McCain, ANWR, and the Grand Canyon

John McCain has said he will not let drilling for oil start in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge because of it's pristine beauty: "As far as ANWR is concerned, I don’t want to drill in the Grand Canyon, and I don’t want to drill in the Everglades. This is one of the most pristine and beautiful parts of the world."

The "pristine beauty" part depends on what part of ANWR you are talking about. Pictured below is part of the coastal area that has been reserved for oil drilling. Of course, the environmentalist wackos have successfully blocked our country from drilling there and achieving any kind of energy independence.

The following pictures (from other parts of ANWR) are what environmentalists show the simple-minded people, like John McCain, when trying to convince them of the damage and loss of habitat that will occur when drilling eventually commences in ANWR:

As far as comparisons with the Grand Canyon, ANWR gets under 2,000 visitors annually. Why? "For most of the year, ANWR is unbearably cold and dark. For several weeks, the sun doesn't even rise and leaves the windswept landscape a very inhospitable environment. Only a few hundred people visit ANWR each year."

But the Grand Canyon, pictured below, gets an astounding 5 million visitors annually. I guess that our country's energy independence and national security will have to be set aside so that John McCain and the Marxist environmentalists can have their pristine ANWR that they never will visit.

Arctic ice traps "climate tour" icebreaker

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This is an interesting article about a tour ship for those who want to see the Arctic ice cap before it melts as a result of man-made global warming. Things went awry when the icebreaker tour ship became trapped in the ice that is supposed to be disappearing.

I am on the bridge of the massive Russian icebreaker Kapitan Khlebnikov, and the tension is palpable. We have hit ice - thick ice.

We are travelling from the northeastern corner of Russia, across the Bering Sea and the top of Canada to Resolute Bay in Nunavut. At least that's the plan. We haven't even reached Canadian waters and we are already in trouble.

The ice master studies the mountains of white packed around the ship while the 24,000-horsepower diesel engines work at full throttle to open a path. The ship rises slowly onto the barrier of ice, crushes it and tosses aside blocks the size of small cars as if they were ice cubes in a glass. It creeps ahead a few metres, then comes to a halt, its bow firmly wedged in the ice. After doing this for two days, the ship can go no farther.

The ice master confers with the captain, who makes a call to the engine room. The engines are shut down. He turns to those of us watching the drama unfold, and we are shocked by his words: "Now, only nature can help this ship." We are doomed to drift.

What irony. I am a passenger on one of the most powerful icebreakers in the world, travelling through the Northwest Passage - which is supposed to become almost ice-free in a time of global warming, the next shipping route across the top of the world - and here we are, stuck in the ice, engines shut down, bridge deserted. Only time and tide can free us.

No apology necessary for Koran shooting

Today, President Bush apologized for an incident in which an American soldier in Iraq used the Koran, the holy book of the Muslims, for target practice.

Although I wouldn't waste a perfectly good bullet on a Koran, for our government to treat the Koran as something sacred when we don't even guarantee that kind of respect for the Holy Bible is a spectacular display of weakness and political pandering. In some Muslim countries, even those considered to be our allies, our soldiers and citizens are not even allowed to bring a Bible with them.

Writers and cartoonists around the world who have "insulted" Islam have been killed or recieved death threats.

It is truly amazing that in the 6 1/2 years since 9/11 Islam and Muslims have become a special protected class in our country and that this special protection even extends beyond our borders. Islam and the Koran have been elevated by our politicians to a protected status that Christianity and Judaism have never attained. Muslims are given special consideration in airports, schools, and other government run institutions.

Our Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, not the politically-correct favoring of one religion over the other. It's time to elect leaders who will honor the Constitution and not a backward, misogynistic, hate-filled religion like Islam.

The truth about "climate change"

On Mike Huckabee's website, Mike asked his readers and bloggers to comment on the following question: Should "climate change" be part of the GOP platform with issues such as less government, lower taxes, a strong national defense and real border security? The following is my response:

The earth has been warming and cooling in natural cycles for thousands of years, long before man ever had a chance to leave a "carbon" footprint.

To think that we are powerful enough to affect the global climate, particularly the temperature, is secularist in philosophy and is a tribute to the sinful man's ego as he tries to put himself on par with Almighty God, the maker of the sun, which drives temperature change, and the earth, that receives the sun's energy.

Stopping a hurricane or a volcanic eruption would be easier than trying raise or lower the temperature of the earth an iota.

I normally do not voice my Christian views in these political forums, but this issue of the climate boils down not to just political posturing, but also to very nature of man and the Creation.

The Bible is replete with examples of the Lord controlling the weather, using it to save His people, destroy His enemies, punish a wayward people, bring blessings to his faithful servants, or to demonstrate His awesome power, such as when the Lord spoke to Elijah as he hid in a cave.

When Jesus calmed the storm that frightened his disciples in their small boat, He demonstrated again that it is not man who influences the earth's weather, but it is under Almighty God's control.

Liberals, particularly socialists and Marxists, have been trying to supplant God with humanism. Man-made "climate change" is a part of that philosophy, as they indoctrinate our children in school and adults through the media with their secular "alternative" to God.

After all, if humans can control the earth's climate, then what can't they control? The liberals will have built their own environmental Tower of Babel, and unfortunately will have suckered many God-fearing people into their illusion that man has the power to affect the environment.

Add to this the political and economic implications, which we are just beginning to see with high food and energy prices, and we will have an even worse mess later if we do not get the government out of the subsidy, tariff, energy, and weather business.

In short, man has not changed the earth's temperature one bit, and to base government policy on a philosophy so short on science and out of harmony with God's laws will only lead to further ruin of our great country.

Unstoppable solar cycles

This video is absolutely brilliant and should be seen by every person in America.

Scientist: Forget Global Warming, Prepare for New Ice Age

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Sunspot activity has not resumed up after hitting an 11-year low in March last year, raising fears that — far from warming — the globe is about to return to an Ice Age, says an Australian-American scientist.

Physicist Phil Chapman, the first native-born Australian to become an astronaut with NASA [he became an American citizen to join up, though he never went into space], said pictures from the U.S. Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) showed no spots on the sun.

He said the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7 degrees Centigrade.

"This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930," Chapman wrote in The Australian Wednesday. "If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over."

[Critics quickly pointed out that Chapman may have been "cherry-picking" the data. A strong La Nina formation in the Pacific pushed down January temperatures over much of the Northern Hemisphere from where they had been a year earlier, but average global temperatures are still much higher than the 20th-century average, and the NOAA said last week that last month was the warmest March on record.]

The Bureau of Meteorology says temperatures in Australia have been warmer than the 1960-90 average since the late 1970s, barring a couple of cooler years, and are now 0.3 degrees Centigrade higher than the long-term average.

A sunspot is a region on the sun that is cooler than the rest and appears dark.

An alternative theory of global warming is that a strong solar magnetic field, when there is plenty of sunspot activity, protects the Earth from cosmic rays, cutting cloud formation, but that when the field is weak — during low sunspot activity — the rays can penetrate into the lower atmosphere and cloud cover increases, cooling the surface.

But scientists from the U.S. National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Bolder, Colorado published a report in 2006 that showed the sun had a negligible effect on climate change.

The researchers wrote in the journal Nature that the sun's brightness varied by only 0.07 percent over 11-year sunspot cycles, and that that was far too little to account for the rise in temperatures since the Industrial Revolution.

Chapman proposes preventive, or delaying, moves to slow the cooling, such as bulldozing Siberian and Canadian snow to make it dirty and less reflective.

"My guess is that the odds are now at least 50:50 that we will see significant cooling rather than warming in coming decades," he writes.

Hurricane expert reconsiders global warming's impact

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Editor's note: As you read this article, you willl notice how vague and contradictory many of the scientists statements are.

For instance: "The take-home message is that we've got a lot of work to do," Emanuel said. "There's still a lot of uncertainty in this problem. The bulk of the evidence is that hurricane power will go up, but in some places it will go down."

It reminds me of a psychic who once told the police that they would find a missing child "either alive or dead in a wet or dry place". To build economic and political policies based on such bad science as global warming alarmism is dangerous for not only our country, but the rest of the world as well.

Houston- One of the most influential scientists behind the theory that global warming has intensified recent hurricane activity says he will reconsider his stand.

The hurricane expert, Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, unveiled a novel technique for predicting future hurricane activity this week. The new work suggests that, even in a dramatically warming world, hurricane frequency and intensity may not substantially rise during the next two centuries.

The research, appearing in the March issue of Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, is all the more remarkable coming from Emanuel, a highly visible leader in his field and long an ardent proponent of a link between global warming and much stronger hurricanes.

His changing views could influence other scientists.

"The results surprised me," Emanuel said of his work, adding that global warming may still play a role in raising the intensity of hurricanes. What that role is, however, remains far from certain.

Emanuel's work uses a new method of computer modeling that did a reasonable job of simulating past hurricane fluctuations. He, therefore, believes the models may have predictive value for future activity.

During and after the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons, which were replete with mega-storms and U.S. landfalls, scientists dived into the question of whether rising ocean temperatures, attributed primarily to global warming, were causing stronger storms.

Among the first to publish was Emanuel, who — just three weeks before Hurricane Katrina's landfall — published a paper in Nature that concluded a key measurement of the power dissipated by a storm during its lifetime had risen dramatically since the mid-1970s.

In the future, he argued, incredibly active hurricane years such as 2005 would become the norm rather than flukes.

Other factors likely
This view, amplified by environmentalists and others concerned about global warming, helped establish in the public's mind that "super" hurricanes were one of climate change's most critical threats. A satellite image of a hurricane emanating from a smokestack featured prominently in promotions for Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

"Kerry had the good fortune, or maybe the bad fortune, to publish when the world's attention was focused on hurricanes in 2005," Roger Pielke Jr., who studies science and policy at the University of Colorado, said of Emanuel. "Kerry's work was seized upon in the debate."

After the 2005 hurricane season, a series of other papers were published that appeared to show, among other things, that the most intense hurricanes were becoming more frequent.

What has not been as broadly disseminated, say Pielke and some hurricane scientists, is that other research papers have emerged that suggest global warming has yet to leave an imprint on hurricane activity. One of them, published late last year in Nature, found that warming seas may not increase hurricane intensity.

That paper's co-author, Gabriel Vecchi, a research scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said Emanuel's new work highlights the great uncertainty that remains in hurricane science.

"While his results don't rule out the possibility that global warming has contributed to the recent increase in activity in the Atlantic, they suggest that other factors — possibly in addition to global warming — are likely to have been substantial contributors to the observed increase in activity," Vecchi said.

Scientists wrangling with the hurricane-global warming question have faced two primary difficulties. The first is that the hurricane record before 1970 is not entirely reliable, making it nearly impossible to assess with precision whether hurricane activity has increased during the last century.

The second problem comes through the use of computer models to predict hurricane activity. Most climate models, which simulate global atmospheric conditions for centuries to come, cannot detect individual tropical systems.

Emanuel's new research attempts to get around that by inserting "seeds" of tropical systems throughout the climate models and seeing which develop into tropical storms and hurricanes. The "seeds," bits of computer code, tend to develop when simulated atmospheric conditions, such as low wind shear, are ripe for hurricane formation.

'A lot of work to do'
In the new paper, Emanuel and his co-authors project activity nearly two centuries hence, finding an overall drop in the number of hurricanes around the world, while the intensity of storms in some regions does rise.

For example, with Atlantic hurricanes, two of the seven model simulations Emanuel ran suggested that the overall intensity of storms would decline. Five models suggested a modest increase.

"The take-home message is that we've got a lot of work to do," Emanuel said. "There's still a lot of uncertainty in this problem. The bulk of the evidence is that hurricane power will go up, but in some places it will go down."

The issue probably will not be resolved until better computer models are developed, said Judith Curry, of the Georgia Institute of Technology, a leading hurricane and climate scholar.

By publishing his new paper, and by the virtue of his high profile, Emanuel could be a catalyst for further agreement in the field of hurricanes and global warming, Curry said.

The generally emerging view, she said, seems to be that global warming may cause some increase in intensity, that this increase will develop slowly over time, and that it likely will lead to a few more Category 4 and Category 5 storms. How many? When? No one yet knows.

Former US president Jimmy Carter betrays victims of terrorism

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Jimmy Carter, the former US president, visited the West Bank in Israel today and met with leaders of Hamas, a terrorist organization that is responsible for hundreds of deaths and is devoted to wiping out Israel as a country. Carter also visited the grave of terrorist Yasser Arafat and laid a wreath at his gravesite.

Carter did all this against the wishes of Israel and the US State Department. His involvement in having talks with a known terrorist organization that is currently fighting other Muslims for control of Palestine is beyond reproach and is a slap in the face to the victims of Hamas and their families. To this day, Hamas routinely fires rocket mortars into Israel in an attempt to extort more concessions from the Israeli government.


Hamas official policy towards Israel is this: "There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors." Obviously, there are no conditions under which Hamas will abandon it's Jihad (struggle) against Israel, including a face-to-face with Carter. Hamas is financed by dozens of countries and Muslim charities all over the world, including millions of dollars from Muslims inside the United States.



The organization's first mass attack was a car bomb that blew up at a bus stop in Afula in April 1994, murdering 8 and wounding 51. Among the most horrific Hamas attacks were the following:

* 22 people killed and 56 wounded in a suicide bombing attack on the No. 5 bus on Dizengoff St. in Tel Aviv, Oct. 1994
* 26 killed by suicide bomber on a #18 bus near the Jerusalem Central Bus Station, Feb. 1996
* 16 killed in the Mahane Yehuda open market in Jerusalem in a double suicide attack, July 1997
* 23 dead and 115 wounded when a Hamas suicide bomber blew himself up on a No. 2 bus line coming from the Western Wall
in Jerusalem, August 2003
* 45 murdered within the space of five days in March 2002: a suicide Hamas terrorist blew himself up in a Haifa restaurant,
killing 15, and another one did the same in the Park Hotel in in Netanya during a Passover Seder, murdering some 30 and
wounding 144.

The ten worst Oslo War Hamas attacks, in which a total of 186 were murdered, also included the following:
* June 1, 2001 - Dolphinarium in Tel Aviv, 21 killed - mostly new-immigrant teenagers from the former Soviet Union
* Aug. 9, 2001 - Sbarro's Pizzeria in Jerusalem, 15 killed, including the parents and three children of the Schijveschuurder family
* Dec. 2, 2001 - Haifa bus, 15 killed
* May 7, 2002 - Rishon Letzion hall, 16 killed
* June 18, 2002 - #32 bus from Gilo, Jerusalem, 19 killed
* March 5, 2003 - #37 bus in Haifa, 15 dead
* June 11, 2003 - #14 bus, Jerusalem, 17 murdered
click here for a full list of Hamas terrorist attacks

Jimmy Carter was an embarrassment as a US president, and is now an embarassment as he tries to build a legacy by reconciling the Palestinian/Israeli divide. The State Department should revoke his passport for giving aid and comfort to the enemy and refuse his re-entry into the United States

Marines help rebuild Islamic schools in Bangladesh

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Four months after deadly storms struck Bangladesh, 40 Marines and sailors with 1st Engineer Platoon, Fuel Company, 9th Engineer Support Battalion, 3rd Marine Logistics Group, continued relief efforts alongside 100 Bangladesh Army and Navy service members by rebuilding two schools March 6 – 30.

The construction project was part of the III Marine Expeditionary Force Bangladesh Interoperability Program, a joint effort focused on helping Bangladeshi communities rebuild from the storm that killed an estimated 3,500 people and caused an estimated $450 million in damage.

The platoon was assign to the town of Mongla in the southwest corner of Bangladesh. In January, an advanced party of Marines was sent to survey the conditions of two Islamic schools, known as Madrasahs, which were identified for repair. The team found little to survey.

“The buildings were gone,” said Gunnery Sgt. David Dickens, platoon sergeant. “They were destroyed. So basically it was just two open lots.”

The engineers immediately went to work designing two new schools from the ground up. Instead of using their standard construction templates, the 9th ESB Marines modified the design to ensure the buildings could be maintained with materials readily available in Bangladesh after they left. They decided on using tin for the roofs and bamboo sheathing for walls instead of the plywood and shingles more common in Western construction.

Building the schools with unconventional materials required the assistance of a Bangladesh Army engineer platoon who worked alongside the U.S. service members.

“As Americans we don’t do a lot of tin roofing any more,” Dickens said. “We had to lean on the expertise of the Bangladesh Army for that.”

Members of the Bangladesh Navy provided security during the project.

Some platoon members found working with the Bangladeshi soldiers difficult at first due to the language barrier as communications were often reduced to hand signals.

“We were basically playing charades in order to construct a building,” said Cpl. Michael Spivey, a squad leader for the platoon.

Over time, both parties began to pick up on the other’s language, making communication smoother. A common phrase emerged as a constant on the job site - “Shu•muh•sha•ne”, a Bangladeshi phrase meaning “no problem”.

“That was the motto of the mission. Any time there was a debate over a problem it always ended with ‘Shu•muh•sha•ne,’ we’ll figure it out,” Dickens said.

The appreciation of the townspeople was evident each day as the Marines drove through town on their way to the construction site, said squad leader Cpl. Amanda Wilson.

“They were really, really grateful and excited when we came by,” she said. “They stood on the side of the streets just waving as we passed. I’ve always wanted to do something for a country like that, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

Dickens shared the sentiment. “It’s probably one of the best projects I’ve ever done in my 16 years in the Marine Corps,” he said.

The "Real" Rainbow Fish Story

By Burt Noyes

(click here for printable version)

Out in the countryside was a very large pond with all kinds of animals, fish, and plants. The smartest creatures were the fish, who had been there as long as anyone could remember.

Now most of the fish were pretty happy with the way things were. They swam around finding food to eat, going to school, talking about the weather, saying things like “Is it wet enough for you?”

Two fish that never seemed very happy though were Jimmy and Kyle.

What made them unhappy, very unhappy, was a fish named Bill.

Bill was different from all the other fish because he had scales that were very different from everyone else’s. Bill’s scales were all kinds of flashy colors, orange, blue, red, purple, yellow, bright green, just about every color you could imagine. All the other fish, including Jimmy and Kyle, had gray scales, some lighter or darker. Jimmy and Kyle would see Bill go by with his bright scales and get very jealous and angry.


Jimmy and Kyle started talking about Bill’s bright colorful scales with all the other gray fish in the pond.

“Don’t you all think Bill should share his scales with everyone else?” they asked their friends.

Their friends like Jane and Karl hadn’t really thought about Bill’s bright scales before, but now that they looked at him and then looked at themselves, they started to get jealous too.

The four fish decided to talk to Bill about sharing his scales. One evening as the warm sun was setting on the edge of the pond, they saw Bill coming back from the south end of the pond.

Jimmy decided to start off the conversation. “Bill, we have noticed how bright and colorful your scales are, and we would like you to give us some of them. Then we’ll be colorful too and finally be happy.”






Bill floated gracefully as he thought about what they were asking. “Well,” he said, “I don’t think the scales would last very long once I give them to you. But I can tell you how you can get some colorful scales of your own”.

“All you have to do is go down to the south end of the pond and find some plants that look like little trumpets growing in the deeper water. After you eat the plants for a few weeks, you’ll start to get more color in your scales, and after a year, you’ll look like me, if not better. My father taught me about this, and his father taught him also.”

The four jealous fish listened to his story, but it sounded like a lot of work and they didn’t want to wait for weeks, and certainly a year was too long. So they swam off together and tried to figure out a plan to get Bill’s scales.

Kyle was listening to the other three when he saw Big Sam swim by. Big Sam was the biggest, ugliest , meanest fish in the pond. Everyone was afraid of him, and even though he was slow, he was very scary.

Kyle told the other three “Hey, let’s get Big Sam to go over there and take Bill’s scales and give them to us.”

“Why would he help us?” Jane asked.

“Let’s make him the king of the pond,” said Karl. “We can tell him how nasty Bill is and that Bill stole all those scales from the other fish. Tell Big Sam that he would be doing a good thing by taking the scales from Bill and giving them equally to everyone else.” Everyone thought the plan was great, and decided to talk to Big Sam as soon as possible.

Early the next morning, the four jealous fish, Jimmy, Kyle, Karl, and Jane, along with some of their not-so-bright friends, found Big Sam floating on his back sleeping like a log.

They woke Big Sam up and told him their plan to make him king. When they told him how Bill had stolen the scales from everyone else, which was a lie, and that Big Sam would be a hero if he could take Bill’s scales and give them to everyone else, Big Sam readily agreed to be their king.

That evening, as the warm sun was setting on the edge of the pond, Bill came along as he usually does from the south end to go home. Big Sam and the jealous fish and their friends all swarmed around Bill, making Bill very afraid.

“I am now the King of the Pond,” declared Big Sam. “My first act as the good king that I am is to take your bright scales and give them to the less fortunate fish in the pond. You have plenty of scales, and we will not take them all, but everyone deserves to have bright scales. And besides that, you don’t deserve these scales, you stole them from the other fish.”

Before Bill could say a word, Big Sam was ripping the scales from Bill’s skin, leaving big colorless patches of gray like the other fish. The jealous fish cheered for Big Sam, who finally seemed to have found something he was good at.

When Big Sam finally finished taking Bill’s scales, Bill silently slipped away while Big Sam turned to other fish.

Big Sam had thousands of bright colorful scales, and started to hand them out a few at a time to the other fish. “Isn’t this great?” said Jimmy and Kyle to the others, as they put some of the colorful scales over their own gray scales. All the fish swam around looking at each other, admiring the new scales, and even happier now that Bill was not as beautiful as he used to be.

They all looked at Big Sam , and were surprised that instead of having a few scales like them, he had hundreds of the bright scales. When Big Sam saw them looking at all the scales he had kept to himself, he smirked “It’s good to be the king,” and swam off to his home.

The next morning, the fish of the pond went about their usual business. Jimmy saw Kyle swimming over his way when he noticed something was wrong with Kyle’s new scales.

“Your new scales are turning gray!” Jimmy shouted.

Kyle shouted back “Jimmy, your new scales are turning gray too!”

As the fish all came out to enjoy the day, they noticed that all the colorful scales were now gray, and that they all looked exactly like they did before they made Big Sam king. Even the hundreds of scales Big Sam had kept for himself were now gray and falling off.

They all were even more jealous and angry when they saw Bill swimming toward the south end of the pond with his patchy skin starting to turn bright and colorful again. And even more shocking than that, two other fish were following Bill to the south end of the pond.

This went on for several days. Each day, Bill and his two friends would come back from the south end of the pond, brighter and more colorful than the day before. Big Sam and the other fish were really angry now.

Big Sam caught them the next day, and took even more of their scales, giving some of them away to the other fish, but still keeping more of them for himself. For weeks this went on. Bill and his two friends kept having their scales taken, Big Sam got bigger and scarier, and the other fish would get a few scales once in a while, just to have them turn gray and fall off the next day.

Meanwhile, more fish were going to the south end of the pond and learning from Bill how to grow their own colorful scales. There were plenty of the trumpet-shaped plants for them to eat if they would just put forth some effort. The jealous fish were getting even more angry, calling them traitors, and demanding that Big Sam do something about the trend.

They told Big Sam that if all the fish got their own bright scales, then they wouldn’t need Big Sam to be king anymore. When Big Sam heard this, he was angry and started looking for a way to stop the colorful fish permanently.

The warm days in the pond had been growing longer and Jane noticed something unusual. The pond was getting lower!!!!!

Now the pond wasn’t very much lower at all. In fact, it had lowered so little that nobody had noticed it but Jane, since she was always measuring the pond.

Jane told Jimmy and Kyle that day how the pond had recently lowered. Jimmy and Kyle had heard of the pond lowering and raising before, but they had never seen it personally. But an idea came to them, an incredible, powerful, devious idea that would put and end to Bill and his friends and their colorful scales.

They called all the fish of the pond to a general meeting around the giant cat-tail plant. This was a very rare occasion, so all of the fish were interested in what was going on.

Jimmy opened the meeting. “We have found out some very alarming news. Jane discovered that the pond we live in is getting lower. Other fish have confirmed this fact. The pond is drying up and we have only one chance to stop it before we all end up dead!”

There was a huge gasp from the crowd. All the fish started yelling, talking, shouting, and crying. “What has caused this to happen?” they asked.

Jimmy slowly pointed his fin in the direction of Bill and his two almost fully-colored friends. “Ever since those three have been feeding at the south end of the pond, and getting more colorful, the pond has slowly been lowering. I propose that Big Sam be given the authority to stop them from going to the south end. Hopefully, we can stop the pond from drying up.”

The crowd heard a cough from the back of the crowd. It was Gerry, the oldest fish in the pond, and he asked for the opportunity to speak.

“I’ve lived in this pond for many seasons,” he said, “more than anyone here I suppose. I’ve seen the pond lower before, and I’ve seen it raise too. I suppose long after I die, the raising and lowering will still go on. I don’t see any evidence that Bill and his friends have caused this to happen, and I propose that they be left alone.”

The fish turned back to Jimmy. He shouted “This old fish is a Lowering denier, and anyone who denies this has to be silenced! Who will you believe, the old denier or Jane with her new scientific measuring stick?”

The crowd of fish roared in agreement, and passed a law giving Big Sam the power to stop Bill and his friends from going to the south end. They also passed a law stopping anyone from discussing the pond-lowering issue.

Bill and his friends did stop going to the south end of the pond. Slowly, their scales started to fade, turning paler and paler until they were as gray as the rest of the fish.

Jimmy and Kyle and the rest of the jealous fish were now very sad at their situation. They were still gray, just like before, but now they had Big Sam for a king, and he had gotten meaner and scarier. Not only did Big Sam not allow them to talk about the pond-lowering issue, they weren’t allowed to talk about anything, read anything, or do anything that Big Sam did not approve of.

The next spring, as the water warmed, and the snow on the banks of pond melted, the water did rise once again, just like the old fish Gerry had predicted. And all the gray fish swam around in misery, waiting for the day when Big Sam would finally float to the surface belly-up one last and final time.

Evolutionists surprised....AGAIN!

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Editor's note: Evolutionists are always being "surprised" and "amazed" and "having to rethink how we evolved" whenever they discover something new in their field of study. Yet, those who believe in creation and Intelligent Design are mocked as ignorant simpletons, with many scientists, teachers and professors being fired for their belief that God was behind the amazing universe we call home.
In the following article, the evolutionists admit that they were wrong about how they structured the "animal tree of life". While creationists never have to revamp their belief system, evolutionists are constantly finding evidence contrary to their current theories and revamping their system to fit the new "evidence". But never call Darwinism and evolution a "theory", you might lose your job or get a failing grade from your science teacher.

find a theater showing "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed"

From LiveScience.com- Earth's first animal was the ocean-drifting comb jelly, not the simple sponge, according to a new find that has shocked scientists who didn't imagine the earliest critter could be so complex.
The mystery of the first animal denizen of the planet can only be inferred from fossils and by studying related animals today. To get to the bottom of that, scientists analyzed massive volumes of genetic data to define the earliest splits at the base of the animal tree of life.
The tree of life is a hierarchy of evolutionary relationships among species that shows which groups split off on their own evolutionary path first.
The new study surprisingly found that the comb jelly was the first animal to diverge from the base of the tree, not the less complex sponge, which had previously been given the honor.
"This was a complete shocker," said study team member Casey Dunn of Brown University in Rhode Island. "So shocking that we initially thought something had gone very wrong."

Dunn's team checked and re-checked their results and came up with the same result every time: the comb jelly came first. The results are detailed in the April 10 issue of the journal Nature, a journal that, like most respected journals, requires other scientists review a paper prior to publication.
Unlike sponges, comb jellies have connective tissues and a nervous system, and so are more complex. Though squishy and tentacled, they are not, however, true jellyfish as they lack the classic bell-shaped body and characteristic stinging cells.
The finding was unexpected because evolutionary biologists had thought that less complex animals split off and evolved separately first. Dunn says that two evolutionary scenarios can explain why the comb jellies would actually have been first among animals. The first is that the comb jelly evolved its complexity independent of other animals after branching off to forge its own path.
The second is that the sponge evolved its simpler form from the more complex form. This second possibility underscores the fact that "evolution is not necessarily just a march towards increased complexity," Dunn said.
Though scientists can say which animal branched off first, they can't date precisely when this early comb jelly diverged away. "Unfortunately, we don't have fossils of the oldest comb jelly," Dunn said. "Therefore, there is no way to date the earliest jelly and determine when it diverged."
Though comb jellies are a common creature in the seas today, these modern specimens likely look very different from their early ancestors.
Dunn and his team hope that their approach will fill other gaps in the tree of life, including where the branches of many of today's species belong.
Other researchers involved in the study, funded by the National Science Foundation: Gonzalo Giribet of Harvard University, Mark Martindale of the University of Hawaii and Ward Wheeler of the American Museum of Natural History.

Movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed"

Ben Stein's movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" chronicles the Stalinist-type persecution that teachers in academia have experienced for not believing the Darwinist theory of evolution. These teachers dare to believe in creation and Intelligent Design.

The movie opens April 18, be sure to be there and support conservative values.

Bible passages for Easter weekend

Romans 5:6-11

6For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— 8but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. 9Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. 10For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. 11More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.







1 Peter 1:3-12
3Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, 5who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. 6In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, 7so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. 8 Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, 9obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

10Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, 11inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. 12 It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look.

Christianity, the Constitution, and Capitalism

As our nation stands at the political crossroads of the 2008 election and a looming economic crisis, it is a good time to examine the bedrock principles upon which our country was founded and gather from them guidance for the future.

The three pillars which have supported our country from the beginning are Christianity, capitalism, and the Constitution, with Christianity being the center pillar that strengthened the other two.

In order to govern men (we'll use "men" in the Biblical sense of "all mankind") the political structure must be based on an understanding of the true nature of man and govern accordingly. Only the Christian faith declares the true nature of man to be fallen in sin and in need of salvation.

The structure of society, primarily the family and government, was ordained by God to curb that fallen nature through the discipline, education, and the threat and imposition of punishment, ranging from the rebuke of a loving parent to the deadly force of lawful authority.

The founding fathers were devout men of different denominations who held in common the basic precepts of the Christian faith. In declaring our independence from Britain and in the writing of our Constitution, they incorporated the truths found in Christianity to form the more perfect union. They recognized that the natural rights of all men, regardless of race or creed, were granted by God and that it was the obligation and duty of government to protect those rights.

Understanding that the government is as weak and imperfect as the men who run it, they incorporated into the Constitution the means of restraining and dividing federal power, protected the citizenry by empowering them to choose and replace their elected officials, and ensured through the Bill of Rights that they would have the means to expose and overthrow the government if it became tyrannical and broke faith with the people it governed.

Our capitalistic free-market system of economics also owes it's success to the Christian world-view.

All men inherently try to get the most they can with the least expenditure of work possible. Capitalism takes advantage of these two weaknesses, greed and sloth, to create a competition based economy that rewards hard work and diligence and punishes laziness.

People who want more "stuff" and discipline themselves to work hard and provide more or better products and services are rewarded with capital, while persons who have less or no ambition and are not willing to expend themselves in hard labor are punished with lower wages and a lower standard of living. Since a free-market capitalistic economy is not a zero-sum game, there is ample economic opportunity for everyone who is willing to do the hard work necessary to succeed. This opportunity has encouraged millions of people to leave their homeland and emigrate to the United States, bringing with them their desire to work and flourish as individuals and families.

In short, capitalism is the perfect economic system for imperfect men.

As time has gone on, however, all three pillars of our nation have been attacked and eroded by liberalism and secularism.

The family, which has been the stabilizing force throughout human history, is being attacked by the nanny-state Federal government, abortionists, and gay rights activists. As "separation of church and state" and Marxism maliciously found it's way into our government structure, the government began infringing on our God-given rights and replaced individualism and industriousness with entitlement programs and restrictions on freedom of speech, religion, and the right to bear arms.

Government regulation, excessive taxation, and environmental socialism has burdened our free-market capitalism to the point that we now are a quasi-fascist state. Hard work, diligence and achievement are punished while over half our population (that either can't or won't provide for themselves), is now supported by the minority through government hand-outs.

A society that ignores and impugns truth cannot survive indefinitely. As communist Russia collapsed of it's own immorality, so too will America collapse as it continues to replace God with State and disregard the values that made this country the greatest enterprise in freedom and liberty known to man.

Weather Channel Founder blasts Gore

Illegal alien crashes into bus, kills four school kids

The woman pictured on the left is an illegal alien that killed four school kids when her van crashed into their school bus Tuesday, Feb. 19.

She gave her name as Aliannis Morales, but the police say that is not her real name.

The accident occurred in Cottonwood, Minnesota when "Morales" ran a stop sign on her way to work. Her van crashed into the Lakeview school bus, killing four students and sending several students to area hospitals.

"Morales" had been working at Norcraft Cabinetry for a month before the crash. She told authorities through an interpreter that she is from Mexico.

Killed in the crash were two brothers, Hunter and Jesse Javens, ages 9 and 13, and Emily Olson, 9, and Reed Stevens, 12.

Why do we have illegal aliens killing American citizens on our roads and in other crimes on a daily basis?

The answer is that the US government has not enforced the laws controlling immigration into the country.

While the Bush Administration is busy putting US Border Patrol agents in jail for doing their job, thousands of illegal aliens like "Morales" cross our borders every day. Some are criminals and gang members, some are drug smugglers, while others are poor Mexicans and other nationals looking for better paying jobs.

While the legal citizens of the United States try to cope with the damage done to their communities and families by illegal aliens, Congress has been trying to give the illegal aliens amnesty in an effort to get more voters for their political parties. Senators Clinton, Obama, and McCain, all running for president, have voted in favor of amnesty for these criminals.

Another problem with our poor border control is that Islamic terrorists could come across the border by mixing in with the other aliens and pose an even greater danger to our national security.

The answer to the illegal immigration problem is simple. We need to build a fence across our southern border with Mexico, increase the number of Border patrol agents, and punish employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens, like the cabinet shop owner who employed "Morales". As illegal aliens are detected by the police, they should be arrested and deported along with their families back to their country of origin.

There should also be a guest worker program instituted that would let people in other countries like Mexico register for jobs and then come to work here legally. Such a program does not need to be run by the US government. There are plenty of employment agencies that could arrange such a program and administer it without increasing the size of our already bloated Federal government.

Only by making some hard political choices are the American people going to solve this illegal immigration problem. One of those choices has to defeating liberal presidential candidates like Clinton, Obama, and McCain.

The Un-American Candidate

A lot of attention was paid to the photo on the left of Barack Obama "forgetting" to put his hand over his heart during the national anthem during a campaign event.

Not being one who looks for a conspiracy behind every fault, I didn't find it alarming and gave Mr. Obama the benefit of the doubt that he was probably nervous or distracted at the moment.

And when Mr. Obama said that he didn't wear a U.S. flag pin on his lapel because it wasn't necessary to prove one's patriotism, I again gave him the benefit of the doubt.

But I can't give him that benefit anymore.

During a campaign stop in Milwaukee his wife, Michelle Obama, said: “People in this country are ready for change and hungry for a different kind of politics and … for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.”

Michelle Obama is only now "proud of her country"?

America is the country that advances freedom, liberty, and economic opportunity to the rest of the world.

America is the country that has freed hundreds of millions of people from Fascists, Nazis, Taliban, vicious dictators, malaria, AIDS, starvation, communism, Marxism, and slavery worldwide without asking for anything back.

America is the country that has willingly sacrificed the lives of hundreds of thousands of our best and bravest young men and women to help people of all religions, ethnic, and racial origins free themselves of tyranny without asking for anything back.

America is the country where Barack and Michelle Obama have lived the American dream. They are proof that in America "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" aren't just words on a paper but the essence of the American culture and way of life.

The Obama campaign has tried to deflect criticism of Michelle's comments with the usual political spin, but it rings hollow when you look at the track record of this couple.

The most alarming thing about this election cycle is not the lack of qualified candidates, but the willingness of the American public to support and elect people who loathe the country and the Constitution that gives them this opportunity to achieve the highest political office in the world.

The New Climate Trend: Global Cooling

A few months ago, it was quietly reported in the media that in actuality the earth had stopped warming in the late 1990's and that the earth had maintained the same temperature ever since.

Now scientists who study the cycles of solar activity are telling us that the earth is probably going to enter a cooling phase that might last for over a century.

Here's a couple of excerpts from Investors Business Daily:

Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada's National Research Council, is among those looking at the sun for evidence of an increase in sunspot activity.
Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.
Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.
This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.

Contrary to the claims of the global warming alarmists, scientists are finding no connection between increased CO2 in the atmosphere and global warming. Here's another excerpt from the same article:

As we have noted many times, perhaps the biggest impact on the Earth's climate over time has been the sun.
For instance, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar Research in Germany report the sun has been burning more brightly over the last 60 years, accounting for the 1 degree Celsius increase in Earth's temperature over the last 100 years.
R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada's Carleton University, says that "CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet's climate on long, medium and even short time scales."
Rather, he says, "I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet."
Patterson, sharing Tapping's concern, says: "Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth."
"Solar activity has overpowered any effect that CO2 has had before, and it most likely will again," Patterson says. "If we were to have even a medium-sized solar minimum, we could be looking at a lot more bad effects than 'global warming' would have had."

The evidence is growing that the earth's warming and cooling cycles are driven by solar activity, not by human activity such as burning fossil fuels.

Global warming activists are only using the issue of climate change to change human behavior, not to save the earth. Their goal is to suppress free-market capitalism and industry, cripple the United States economy, and grow government by introducing laws that tell us what kind of light bulbs to use, what kind of cars to drive, and how many children families should have.

Such laws and regulations not only result in less individual freedom and liberty, but also threaten the American way of life and it's culture.

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The Truth About the Civil War

Causes of the Civil War

As we approach Presidents day on February 18 and Black History Month for 2008, it is a good time to deal with the real causes of the Civil War of 1860 which changed the political, economic, and social landscape of America forever.

Abraham Lincoln is often considered the greatest president because he "saved the Union", that is, he kept the southern states from successfully seceding and forming their own Confederate government, and he "freed the slaves" by signing the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

To understand the struggle between the North and South, we have to look at how both sides viewed the Federal government and States' rights. Remember that in 1860 the United States of America, commonly called "the Union" in those days, was only 84 years old. Most of the key political figures had parents who lived during the time of the American revolution, so the concept of "the Union" and a centralized Federal government as a permanent political structure was not as prevalent as it is today.

The dominant view in the North, which Lincoln shared, was that the states who had entered into the Union at the time of the Revolutionary War were bound to stay in the Union, by military force if necessary, and could not withdraw or secede from the Union.

The Southern states viewed their participation in the Union as voluntary and that secession was their right if the Federal government over-stepped it's Constitutional powers and encroached on the States' rights to self-rule.

In fact, the key issue in the presidential election which Lincoln won was not whether the South should give up slavery, but whether the Federal government could outlaw slavery in new states that were entering the Union. The Southern states felt that giving the Federal government this kind of power would weaken their own right to decide whether they would be slave states or free states.

As for Lincoln, he had made it clear during the election that although he was against slavery he would not use the Federal government to eliminate slavery in the South and would let slavery, which was already declining, die naturally due to free market forces.

Economic power was also at stake in the North/South divide. Contrary to what most history classes teach, the Panic of 1857 had devastated the Northern economy which was based on manufacturing and banking, while the Southern states, whose economy was primarily based on agriculture, were virtually untouched by the economic crisis gripping the North.

If the Southern states, which had the advantage of goods to export and good shipping facilities, withdrew from the Union and established free trade internationally it would further decimate the North financially.

To prevent this from happening, the Federal government used it's military forces to control the trade of the South, imposing taxes on cotton and tariffs on exports, leading to further division. The first battle of the Civil War, the attack on Union forces at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, was in response to this kind of meddling in free trade by the Federal government.

The day after the Confederate forces captured Fort Sumter, Lincoln called up 75,000 militiamen from the states to suppress the Southern rebellion.

The conflict between North and South was now a full-fledged civil war. By the time the Union won the war four years later, more than 620,000 soldiers died in combat and over a million more died from disease.

How the Civil War changed America

The political consequences of the war were enormous. By virtue of it's victory, the Union had stopped the secession of the Confederacy and given the Federal government much more power over the States.

That Federal power kept growing and continues to grow to this day, threatening the freedoms and liberties that the founders of our country sought to guarantee to all citizens in the Constitution.

America now borders on becoming a Socialist state with the Federal government now in charge of the well-being of over half the population through it's entitlement programs like Welfare, Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, the Prescription Drug Program, farm subsidies, earmarks, and Earned Income Credits. The near future probably includes universal health care insurance and child-care programs that will place all children in government run day cares from infancy and continue to indoctrinate them through graduation from high school and even into college.

The economic landscape also changed dramatically. The Northern states manufacturing based economy became dominant and the industrial revolution accelerated beyond anyone's imagination. As in most wars, research, development, and technology were instrumental in victory and now in the following peace time those talents were turned towards the market place and the expansion of America to the west.

Agricultural production started to shift away from the South and into the new states in the mid-west. New railroads made transporting agricultural and manufactured products easier and led to greater integration of the economies of the North, South, and West. As modern machinery entered the workplace and labor unions formed, people worked less hours and now turned their attention to education and leisure activities.

The social structure of America also changed forever after the Civil War. The most obvious change was the newly granted freedom to millions of slaves who could now vote, own land, start businesses, and hold political office. Although it was easy to legislate freedom, changing the way whites and blacks in America viewed each other would take another hundred and forty years of hard work and tolerance.

A subtle but dangerous change in our country also occurred as a result of the Union victory in the Civil War. As noted, Lincoln felt it was not the government's role to force and end to slavery, and that the free market would accomplish that eventually.

But now the government has become a vehicle for social change. Instead of individuals using education, the free market, and dialogue to elevate people from poverty and correct injustice, the government was now viewed as the instrument of change, whether it was addressing racial injustice, establishing wage controls, reducing gun ownership, restricting free speech in campaigns, saving the whales, stopping global warming, access to abortion, fighting AIDS, or the war on drugs.

Today America is at a political cross-roads as unlike any time since the election of 1860. We can choose to follow the liberals into a totally socialistic state like those found in Europe or we can fight for the conservative values of individual freedom and liberty with less government interference in our lives.

The choice is ours, for now.

Suggested reading...

Abraham Lincoln: Tyrant, Hypocrite, or Consummate Statesman?
Causes of the Civil War: A North Georgia Perspective
Causes of the Civil War
Top Five causes of the Civil War
Civil War Facts
The Panic of 1857

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What's splitting the Reagan coalition?

What's splitting the Reagan coalition?
How is it that a successful conservative governor who wants to eliminate the IRS, defend the sanctity of life and marriage, appoint judges like Scalia and Roberts, and fight Islamic fascism to the finish is running third in the Republican primaries?

Answer: Since mid-November of 2007, there has been a push by the conservative "new media" to destroy the Republican opponents of Mitt Romney.

The dominant conservative publication The National Review had set the tone for this by endorsing Mitt Romney. Around the same time, Rush Limbaugh was visiting his idol from childhood, William Buckley, the founder of The National Review and considered by many to be the founder of the modern conservative movement.
Within days, Rush Limbaugh and other "conservative" talk show hosts and columnists were excoriating Huckabee.

Instead of offering an honest analysis of Huckabee's political career, they sought to portray him as a hayseed born-againer who loved raising taxes and wanted to bring about an Orwellian Big Brother state.

In the meantime, Romney decided to go negative against Huckabee in Iowa, where Huckabee had grabbed the lead. Romney's attack ads were a blatantly dishonest attempt to portray Huckabee as a crime loving tax-raiser, and, coupled with the constant barrage of misinformation from the talk shows, alienated a core constituent group of social conservatives who correctly recognized the attacks on Huckabee as a slam against themselves and their values.

The rift that is now splitting the conservatives will not be healed during this election process. The Christian right and the FairTax activists now see that they are welcome just as long as they go along with the Republican establishment. To think that someone like Huckabee who represents these groups should be president is considered heresy by the elitists who want to control the nomination process.

The secular elitists who enjoy the posh lifestyle and rubbing elbows with political snobs are embarrassed that grass-roots activists like conservative Christians and FairTaxers are in their tent and are succeeding in driving them out, ensuring that a liberal, be it Romney, McCain, Clinton, or Obama will be in the White House next year.

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Cost of Romney's Mass. Health-care Plan Skyrocketing

According to recent reports, the cost of Massachusetts' health insurance mandate will rise 85 percent, or $400 million, in 2009. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R), meanwhile, has been on the presidential campaign trail praising the program he put into place.

According to The Boston Globe, the cost increase is largely due to an increase in the number of people signing up for state-subsidized health insurance. State and federal taxpayers are likely to shoulder the cost increase.

"Essentially, the people who signed up under the mandate were the people who were getting subsidies," said Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Carmen Balber, a consumer advocate at Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, added, "What we've seen happen in Massachusetts is that lots of people are signing up for subsidized care," although "just 7 to 8 percent of the people who have newly signed up for health insurance have enrolled in a program they must pay full price for."

Tanner told Cybercast News Service that the state will likely need to raise taxes to cover the additional costs.

Romney, however, has been campaigning on the health insurance plan as a success.

"We put in place a plan that gets every citizen in our state health insurance, and it didn't cost us new money," he said during the Republican debate in New Hampshire on Jan. 5. "It didn't require us to raise taxes."

Mitt Romney likes to brag that he got universal coverage in Massachusetts without a tax increase," said Tanner. "I don't think that's going to be true for long."
Click here for full story...

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The Truth About The Economic Stimulus Package

What a way to buy votes.

With the threat of a recession looming in the near future, President Bush and Congress agreed to an economic stimulus package of "tax rebates" for lower to middle class households.

People eligible would get anywhere from $300-$1200 in the hope that they will spend the money and restore the lost momentum in the U.S. economy.

The $150 billion package would also give businesses $50 billion in tax incentives.
The normally super-slow federal government displayed tremendous speed in developing this package, which proves that when it comes to buying votes, both parties can spend recklessly and without regard for sound economic principles.

Many of the recipients do not pay taxes, so to call it a "tax rebate" is foolish. It is really a welfare check.

No word yet on where the money for this package comes from.

It would have been better to just tell everyone that does pay taxes to deduct the allotted rebate from their next payment to the IRS, but that wouldn't buy as many votes for either party.

Better yet, the best way to stimulate the economy would be to pass H.R. 25, also known as the FairTax. The FairTax would unleash the economic power of individuals, small businesses, and large corporations.

With the FairTax, every person with a job or business pays no income tax, so they get a full paycheck instead of having deductions taken from their pay and sent to the government agencies like the IRS and Social Security Administration.

The income tax is then replaced with a national sales tax of about 23%, which replaces the embedded taxes that are found in every product or service.

The result is that the prices of products and services remains virtually unchanged while reducing the size of government, getting the IRS out of our lives, and giving the poorest of Americans a real economic boost.

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Do we need another Reagan?

The folly of the Republican establishment in looking for a Ronald Reagan clone borders on cultism.

Reagan was a fine man who led the conservative movement to prominence, not a Reagan movement.

But the Republican establishment and elitists have determined that the only way for the conservative movement to make progress is to have a Reagan clone as the presidential nominee.

Would we want a Reagan clone today? No way!

Reagan turned tail and ran when the terrorists struck in Beirut on Oct. 23, 1983, killing 241 American soldiers. His lack of backbone in this situation became the default policy on terrorism until we were struck on 9/11.

In 1986, Reagan signed into law the Immigration Reform and Control Act, also known as Simpson-Mizzoli. This law gave amnesty to millions of illegal aliens and laid the groundwork for the invasion of our country by millions more that has happened since.

Reagan was great at battling liberalism and Communism, but his national security policies made America a soft target, and we are paying a heavy price for that today.

The Reagan purists of today slam Mike Huckabee because he's not Reaganesque. I say that's fine with me.

We need a conservative leader who can bring solutions for the problems we face in 2008, not 1980.

That leader is Mike Huckabee.

ConservativeKids.net

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Florida teen's story touched Huckabee

from the Union Leader

Connie and Sarah Davis are with the bandwagon.

In town for a whirlwind weekend with their candidate of choice, the mother-daughter duo from Ormond Beach, Fla., found themselves screaming like a pair of political primary groupies Friday, watching as Republican Mike Huckabee rocked the campaign trail in Henniker.

"It was really cool," said Connie Davis. "I think they were playing 'Freebird,' or some Journey song. Anyway, at the end, Governor Huckabee was playing with the band and people were rushing the stage, and he looked over at us and nodded. He thanked us for coming."

Then the two tourists were whisked backstage to hang out with Huckabee and his roundhouse of roadies - most notably Chuck Norris and his wife, Gena.

"Oh, and a crew from 'Nightline' was interviewing him, too," said Davis, a conservative Christian who home-schools her four kids, including the oldest, 15-year-old Sarah.

She said their journey to New Hampshire for this pivotal moment in political history was an unexpected blessing.

"Sarah has been taking a government class this year and she has become more and more passionate about Huckabee," said Davis.

So much so, that the teen asked family members to contribute to Huckabee's campaign as her Christmas gift this year - a small request that triggered an unexpected chain of events

read the rest of the story...

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Why They Serve: Maj. Carter's Story

Army Maj. Lisa L. Carter, a two-time Iraq veteran, wants to share her life’s success story with the American public.

Army Maj. Lisa L. Carter. Defense Department photo (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available.

Carter recalled her days as a single mother working at a post office in Atlanta while caring for her 2-year-old daughter a few years after her 1984 graduation from Fulton High School there.

“I met a lot of retired military personnel” at the post office, Carter said, noting the veterans encouraged her to join the Army Reserve as a way to improve her life.

Today, Carter is an active-duty Army officer. She also is among 12 servicemembers participating in the sixth quarterly iteration of the Defense Department’s “Why We Serve” public-outreach program. Carter will tell her story to community, business and veterans group audiences, and at other gatherings.

Carter said she enjoys her career as an Army officer and wants the public to know military people have the same dreams and aspirations as their civilian counterparts. “We are human beings just as they are,” Carter observed.

And although wartime deployments may be hard on servicemembers’ personal lives, military members remain dedicated to their pledge to defend the nation, she said.

“It is stressful to be deployed. It is stressful to be away from your family. But servicemembers know that this is their job and responsibility -- to serve,” Carter said.

Following the advice of her post office co-workers, Carter enlisted in the Army Reserve in 1987 as an administrative specialist. During her initial training at Fort Jackson, S.C., she said, she experienced a revelation that jolted her mind.

“I saw a black female officer,” Carter recalled. “I looked at her and thought: ‘If she can do it, surely I can do it.’”

Then and there, Carter set a personal goal to obtain a college degree and a commission. In 1996, she graduated from Georgia State University with a bachelor’s degree in social work and earned an Army lieutenant’s gold bars through the school’s ROTC program.

read the rest of her story on conservativekids.net

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The Truth About Income Taxes

One thing you will constantly hear from liberals is that the rich people in America don't pay their fair share of income taxes while the middle class and "working poor" shoulder a larger share of the tax burden in our country.

In the 2008 presidential race, the Democrats are promising to repeal the "Bush tax cuts for the rich". What they are referring to are the cuts in the rate of income taxes that occurred during President Bush's first administration, which appeared to reduce the amount of tax paid by the richest Americans.

Income taxes are taxes that individuals pay to the government based on the money (income) that they earn, whether from a job or from the profits of their business. It may also include income from pensions, social security, interest earned on investments, and other income sources.

But how much do the richest of Americans pay in taxes compared to the average person? Are the liberals and Democrats right, or are they using class envy to gain political power?

The truth is that the richest 1% of Americans pay more than 39.38% of the total income taxes, even though they only earn 18% of the income. Since President Bush took office, the top 1% of earners have gone from paying 37.42% to 39.38%, carrying more of the tax burden than ever.

In fact, the top 50% of income earners actually pay 96.93% of the total income tax burden in our country. (Click here to see the charts from the IRS)

That means that the bottom 50% pay only 3.7% of the total income tax burden.

Since the poor pay no income taxes*, why do liberals lie about it to the people?

First of all, they know that it's human nature for people who have less to be jealous of those who have more. Whether it's a nicer skateboard or a bigger house or a new car, children and adults usually want bigger or better things and can become jealous of people who have those bigger and better things.

The same thing happens with money. People with less money are often jealous of people with more money. Because they make less money, they feel that people who they consider rich should pay more money than them in taxes.

After all, if the rich have so much money, they can afford to give more of it to the government, right?

This kind of taxation, where the more you earn, the higher percentage you pay in taxes, is called progressive taxation. Progressive taxation is one of the foundations of communism, socialism and Marxism.

Unfortunately, our American economic system has been infected with this kind of Marxism: progressive taxation, the welfare system, food stamp programs, Social Security and Medicare; and now the liberals are proposing some form of universal health care, which is socialized medicine.

People who are successful through hard work and smart money management are punished by having more of their money confiscated by the government (taxes), while those who don't work and don't achieve are rewarded with government freebies at the expense of those who do.

The true power of government is it's ability to take people's money away from them and give it to someone who will vote for them. Liberals use this power to buy the votes of the poor, who are essentially voting themselves government benefits when they put liberals and Democrats in public office.

Only by educating the public and using the power of the vote can we reverse this trend.

First, people need to learn that by hard work, smart money management, and better education, they can achieve financial success without the help of government.

Next, we need to make sure that conservative political candidates who understand and promote the free market, individual liberty and responsibility, and smaller, less intrusive government get our support and votes.

* Even though the poorest people may have income tax deductions from their paychecks during the year, the Earned Income Credit and other credits gives them that money and more back during tax season, which amounts to welfare.

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SWAT Team Invades Home, Seizes Boy for Medical Treatment

Comment: The story below is a good example of what happens when government violates it's constitutional limits. In most states, child welfare agencies have authority that is unconstitutional. Child welfare agencies do not have to meet the constitutional requirements of "probable cause" and are allowed to violate the "unreasonable searches and seizures" clause of the 4th Amendment. You'll also notice that the father of the family is described as a "self-proclaimed constitutionalist" by the Sheriff, as if that's a bad thing.

original story on World Net Daily
Nearly a dozen members of a police SWAT team in western Colorado punched a hole in the front door and invaded a family's home with guns drawn, demanding that an 11-year-old boy who had had an accidental fall accompany them to the hospital, on the order of Garfield County Magistrate Lain Leoniak.

The boy's parents and siblings were thrown to the floor at gunpoint and the parents were handcuffed in the weekend assault, and the boy's father told WND it was all because a paramedic was upset the family preferred to care for their son themselves.

Someone, apparently the unidentified paramedic, called police, the sheriff's office and social services, eventually providing Leoniak with a report that generated the magistrate's court order to the sheriff's office for the SWAT team assault on the family's home in a mobile home development outside of Glenwood Springs, the father, Tom Shiflett, told WND.

WND calls and e-mails to Garfield County Social Services were not returned, and Leoniak, who earlier served as a water court clerk/referee, also was not available.

Sheriff Lou Vallario, however, did call back, and told WND he ordered his officers to do exactly what the magistrate demanded.

"I was given a court order by the magistrate to seize the child, and arrange for medical evaluation, and that's what we did," he said.

According to friends of the family, Tom Shiflett, who has 10 children including six still at home, and served with paramedics in Vietnam, was monitoring his son's condition himself.

The paramedic and magistrate, however, ruled that that wasn't adequate, and dispatched the officers to take the boy, John, to a hospital, where a doctor evaluated him and released him immediately.

read the rest of the story here...