an accessory, an option; whereas, for a person of Muslim background, Islam is a given.

That's why, as practised by Buckinghamshire County Council, multiculturalism means All Saints Church can't put up one sheet of A4 paper announcing tomorrow night's carol service on the High Wycombe library notice board, but, inside the library, Rehana Nazir, the "multicultural services librarian", can host a party to celebrate Eid.

To those of us watching from afar the ructions over the European constitution - a 1970s solution to a 1940s problem - it seems amazing that no Continental politician is willing to get to grips with the real crisis facing Europe in the 21st century: the lack of Europeans. If America believes in the separation of church and state, in radically secularist Europe the state is the church, as Jacques Chirac's edict on headscarves, crucifixes and skull caps made plain. Alas, it's an insufficient faith.

By contrast, if Christianity is merely a "myth", it's a perfectly constructed one, beginning with the decision to establish Christ's divinity in the miracle of His birth. The obligation to have children may be a lot of repressive Catholic mumbo-jumbo, but it's also highly rational. What's irrational is modern EUtopia's indifference to new life.

I recently had a conversation with an EU official who, apropos a controversial proposal to tout the Continent's religious heritage in the new constitution, kept using the phrase "Europe's post-Christian future". The evidence suggests that, once you reach the post-Christian stage, you don't have much of a future. Luke, a man of faith and a man of science, could have told them that.

- Mark Steyn

from The Daily Telegraph, December 23rd 2003



YOU CAN'T PLEASE ALL THE PEOPLE ALL THE TIME

**************


CAN YOU HEAR the grumbling over in what Howard Dean used to call “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party?” The tolerance-and-diversity crowd is upset with Barack Obama; it seems the president-elect has been bringing people into his circle who don't agree with them on every single issue.



The consternation on the left began with the naming of Obama's national security team -- Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, Robert Gates to continue as secretary of defense, and retired four-star General James Jones as national security adviser. “Barack Obama's Kettle of Hawks,” they were promptly dubbed in the Guardian by the left-wing journalist Jeremy Scahill, “with a proven track record of support for the Iraq war [and] militaristic interventionism.” How could Obama possibly keep his campaign promise “to end the mindset that got us into war,” asked The Nation, when none of his top foreign policy/national security picks had opposed the war?

There was even more distress in progressive precincts after Obama's economic team was announced. Lawrence Summers, who will chair the National Economic Council, “opposed regulating the newfangled financial instruments that greased the way to the subprime meltdown,” wrote David Corn, the Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones magazine, in a column for the Washington Post. Obama's choice for Treasury secretary, New York Fed president Timothy Geithner, “helped oversee the financial system as it collapsed.” Both of them, lamented Corn, are close to Robert Rubin, “a director of bailed-out Citigroup and a poster boy for . . . Big Finance.” In the plaintive title of Corn’s essay, “This Wasn’t Quite the Change We Pictured.”

Add to those the passel of former Clinton operatives who have returned to play key roles in the Obama transition, including Rahm Emanuel, John Podesta, and Greg Craig, and Obama Girl herself could be forgiven for feeling disillusioned. Whatever happened to the fresh, progressive candidate who promised an escape from Clinton-era Democratic politics?

As if all that weren't enough to give a fervent liberal agita, Obama has asked the Rev. Rick Warren, the evangelical pastor of Saddleback Church, to deliver the invocation at his inauguration. From many on the left, where Warren's staunch opposition to same-sex marriage is reason enough to loathe him, responses have ranged from dismay to fury. Barney Frank labeled the pastor's views “very offensive” and pronounced himself “very disappointed” that Obama would invite him. The blog Liberal Rapture was more pungent: “Obama throws another middle finger to liberals.”

A few reflections:

1. It's never advisable to fall in love with a politician; sooner or later, you're bound to feel betrayed. While Obama's true believers may be feeling jilted, can they really claim he gave them no warning? After all, once he nailed down the Democratic nomination in June, Obama began backing away from one liberal stance after another: on banning handguns, on NAFTA, on Iran, on warrantless wiretapping, on public financing of the presidential campaign, on the death penalty for child rape -- even, eventually, on the desirability of swiftly withdrawing US troops from Iraq. He was not the candidate of left-wing ideological purity: Could he have put it any more clearly?

2. Actually, he did put it more clearly. He ran explicitly against believing “that we're doomed to fight the same tired partisan battles over and over again” and in favor of changing America into “a country that no longer sees itself as a collection of Red States and Blue States.” However one-sided his voting record in Illinois and the US Senate, he pledged something different if he were elected president. For now, at least, he's making good on his pledge.

3. Still, Obama is hardly in danger of turning into anything resembling a right-winger. With his trillion-dollar “stimulus” proposal, he is inviting comparisons to FDR. And with committed liberals like Tom Daschle as Health and Human Services secretary, Carol Browner as energy czar, and Eric Holder as attorney general, the Obama administration is never going to be accused of harboring Republican tendencies.

4. Most Americans are not explicitly ideological, and most, so far, think very highly of Obama. According to Gallup, 67 percent of the public is confident of his ability to be a good president; 71 percent view him favorably. OK, so Barney Frank and The Nation are complaining about him. There are worse fates.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

Obama and the peeved progressives

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
December 24, 2008

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/797/obama-and-the-peeved-progressives

BE BETTER THAN A BAG BOY, IF YOU CAN

BETTER THAN THE SUPER BOWL

******************


Gainesville State players douse head coach Mark Williams in celebration.

They played the oddest game in high school football history last month down in Grapevine, Texas.

It was Grapevine Faith vs. Gainesville State School and everything about it was upside down. For instance, when Gainesville came out to take the field, the Faith fans made a 40-yard spirit line for them to run through.

Did you hear that? The other team's fans?

They even made a banner for players to crash through at the end. It said, "Go Tornadoes!" Which is also weird, because Faith is the Lions.

"I WOULDN'T EXPECT ANOTHER PARENT TO TELL SOMEBODY TO HIT THEIR KIDS. BUT THEY WANTED US TO!"

It was rivers running uphill and cats petting dogs. More than 200 Faith fans sat on the Gainesville side and kept cheering the Gainesville players on—by name.

"I never in my life thought I'd hear people cheering for us to hit their kids," recalls Gainesville's QB and middle linebacker, Isaiah. "I wouldn't expect another parent to tell somebody to hit their kids. But they wanted us to!"

And even though Faith walloped them 33-14, the Gainesville kids were so happy that after the game they gave head coach Mark Williams a sideline squirt-bottle shower like he'd just won state. Gotta be the first Gatorade bath in history for an 0-9 coach.

But then you saw the 12 uniformed officers escorting the 14 Gainesville players off the field and two and two started to make four. They lined the players up in groups of five—handcuffs ready in their back pockets—and marched them to the team bus. That's because Gainesville is a maximum-security correctional facility 75 miles north of Dallas. Every game it plays is on the road.

This all started when Faith's head coach, Kris Hogan, wanted to do something kind for the Gainesville team. Faith had never played Gainesville, but he already knew the score. After all, Faith was 7-2 going into the game, Gainesville 0-8 with 2 TDs all year. Faith has 70 kids, 11 coaches, the latest equipment and involved parents. Gainesville has a lot of kids with convictions for drugs, assault and robbery—many of whose families had disowned them—wearing seven-year-old shoulder pads and ancient helmets.

So Hogan had this idea. What if half of our fans—for one night only—cheered for the other team? He sent out an email asking the Faithful to do just that. "Here's the message I want you to send:" Hogan wrote. "You are just as valuable as any other person on planet Earth."

Some people were naturally confused. One Faith player walked into Hogan's office and asked, "Coach, why are we doing this?"

And Hogan said, "Imagine if you didn't have a home life. Imagine if everybody had pretty much given up on you. Now imagine what it would mean for hundreds of people to suddenly believe in you."

Next thing you know, the Gainesville Tornadoes were turning around on their bench to see something they never had before. Hundreds of fans. And actual cheerleaders!

"I thought maybe they were confused," said Alex, a Gainesville lineman (only first names are released by the prison). "They started yelling 'DEE-fense!' when their team had the ball. I said, 'What? Why they cheerin' for us?'"

It was a strange experience for boys who most people cross the street to avoid. "We can tell people are a little afraid of us when we come to the games," says Gerald, a lineman who will wind up doing more than three years. "You can see it in their eyes. They're lookin' at us like we're criminals. But these people, they were yellin' for us! By our names!"

Maybe it figures that Gainesville played better than it had all season, scoring the game's last two touchdowns. Of course, this might be because Hogan put his third-string nose guard at safety and his third-string cornerback at defensive end. Still.

After the game, both teams gathered in the middle of the field to pray and that's when Isaiah surprised everybody by asking to lead. "We had no idea what the kid was going to say," remembers Coach Hogan. But Isaiah said this: "Lord, I don't know how this happened, so I don't know how to say thank You, but I never would've known there was so many people in the world that cared about us."

And it was a good thing everybody's heads were bowed because they might've seen Hogan wiping away tears.

As the Tornadoes walked back to their bus under guard, they each were handed a bag for the ride home—a burger, some fries, a soda, some candy, a Bible and an encouraging letter from a Faith player.

The Gainesville coach saw Hogan, grabbed him hard by the shoulders and said, "You'll never know what your people did for these kids tonight. You'll never, ever know."

And as the bus pulled away, all the Gainesville players crammed to one side and pressed their hands to the window, staring at these people they'd never met before, watching their waves and smiles disappearing into the night.

Anyway, with the economy six feet under and Christmas running on about three and a half reindeer, it's nice to know that one of the best presents you can give is still absolutely free.

Hope.

by Rick Reilly
CSPAN The Magazine

HERE IS THE TRUE STOREY

**********************




"The constitution of the United States is to receive a reasonable interpretation of its language, and its powers, keeping in view the objects and purposes, for which those powers were conferred. By a reasonable interpretation, we mean, that in case the words are susceptible of two different senses, the one strict, the other more enlarged, that should be adopted, which is most consonant with the apparent objects and intent of the Constitution."

--Justice Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833

"Christianity becomes not merely an auxiliary, but a guide, to the law of nature; establishing its conclusions, removing its doubts, and evaluating its precepts." Joseph Story, "The Value and Importance of Legal Studies," a lecture delivered August 25, 1829 at his inauguration as Dane Professor of Law in Harvard University, cited in James McClellan, Joseph Story and the American Constitution (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma, 1971), p. 66. Story served as Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1811-1845, and founded the Harvard Law School.

"My own private judgment has long been (and every day's experience more and more confirms me in it) that government cannot long exist without an alliance with Religion to some extent, and that Christianity is indispensable to the true interests and solid foundation of all governments. . . . I know not, indeed, how any deep sense of moral obligation or accountableness can be expected to prevail in the community without a firm foundation of the great Christian truths." Joseph Story, in a letter to Jasper Adams, May 14, 1833, in JSAC, p. 139.

“The real object of the (First) Amendment was not to countenance, much less advance, Mahometanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Chrisianity; but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects (denominations).” Original Intent, by David Barton, ch. 2, p. 31, Wallbuilder Press, Aledo, TX,
1996; Commentaries, Story, Vol. III, p. 728, 1871

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

CHRIST IS BORN TO US THIS NIGHT

********************

6 And it came to pass, that when they were there, her days were accomplished, that she should be delivered. 7 And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him up in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn. 8 And there were in the same country shepherds watching, and keeping the night watches over their flock. 9 And behold an angel of the Lord stood by them, and the brightness of God shone round about them; and they feared with a great fear. 10 And the angel said to them: Fear not; for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, that shall be to all the people:

11 For, this day, is born to you a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord, in the city of David. 12 And this shall be a sign unto you. You shall find the infant wrapped in swaddling clothes, and laid in a manger. 13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly army, praising God, and saying: 14 Glory to God in the highest; and on earth peace to men of good will. 15 And it came to pass, after the angels departed from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another: Let us go over to Bethlehem, and let us see this word that is come to pass, which the Lord hath showed to us.

16 And they came with haste; and they found Mary and Joseph, and the infant lying in the manger. 17 And seeing, they understood of the word that had been spoken to them concerning this child. 18 And all that heard, wondered; and at those things that were told them by the shepherds. 19 But Mary kept all these words, pondering them in her heart. 20 And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God, for all the things they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.

21 And after eight days were accomplished, that the child should be circumcised, his name was called JESUS, which was called by the angel, before he was conceived in the womb. 22 And after the days of her purification, according to the law of Moses, were accomplished, they carried him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord: 23 As it is written in the law of the Lord: Every male opening the womb shall be called holy to the Lord: 24 And to offer a sacrifice, according as it is written in the law of the Lord, a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons: 25 And behold there was a man in Jerusalem named Simeon, and this man was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel; and the Holy Ghost was in him.

26 And he had received an answer from the Holy Ghost, that he should not see death, before he had seen the Christ of the Lord. 27 And he came by the Spirit into the temple. And when his parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him according to the custom of the law, 28 He also took him into his arms, and blessed God, and said: 29 Now thou dost dismiss thy servant, O Lord, according to thy word in peace; 30 Because my eyes have seen thy salvation,

31 Which thou hast prepared before the face of all peoples: 32 A light to the revelation of the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel. 33 And his father and mother were wondering at those things which were spoken concerning him. 34 And Simeon blessed them, and said to Mary his mother: Behold this child is set for the fall, and for the resurrection of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be contradicted; 35 And thy own soul a sword shall pierce, that, out of many hearts, thoughts may be revealed.

36 And there was one Anna, a prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Aser; she was far advanced in years, and had lived with her husband seven years from her virginity. 37 And she was a widow until fourscore and four years; who departed not from the temple, by fastings and prayers serving night and day. 38 Now she, at the same hour, coming in, confessed to the Lord; and spoke of him to all that looked for the redemption of Israel. 39 And after they had performed all things according to the law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their city Nazareth. 40 And the child grew, and waxed strong, full of wisdom; and the grace of God was in him.

THE HOLY GOSPEL ACCORDING TO SAINT LUKE

Chapter One






KWESTIONS ABOUT KWANZAA

******************

This year, I believe my triumph over this synthetic holiday is nearly complete. The only mentions of Kwanzaa I've seen are humorous ones. Most important, for the first time in eight years, President George Bush appears not to have issued "Kwanzaa greetings" to honor this phony non-Christian holiday that is younger than I am.

It is a fact that Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 by a black radical FBI stooge, Ron Karenga, aka Dr. Maulana Karenga. Karenga was a founder of United Slaves, a violent nationalist rival to the Black Panthers and a dupe of the FBI.

In what was probably ultimately a foolish gamble, during the madness of the '60s the FBI encouraged the most extreme black nationalist organizations in order to discredit and split the left. The more preposterous the organization, the better. Using that criterion, Karenga's United Slaves was perfect. In the annals of the American '60s, Karenga was the Father Gapon, stooge of the czarist police.

Despite modern perceptions that blend all the black activists of the '60s, the Black Panthers did not hate whites. They did not seek armed revolution. Those were the precepts of Karenga's United Slaves. United Slaves were proto-fascists, walking around in dashikis, gunning down Black Panthers and adopting invented "African" names. (That was a big help to the black community: How many boys named "Jamal" currently sit on death row?)

Whether Karenga was a willing dupe, or just a dupe, remains unclear. Curiously, in a 1995 interview with Ethnic NewsWatch, Karenga matter-of-factly explained that the forces out to get O.J. Simpson for the "framed" murder of two whites included: "the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, Interpol, the Chicago Police Department" and so on. Karenga should know about FBI infiltration. (He further noted that the evidence against O.J. "was not strong enough to prohibit or eliminate unreasonable doubt" -- an interesting standard of proof.)

In the category of the-gentleman-doth-protest-too-much, back in the '70s, Karenga was quick to criticize rumors that black radicals were government-supported. When Nigerian newspapers claimed that some American black radicals were CIA operatives, Karenga publicly denounced the idea, saying, "Africans must stop generalizing about the loyalties and motives of Afro-Americans, including the widespread suspicion of black Americans being CIA agents."

Now we know that the FBI fueled the bloody rivalry between the Panthers and United Slaves. In one barbarous outburst, Karenga's United Slaves shot to death Black Panthers Al "Bunchy" Carter and Deputy Minister John Huggins on the UCLA campus. Karenga himself served time, a useful stepping-stone for his current position as a black studies professor at California State University at Long Beach.

(Sing to "Jingle Bells")

Kwanzaa bells, dashikis sell

Whitey has to pay;

Burning, shooting, oh what fun

On this made-up holiday!

Kwanzaa itself is a nutty blend of schmaltzy '60s rhetoric, black racism and Marxism. Indeed, the seven "principles" of Kwanzaa praise collectivism in every possible arena of life -- economics, work, personality, even litter removal. ("Kuumba: Everyone should strive to improve the community and make it more beautiful.") It takes a village to raise a police snitch.

When Karenga was asked to distinguish Kawaida, the philosophy underlying Kwanzaa, from "classical Marxism," he essentially explained that under Kawaida, we also hate whites. While taking the "best of early Chinese and Cuban socialism" -- which one assumes would exclude the forced abortions, imprisonment of homosexuals and forced labor -- Kawaida practitioners believe one's racial identity "determines life conditions, life chances and self-understanding." There's an inclusive philosophy for you.

Coincidentally, the seven principles of Kwanzaa are the very same seven principles of the Symbionese Liberation Army, another charming invention of the Worst Generation. In 1974, Patricia Hearst, kidnap victim-cum-SLA revolutionary, posed next to the banner of her alleged captors, a seven-headed cobra. Each snake head stood for one of the SLA's revolutionary principles: Umoja, Kujichagulia, Ujima, Ujamaa, Nia, Kuumba and Imani -- the exact same seven "principles" of Kwanzaa.

Kwanzaa was the result of a '60s psychosis grafted onto the black community. Liberals have become so mesmerized by multicultural nonsense that they have forgotten the real history of Kwanzaa and Karenga's United Slaves -- the violence, the Marxism, the insanity. Most absurdly, for leftists anyway, is that they have forgotten the FBI's tacit encouragement of this murderous black nationalist cult founded by the father of Kwanzaa.

This is a holiday for white liberals -- the kind of holiday Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn probably celebrate. Meanwhile, most blacks celebrate Christmas.

Kwanzaa liberates no one; Christianity liberates everyone, proclaiming that we are all equal before God. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). Not surprisingly, it was practitioners of that faith who were at the forefront of the abolitionist and civil rights movements.

Next year this time, we'll find out if our new "Halfrican" president is really black or just another white liberal. If he's black enough to say the "brothers should pull up their pants," surely Obama can just say no to Kwanzaa.

- Ann Coulter
Legal Affairs Correspondent for HUMAN EVENTS and author of "High Crimes and Misdemeanors," "Slander," ""How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)," "Godless," and most recently, "If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans."

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

A NATURAL BORN CITIZEN HE IS NOT

*********************

The following report is the culmination of over four months of intensive, empirical research whose sole purpose has been to determine if the images and photographs posted on the Internet are true reproductions of a genuine document purported to be Obama's original birth certificate. The idea for the research actually began from the time when the first image was posted on June 12 to the Daily Kos blog. I don't recall on which website I actually saw the story (most likely World Net Daily), but the news had gone viral basically from the moment that it hit the Internet.

Before seeing the image, I had no idea that Barack Obama's birthplace was in question, or that his status as a natural-born US citizen had never been proven. Like millions of other Americans, I believed the story he told about being born in Hawaii to an American Mother (and a U.S. citizen) and an African Father (a Kenyan national attending college on a student visa). I had no idea that this issue would mushroom and take on a life of its own. What I did know, however, was that from the first time I saw the Daily Kos image, or what I now call, "Obama's bogus birth certificate," that something was just not right about it. As someone who has scanned hundreds of thousands of documents in his lifetime, I had a hard time accepting that this was an original scan image made from an original paper document. As Fate would have it, right then, on June 13, I was looking at the conclusive evidence that the text on this image had been graphically altered, or "manufactured," as my first blog post would claim.

From that point onward, I had no inkling of what was to come. I had no idea that I would wind up being the only person on the Planet (at that time) to have spotted the anomalies that I knew were the by-products of intentional, graphic alteration, and to go on record as stating that the Daily Kos image was a fake. I was also not prepared for what came along with this knowledge, for what I had to endure for making it public. Basically, I had painted a big bullseye on my chest and my research findings, and the critics were now coming out of the virtual woodwork taking shots at me personally, and my research, secondly. I had started a new online game called, "Let's pile on Polarik," and every little error I made was magnified into a major transgression. Yet, the crux of my contention was never successfully refuted.

Now, if I had to do it all over again, I probably would not have done it at all, knowing that I'd be spending the next four months conducting further research and compiling evidence on not just the Certificate of Live Birth (COLB) image, but also the digital photographs that were to follow two months later. The personal costs to me were enormous, and I will not elucidate on them (but for those who know me, they also know what were those costs). What began as sort of a curiosity turned into my personal quest for the "Holy Grail," so to speak. I was guided only by the need to uncover the truth, and by the constant harassment by my critics. Had they left me alone from the beginning, I probably would not be writing this report today.

I debated, long and hard, about the title of my report. Aside from it being catchy, I ran the danger of being lumped into a group of false conspiracy theorists, and brushed aside as an idiot wearing a "tinfoil hat." (Actually, that's already happened, many times over). Perhaps there are a lot of false conspiracies, including some really outlandish ones, but there would not be laws on the books, both at a state level and a federal level, that specifically mention the act of conspiracy when the purpose of that conspiracy is to either engage in illegal activity, engage in a cover-up of that illegal activity, or interfering with the investigation of that illegal activity. Conspiracy can involve all of these. Yet, somehow, the word, "Conspiracy," has become a pejorative for "nutty theories from the fringe," as if there has never been a real "conspiracy."

Do you remember, or ever hear about, the "Watergate Conspiracy?" Do you remember, or ever hear about, what happened to President Richard Nixon as a result?

I would tell all of you who think that "conspiracies" are a joke and that the people who claim to have found them are "idiots wearing tinfoil hats," to just ask an FBI agent what he or she thinks about "conspiracy." Or, go ahead and ask a federal judge what he or she thinks about "conspiracy."

"Conspiracy" is no laughing matter, ladies and gentlemen, and neither is "document fraud," as in creating and passing a counterfeit birth certificate.

I should now alert you to the fact that I have been using the phrase, "Bogus birth certificate," as a euphemism for "Counterfeit birth certificate," which is defined as, "A copy or imitation of a state-issued birth certificate that is intended to be taken as authentic and genuine in order to deceive another."

Sound familiar? According to Authenticate-360:

Birth certificates are generally used as “breeder” documents to gain other identity documents and to perpetuate fraud. But unlike Social Security cards, birth certificates are issued by hundreds, if not thousands, of entities, with little regard to consistency or security. An accurately forged birth certificate is a dangerous document, allowing the bearer significant access to everything from driver’s licenses to passports...The increasing availability and affordability of high-quality digital scanners and copiers is a constant threat to the authenticity of government issued documents.

There are current Federal laws in place that prohibit the use of false identity documents, such as a birth certificate, and they are spelled out in Chapter 18 of the United States Code, Section 1028, Fraud and related activity in connection with identification documents, authentication features, and information. In particular, there are specific paragraphs that relate to the use of a false identification document:

The term "false identification document" means a document of a type intended or commonly accepted for the purposes of identification of individuals that - (A) is not issued by or under the authority of a governmental entity or was issued under the authority of a governmental entity but was subsequently altered for purposes of deceit; and(B) appears to be issued by or under the authority of the United States Government, a State, a political subdivision of a State, a foreign government, a political subdivision of a foreign government, or an international governmental or quasi-governmental organization.

What you are about to read in this report are well-documented facts arising from evidence collected over a period of four months and subjected to intense scrutiny and empirical evaluation. Given the overriding fact that the individual whose identity document is in question, has repeatedly failed to provide a genuine identity document, the charge that this individual, along with other individuals, did conspire to proffer in its place, a false identification document, is hereby levied by the American people, by way of one of its citizens. To summarize the seriousness of these actions and this charge, and to the importance of what is contained within this report:

There is conclusive and irrefutable evidence that the COLB image created and distributed by Obama's campaign to the Daily Kos, Annenberg's Factcheck, and the St. Pete Times, Politifact, is, unquestionably, a false identification document. Furthermore, there is conclusive and irrefutable evidence that the photos taken by Annenberg's Factcheck, in collusion with the Obama campaign, are themselves, false identification documents, having been made from the same false identification document image, as well as from additional false identification documents created for the same purpose; namely, to proffer these false identification documents as true reproductions of a genuine, Hawaii-issued and certified, "Certification of Live Birth" document, and thereby, intentionally deceive the American public into believing that Barack Hussein Obama is a natural-born citizen of the United States, and thereby, fully qualified to become their President.

I never imagined that my studies would amount to this. I thought, like most Americans, that maybe the information was accurate even though the document image was fake. I thought, like most Americans, that Obama would simply present a copy of his real, original birth certificate, and that would be that. Yet, here we are, more than twenty months after Obama announced his candidacy for the Presidency, and nearly three weeks after the election, and Obama still refuses to show his real birth certificate!

Sadly, mainstream media have totally ignored this inconvenient truth and are not even been willing to even look at this birth certificate issue. They are all still in-the-tank with Obama, but even more so now that he is in line to be President. They all bought into the lies and fraudulent documents proffered up as evidence on Obama's qualifications. They have been too quick to label as "trash" or "garbage" any legitimate questions asked about Obama's real birth certificate. Even thigh-ranking governmental officials in the state of Hawaii where Obama was allegedly born, won't reveal what's on Obama's original birth certificate. All they have said is that they have it. They have not said (1) where Obama was born. (2) when Obama was born, or (30 even to whom Obama was born.

The answer to "What's on Barack Obama's real, original birth certificate" ranks right up there with some of the great mysteries of our time -- and that is really hard to swallow. That a man, with a dubious background, has been elected to the highest office of the greatest superpower in the world without ever having to prove who he says he is! That is not "nutty," that's just plain insane!

With all that said, and without further ado, I present to you my final and complete report on Barack Obama's bogus birth certificate, The Born Conspiracy.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Since the beginning of Barack Hussein Obama’s Presidential campaign on February 11, 2007, there had been numerous rumors regarding Obama’s citizenship status. Several reporters had asked for a copy of Obama’s birth certificate, however, all requests were subsequently denied.

On or about June 12, 2008, the Daily Kos blog, a pro-Obama website, received an image from the Obama Campaign that they claimed was a scanned copy of Obama’s “original birth certificate,”. Before this document image was cropped to 2427 x 2369 pixels, it measured 2550 x 3300 pixels, or 8 1/2” x 11” when printed.

Also, on or about June 12, 2008, the Obama Campaign posted a smaller copy of the same cropped image, measuring 1000 x 1024 pixels:

“You may have recently heard right-wing smears questioning Barack Obama's birth certificate and citizenship. These assertions are completely false and designed to play into the worst kind of stereotypes. You can see Barack Obama's birth certificate for yourself and help push back with the truth...”

The very next day, which was on or about June 13, 2008, Obama’s Campaign replaced the first document image they posted with a smaller copy which they posted to a new website, “Fight The Smears” (fightthesmears.com). The smaller image was disproportionately reduced to 585 x 575 pixels, which was almost half the size of the original posted image, and one-third of its quality.

Also, on or about June 13, Politifact.org, a supposedly nonpartisan, fact checking website that is unquestionably pro-Obama, published a copy of the same image as that posted on the Daily Kos, but was also disproportionately reduced it to 811 x 786 pixels, or 1/3 of its size and 1/6 of its image quality.

On or about June 16, 2008, Factcheck.org, a pro-Obama fact checking website ,posted a full-sized image copy of same document image that appeared on the Daily Kos. Factcheck’s image copy was identical to the Daily Kos image copy before that image was cropped. Factcheck.org is owned by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania; a center run by Obama supporters and funded by the Annenberg Public Policy Center.

Factcheck.org made the following statement to explain how they received their image copy:

"Bloggers raised questions based on the absence of evidence, specifically the lack of a publicly available copy of a birth certificate and the supposed secrecy surrounding it". According to FactCheck, Tommy Vietor at the Obama campaign sent a message to them and "other reporters" saying, "I know there have been some rumors spreading about Obama’s citizenship, so I wanted to make sure you all had a copy of his birth certificate."

I first noticed that the image posted to the Daily Kos and purported to be the “original birth certificate” of Barack H. Obama, did not look like a regular birth certificate. This image was made only from the front side of a COLB: no copy of the reverse side of this COLB has ever been made, :birth certificate” document was ever scanned, a side that contains all of the official certification instruments, such as the official Hawaiian Seal, State Registrar’s signature, and date stamp of when the document was printed.


To validate my findings that the text in this COLB document image was the result of graphic alternations, and not a result of any printer or scanner artifacts, I made over 700 test scans and images using an actual paper COLB and different scanners that were subjected to different combinations of scanning and image parameters. I was finally able to replicate the Kos image so closely that other image experts thought it was the same Kos image, and not my “clone.”

From this date forward, when I first discovered the evidence of tampering, and regardless of the unfamiliar format of the COLB and the questionable information it contained, I collected a great deal of additional evidence, that the scanned image alleged to be a true copy of Obama’s original COLB was forged, and that this altered image of an official state-issued document is nothing less than a false identification document as defined by Chapter 18, Section 1028 of the United States Code.

All of my findings pertaining to a single source image and the four copies made from of it that are still posted on the four (4) websites, DAILYKOS.COM, FIGHTTHESMEARS.COM, FACTCHECK.ORG, and POLITIFACT.COM, as referred to and described above, are outlined in my Final Report

On August 21, slightly more than two months after the publication of the image on the Daily Kos and Obama's website, Factcheck published their story about nine photos they claimed were allegedly taken of Obama's "real" COLB at his campaign headquarters – the same COLB used to make the document image they posted on June 16.

There was no longer any question in my mind that the COLB image Factcheck posted is a forgery and that Obama's real COLB, as proffered by Factcheck, is a nonexistent document. However, Factcheck created a conundrum for me: if the image Factcheck posted is a forgery of a nonexistent document image, then how can any genuine photos be made of it? The answer had to be that both the image and the photos were forgeries.

I have thoroughly examined the photographs that FactCheck published, and have subsequently found clear and irrefutable evidence of tampering with both the alleged COLB objects photographed and with the photos themselves. One of those COLB objects was, in fact, a printout of a forged document image with the Seal superimposed onto it for the final pictures.

FactCheck’s photos reveal both the absence of known, relevant features found on genuine COLBs along with the presence of illogical and impossible features that would never be found on a real 2007 COLB. Specifically, on the COLB objects photographed, the security border closely matches the border found on a real 2007 COLB. However, both the embossed Seal and the State Registrar’s Signature stamp do not match the same elements found on a real 2007 COLB, but perfectly match those found on a real 2008 COLB; or, in other words, something that would never happen in real life.

Hawaii made three important changes to their COLBs from 2007 to 2008, including the use of a larger certificate layout, a new security border, and, much to the chagrin of Factcheck and the Obama Campaign, a new Seal and Signature stamp that can now be stamped on a COLB by a machine.

With my experience and specialization in document imaging, my findings are conclusive and irrefutable that the COLB images posted by Obama to his campaign website, fightthesmears.com, to the dailykos.com, a pro-Obama blog, to FactCheck.org, a pro-Obama political research group, and to Politifact.org, are, in fact, image forgeries with the intent to defraud the American People into believing that these images were digitally scanned from Obama’s genuine, “original” birth certificate.

With my experience and specialization in photography and digital imaging, my findings are conclusive and irrefutable that the COLB photographs posted by FactCheck.org, a pro-Obama political research group, and to Politifact.org, are, in fact, photographic forgeries with the intent to defraud the American People into believing that these digital photographs were taken of Obama’s genuine, “original” birth certificate.

Obama's 'Born' Conspiracy
Forged images, phony photos, and felony fraud
By Ron Polarik, PhD

AUTHOR'S NOTE: If you have any problems viewing this report, copies of it are also posted at: The Free Republic, Obama Crimes, and Obama's Bogus Birth Certificate (which also has my rebuttal to Neal Krawetz, someone who fraudulently claims to have "debunked" this report -- but who never read it!

HOW ABOUT A BAILOUT FOR SUBPRIME EDUCATION

********************

Over at Tina Brown's Daily Beast, Zac Bissonnette, a sophomore at UMass Amherst, explains "Why College Is A Waste Of Money":

"Government figures show that of students who entered four-year colleges in 1997, just 54% had earned a degree six years later. A professor wrote about this issue in The Atlantic earlier this year, arguing that it’s immoral to tell all students they can go to college, then crush their dreams by failing half of them. But the problem has deeper effects than hurt feelings: the 54% graduation rate means that around 46% of all money used to finance college tuition results in no degree.

Which means that financially speaking, the spectacularly high dropout rate boils down to a spectacularly bad investment. Though there’s no specific data, one can imagine the countless millions that are wasted financing educations that never come to fruition... There are plenty of four-year colleges willing to take the money of anyone who can pony up — whether that money comes from parents, the government, or that student's paychecks until he’s old enough to buy a discounted movie ticket. These colleges have seats to fill and bills to pay, and sure, they'd all love to be Harvard, but they'll take what they can get. And student lenders? They have absolutely no incentive to encourage responsible borrowing because they will get paid back — you can file for bankruptcy 400 times, and your student loans will still be there, with interest and penalties accruing daily.

The people financing these college investments — parents and taxpayers — have a right to demand that 46% of their money* isn't sunk into the education of a student who drops out after a few semesters."

In droning the mantra that every kid should have the right to a college education, we're doing the opposite of what we ought to be doing — which is telescoping education into a much shorter period. It's taken for granted that our bodies mature much earlier than our great-grandparents so we all need access to condoms and abortion by Fifth Grade, but apparently our minds need longer than ever, and in some cases until early middle age. So we enter adolescence much sooner and leave it a decade or more later.

Right now, to put my demography hat on, the western world has a possibly terminal shortage of children. One reason it does is because the fellows on whom society traditionally depends for child-rearing — young adults — are staying in school until their mid-twenties and embarking on grown-up life ever later, if at all. Thirty per cent of German women are childless; among university graduates, it's 40 per cent. The pursuit of a 100 per cent college-educated populace is a recipe for societal suicide.

And, in America, so-called "expanding opportunities for college" is an obvious crock to absolve high schools of their failure to educate. It would be nice to think there are persons of influence rethinking this racket. Instead, the political class is committed to getting that 46 per cent drop-out rate up to 55 or 60.

- Mark Steyn
The Corner
THE NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE
22 December 2008

Monday, December 22, 2008

A TWO-MONTH TAX HOLIDAY WOULD BE A GREAT CHRISTMAS PRESENT

**************

During last week's battle over a federal rescue for Detroit's automakers -- after a deal had passed the House but before it collapsed in the Senate -- the Gallup Organization summarized its latest findings:

Bailouts Aren't Increasing Consumer Confidence.”

To put it mildly. More than 60 percent of Americans now rate the economy “poor”; a whopping 82 percent expect economic conditions to get even worse. “Americans seem to be suffering from so-called ‘bailout fatigue,’” Gallup observed, “opposing not only the auto bailout, but also the original $700 billion financial-institutions bailout. . . .What has been happening in Washington, D.C., has seemed to do little to boost consumer confidence and may be doing just the opposite.”

9didvsrnvkie3cccxtuh0w

It’s no wonder Americans are dispirited. For months they’ve watched the Bush administration, congressional Democrats, and the Federal Reserve fling hundreds of billions of dollars at this economic crisis. Yet the more Washington has spent, the worse the crisis has grown.

Unemployment is at a 26-year high. Stocks are in the dumper. Sales are tumbling. Retirement funds are bleeding. The deepest recession since World War II is underway, and Washington seems to think that the way to make things better is to keep pumping out staggering amounts of money it doesn’t have for the relief of powerful corporations like Citicorp, AIG, JP Morgan Chase, and Fannie Mae.

No one actually knows how much all these “bailouts” will eventually add up to, but Bloomberg calculated recently that Americans are on the hook for as much as $7.7 trillion. Other estimates go even higher. The investment website Fool.com puts the total amount pledged -- “the combined total of existing and announced outlays from the Federal Reserve and from US government agencies that are directly attributable to the financial crisis” -- at nearly $8.6 trillion.

This is spending on a gargantuan scale, far and away the largest outlay in US history. Granted, some of it is for loan guarantees that may never be needed. But there is also no guarantee that these mammoth commitments will do anything to revivify the financial markets. They haven’t yet and show no sign of doing so anytime soon. So, yes, Americans should be dismayed. The government’s bailout-and-stimulus frenzy is driving the national debt to stratospheric levels -- remember, this is all borrowed money -- while doing little to invigorate the economy.

US Representative Louie Gohmert has a better idea. The third-term Texas Republican proposes to strip Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson of his authority to spend the $350 billion remaining in the $700 billion bailout fund Congress created in October. Instead of being doled out to well-connected banks and Wall Street investment firms, the money would be used to finance a two-month federal tax holiday for every American taxpayer.

U.S. Representative to speak at SFA graduation

US Rep. Louie Gohmert

Each month, Americans pay about $101 billion in personal income taxes, plus $66 billion in Social Security and Medicare withholding. So a two-month reprieve from these taxes would actually cost less than the $350 billion left in Paulson’s bailout pot, Gohmert points out, “but it would provide significantly more relief to taxpayers as well as a greater economic boost.” Giving Americans two months off from paying federal income and payroll taxes would prove a far more potent “stimulus” than any plan dreamed up by Treasury aides and Capitol Hill bureaucrats. Anything a few hundred Washington operatives can do with that bailout money, 150 million American workers and entrepreneurs can do better, faster, and smarter.

“Imagine,” says former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who backs the Gohmert proposal, “how many people could pay down some of their debt, how many will be able to rebuild some of their retirement funds, how many . . . might start a new business or expand their existing business.” And all without the need for bureaucratic oversight or centralized control.

Granted, a two-month tax holiday isn’t ideal. The best economic medicine right now -- the best way to stimulate new spending, investment, and saving -- would be a permanent reduction in marginal tax rates. Once upon a time, this would have been the natural Democratic prescription; as President Kennedy explained in 1962, “the most direct and significant kind of federal action aiding economic growth” is to “reduce the burden on private income and the deterrents to private initiative which are imposed by our present tax system.”

Alas, the politics of the Democratic party have changed since then. Gohmert understands that a Democratic-controlled Congress isn’t going to enact long-term tax relief, so he isn’t pushing for it. But those bailout funds have already been legislated; the only question now is how they should be spent. Would we be better off plowing the money into new corporate welfare for mortgage lenders and insurance giants? Or leaving it in the hands of the men and women who earned it, to be used as they deem best?

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

BETTER THAN A BAILOUT

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Sunday, December 14, 2008

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/12/14/better_than_a_bailout/


THE VATICAN OBELISK IS A SUNDIAL POINTING TO CHRISTMAS

*************

Pope_benedict_xvi_4



"With Christmas near at hand we are invited to fix our gaze upon the ineffable mystery that Mary carried within her virginal womb for nine months:

the mystery of God made human.

This is the first cardinal point of redemption.

The second is the death and resurrection of Jesus

and these two inseparable points reveal a single divine plan:

to save humanity and its history,

taking them up entirely by completely taking on all the evils that oppress them".

"This mystery of salvation also has a historical dimension, a cosmic dimension:

Christ is the sun of grace who with His light: 'transfigures and ignites the universe that awaits Him.

The very placement of Christmas is tied to the winter solstice,

when the days in the Northern hemisphere start to become longer.

Regarding this, perhaps not everyone knows that St. Peter's Square is also a meridian:

the great obelisk projects its shadow along a line that runs along the pavement toward the fountain under this window, and in these days the shadow is the longest of the entire year.

This reminds us of the role of astronomy in marking the hours of prayer. For example, the Angelus is prayed in the morning, at noon, and in the evening".

"The fact that the winter solstice takes place today, 21 December, at this very hour,

affords me the opportunity of greeting those who are participating in the initiatives of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, called to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Galileo Galilei's first observations with the telescope. Among my predecessors ... there have been practicioners of this science, including Sylvester II, who taught it, Gregory XIII to whom we owe our calendar, and St. Pius X, who knew how to build sundials. If the heavens, in the beautiful words of the psalmist, 'tell of the glory of God', the laws of nature, which many scientists have studied over the years giving us an ever-better understanding of them, are a great incentive to contemplate the works of the Lord with gratitude".

- POPE BENEDICT XVI

Sunday, December 21, 2008

FOREIGN INVESTORS AND GOVERNMENTS ARE GETTING A LOT OF U.S. DOLLARS AS WE PAY THEM FOR HOLDING OUR DEBT

****************
A November Treasury Department report states that the interest payment on the federal debt for Fiscal Year 2009 will be about $450 billion, making it the fourth largest expense in the federal budget behind Medicare-Medicaid, Social Security and defense spending.

The federal fiscal year runs from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30. The Treasury Department report presents the budget estimates for the full fiscal year 2009, which the interest payment and federal department budget projections are based upon.

If President-elect Barack Obama and the Democratic congressional leadership enact a proposed $1 trillion stimulus plan in early 2009, it could add about $50 billion to those annual interest payments, budget experts told CNSNews.com on Monday.

According to the Treasury Department report, released on Dec. 10, the federal government expects to pay $449,070,000.00 in interest on Treasury debt securities for FY 2009.

The Health and Human Services budget, which includes Medicare and Medicaid, will cost $739,241,000.00 for the fiscal year; Social Security Administration, $699,976,000.00; and the Defense Department-Military budget, $656,722,000.00. (Estimates by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget are nearly identical.)

Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, told CNSNews.com on Monday that the money paid by the Treasury for interest is different than other expenditures, because it does not directly benefit taxpayers.

“It represents money that can’t be used for tax reduction or spending programs,” said Edwards.

If the Obama administration is able to enact a $1 trillion stimulus package, taxpayers can expect to see $50 billion added to the annual payment, because the federal government usually borrows at an interest rate of about 5 percent, said Edwards and Brian Riedel, the latter who is a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that Obama's team is considering a stimulus package for the faltering U.S. economy that could reach $1 trillion over two years.

“The fact that we are borrowing a trillion dollars means that someone has to pay that back,” said Edwards. “The economic fact is that while Americans are consuming a trillion more in stuff this year, people in later years will have to pay for it.”

- CNS NEWS