blog it down

Checking out my previous entries, these posts have been WAY to long! Perhaps I should Blog it down a bit instead of up.

I thoroughly enjoyed watching Christ Matthews host the GOP debate the other night. The highlight of the evening was when he "seriously" asked if it would be good for America for the Clintons to be in the White House again. He really tried to emphasize his seriousness, but of course everyone laughed at him, and Mr. Mitt even said "you have got to be joking!"On a serious note, Ron Paul was the real deal. It is quite the day when a strict Constitutionalist ends up looking like a freak at GOP presidential debate. He was the only candidate who mentioned the constitution that evening.


While you are waiting for more posts to show up.. treat yourself to a trip to www.redbluenation.net.
Here you can check out what the Queen of England REALLY does in her spare time. Snuggle up with some priceless moments from Pres. candidate Mike Gravel while you are there too!

Off to bed, just in time to engage with Jesse in our nightly wrestling match. I think he is starting to discover that there is just not much room left in his world. If our in-utero wrestling matches are any indication, Caleb is going to have quite a match in a couple years. Anna will have to develop the talent of being one that makes peace! Eight more weeks hopefully and he can stretch out in his very own bed, as will I.

Fox News Network: CLEAN UP!

One of my favorite talk show hosts: Laura Ingraham, has addressed in a big way the problem with the sleaze on the Fox News Network. There is quite a bit of momentum forming to contact Fox News and demand a better moral standard! Here is my letter to Fox News. Everyone, send a letter to Fox, it will only take a few minutes!!!

Dear Fox News,

Like so many other millions of viewers,I have been overjoyed to see the rise of a "Fair and Balanced" Network such as Fox.
I hope you keep up the investigative reporting and your commitment to the truth. It is what made you number one. The people who made you number one are comprised of people in this country who are committed to the truth and integrity our nation was founded on.

The people who have given you your success for the most part are fairly conservative people. The "T-Warriors" as Bill O'Reilly calls them are getting quite fed up with all the trash they have been seeing on your network lately. We don't mind hearing stories about a congressman's sex tape scandal (just to throw an example out there), but when you show the footage of the actual sex tape it comes across as being very sleazy and unprofessional. Throughout the day you are constantly showing sexual images of women. Bill O'Reilly is perhaps one of the worst offenders of this. His soft-porn footage he likes to constantly roll is an affront to the conservative people he likes to attract. How a society regards it's women and children is a good indication as to what direction the society is headed for. Showing these images constantly degrades and sexually exploits women and the gifts they were given by their Creator.

It usually happens that when a show or network has to stoop lower and lower just to get a story or an edge over their competitor, they are running out of ideas or their creativity is shot. I sincerely hope this isn't the case with Fox. I am speaking with more and more people who are fed up with this trash we get assaulted with when all we want is to hear the news. Your network cannot continue flooding my house with these images and so I, like many others are tuning you out. If you doubt where your customer base is coming from, I would love to see you run an online poll regarding this issue.

I appreciate your time and consideration,
Melissa Taylor

Immigration and Teddy

I have been having a great time listening to the Laura Ingraham show. She's hilariously smart and not a shill for anyone, unlike Rush or Hannity. Here is something she had on her show about Teddy R. and his comments on Immigration in his State of the Union speech. What has happened to conservatism?

TEDDY!!!

Our present immigration laws are unsatisfactory. We need every honest and efficient immigrant fitted to become an American citizen, every immigrant who comes here to stay, who brings here a strong body, a stout heart, a good head, and a resolute purpose to do his duty well in every way and to bring up his children as law-abiding and God-fearing members of the community. But there should be a comprehensive law enacted with the object of working a threefold improvement over our present system. First, we should aim to exclude absolutely not only all persons who are known to be believers in anarchistic principles or members of anarchistic societies, but also all persons who are of a low moral tendency or of unsavory reputation. This means that we should require a more thorough system of inspection abroad and a more rigid system of examination at our immigration ports, the former being especially necessary.

The second object of a proper immigration law ought to be to secure by a careful and not merely perfunctory educational test some intelligent capacity to appreciate American institutions and act sanely as American citizens. This would not keep out all anarchists, for many of them belong to the intelligent criminal class. But it would do what is also in point, that is, tend to decrease the sum of ignorance, so potent in producing the envy, suspicion, malignant passion, and hatred of order, out of which anarchistic sentiment inevitably springs. Finally, all persons should be excluded who are below a certain standard of economic fitness to enter our industrial field as competitors with American labor. There should be proper proof of personal capacity to earn an American living and enough money to insure a decent start under American conditions. This would stop the influx of cheap labor, and the resulting competition which gives rise to so much of bitterness in American industrial life; and it would dry up the springs of the pestilential social conditions in our great cities, where anarchistic organizations have their greatest possibility of growth.

Both the educational and economic tests in a wise immigration law should be designed to protect and elevate the general body politic and social. A very close supervision should be exercised over the steamship companies which mainly bring over the immigrants, and they should be held to a strict accountability for any infraction of the law.

Buchanan says it all

Well, I must admit, I have fallen oh so far behind in my blogging. Too much snot to wipe, too much refilling of humidifiers, too much cleaning up wet 3-foot long pieces of toilet paper. Really, does it have to take 3 feet of toilet paper to blow your nose once? It must for a 5 year old, specifically one named Anna. Oh, the sickness hasn't been that bad. We haven't had the flu here in almost 3 years. Now, some of you will be SHOCKED, but I did resort to the use of a drug during Caleb's bout with this flu. Anna managed to make it though with the herbs, but Caleb needed a little more help. Robitussin (is that even how you spell the thing?) is great for a little kid who's up gagging and coughing his brains out all night. Hum, it's great for the mom too. One night he woke up choking with his chest closed and wheezing, emitting that all too familiar bark a sea-lion would make. All you can do there is wrap them up and take them into the freezing night air. Does a croup wonders! We used to do this with my brother when he was little. By the time you get them to the hospital, the cold air in the car helped get the inflammation down a bit. Assuring Josh of my cold-air method was a little difficult in the middle of the night, but we all made it through. Sitting on the front porch in the pitch black, holding the little, wheezing, fever ball in my arms at three in the morning made me think. Now, the thinking wasn't all that deep, I had just gone through several days of this with Anna, so I only thought one thing. Is this worth it? I could be in bed right now, snuggled and warm, sleeping the night away, in a nice quiet house. Instead I was sitting outside holding a little kid in the freezing night air as he slept on my shoulder. The differences aren't all that striking on paper, but while I was sitting there the former seemed like heaven. I began thinking: who is raising future husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, statesmen, inventors, artists, preachers, mentors? The reality is, mothers are. Mothers who sit up with these people when they are little and can't even tend for themselves. Sometimes parenthood seems very ideological, very noble, very fulfilling, but I, for one, really forget sometimes about all the grunt work that is involved. Doesn't every noble accomplishment come only after years of grace, work, tears, persistence? I guessed it did. So I took my little preacher (that's what I call him) back into the house and we sat the night out. Of course I'm exaggerating, and I know people with 5 or 10 kids have it way worse. And, the worse is probably yet to come for me. Having said that, these nights were still difficult to my comparative easy life and it was nice to rejoice in the "heritage from the Lord", even when the heritage is 2 years old and keeps you up all night.

One other quick note. I have been looking into the Horton/Kline "two kingdom" view. It is a view that I'm afraid just utterly cripples the impact Christians could have on a culture/society. Andrew Sandlin has written a great article on it you can find here: http://www.natreformassn.org/statesman/01/retreat.html I guess the next question is how prevalent is this view in the reformed church? Mr. Sandlin suggests it's increasing in popularity. Hummm... any thoughts? As if anyone still reads my forgotten blog. hehe

Lastly, this is a very well written article by Pat Buchanan, one of my favorites. Conservatives seem to forget about him when Republicans are in power. And on a side note, what's up with Bush not pardoning these 2 border patrol agents? (http://www.eagleforum.org/column/2007/jan07/07-01-03.html) For all the conservatives who looooove Bush, there must be some reason for this madness!!!

Read on for Buchanan's article:

The Ideologue

by Patrick Buchanan
January 24, 2007 Churchillian it was not. Yet the State of the Union seemed a success if Bush's purpose was to buy time from Congress to wait and see if his surge of U.S. forces into Iraq might yet succeed.

But when Bush started to describe the ideological war we are in, one began to understand why we are in the mess we are in.

"This war," said Bush, "is an ideological struggle. ... To prevail, we must remove the conditions that inspire blind hatred and drove 19 men to get onto airplanes and to come to kill us."

But the "conditions" that drove those 19 men "to come to kill us" is our dominance of their world, our authoritarian allies and Israel.

They were over here because we are over there.

If Bush is going to remove those "conditions," he is going to have to get us out of the Middle East. Is he prepared to do that? Of course not. Because Bush, believing the problem is not our pervasive presence but the lack of freedom in the Middle East, is waging his own ideological war to bring freedom in by force of arms, if necessary.

"What every terrorist fears most is human freedom -- societies where men and women make their own choices."

Very American. But the truth is terrorists do not fear free societies, they flourish in them. The suicide bombers of 9-11, Madrid and London all plotted their atrocities in free societies. From the Red Brigades, who murdered Italy's Aldo Mori, to the Baader-Meinhoff Gang, who tried to kill Al Haig, to the Basque ETA, the IRA and the Puerto Rican terrorists who tried to assassinate Harry Truman, free societies are where they do their most effective work.

Stalin's Russia and Nazi Germany had no trouble with terrorists.

"Free people are not drawn to violent and malignant ideologies," declared Bush. Oh? Explain, then, why 70 million Germans, under the most democratic government in their history, gave more than half their votes to Nazis and Communists in 1933? In every plebiscite he held, Hitler won a landslide. In the year of Anschluss and Munich, 1938, Hitler was Time's Man of the Year and far more popular than FDR, who lost 71 seats in the House.

During 2006, free Latin peoples brought to power anti-American Leftists Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and came close to electing their comrades Ollanta Humala in Peru and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico.

In the free elections Bush demanded in Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq, the winners were the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Hamas and Shia militants with ties to Iran.

If a referendum were held in the Middle East on the proposition of the U.S. military out and Israel gone, how does Bush think it would come out?

"So we advance our security interests by helping moderates, reformers and brave voices for democracy," said Bush. But how many of those "moderates" -- Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, Kuwait, the Gulf States -- are ruled "by brave voices for democracy"?

Our Islamist enemies would likely endorse unanimously a Bush call for free elections in all those countries, as elections could not but help advance to greater power, at the expense of our friends, those same Islamist enemies.

What is Bush doing? The America that won the Cold War said ideology be damned, we stand by our friends.

"The great question of our day is whether America will help men and women in the Middle East to build free societies," said Bush.

But if we bleed our country to give the men and women of the Middle East the freedom to choose the society they wish to live in, are we sure they will not choose a society where Sharia is law? In liberated Afghanistan, popular sentiment was behind beheading that Muslim who converted to Christianity.

What leads Bush to believe everyone wants to be like us? Is it not ideology?

To characterize "the totalitarian ideology" we confront, Bush quoted Osama bin Laden: "Death is better than living on this Earth with the unbelievers among us."

This is the true mark of the true believer. But did not the Spain of Isabella want the "unbelievers" removed from "among us"? Did not Elizabeth I feel the same about Catholics?

"Give me liberty or give me death!" said Patrick Henry of the Brits remaining in this country that Brits had founded. "Live free or die!" is the motto of the great state of New Hampshire.

This is the heart of the war we are in. Americans believe in freedom first. Millions of Muslims believe in Islam first -- submission to Allah. We decide for us. Do we also decide for them?

Perhaps the best advice we can give our Muslim friends in the Middle East is the hard advice Lord Byron gave the Greeks under the Islamic rule of Ottoman Turks:

Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not,

Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow?