What the Future May Hold

It’s been 10 months since I regularly wrote for this blog and now I’m thinking about picking it up again.  Much has changed in that 10 months and little of that change has been positive.  This country is accelerating down the road to destruction more rapidly each day.  I don’t know if it’s even possible to stop it but I think conservatives and Christians have to make the attempt. I’m a fan of Rush Limbaugh and I’m not ashamed to say so but I don’t always agree with him.  For example, I don’t share his optimism when it comes to this country.  Rush is convinced that America is so great that no President and no Congress can bring it down.  I believe America has been a great country but we’ve lost much of what made us great.  Would I like to see us regaini that greatness?  Of course!  Do I think we can do so?  I don’t know. We’ve gone so far down this road.  I argued before the election that the rate of change was slow enough that most American’s didn’t notice the slow march left and that, perhaps, what we needed was an acceleration of that march so that the American people would wake up and take notice.  I predicted that Barach Obama would be an even worse President than Jimmy Carter and it took a Jimmy Carter to get a Ronald Reagan. Well, we got Obama and he and the Democrats are moving at breakneck speed to turn back any and all conservatives gains over the last eight years.  They are taking... [Read more]

Some Much Needed Perspective

Two days until election day and both liberals and conservatives alike are worried.  Tuesday has the potential to be another razor close election, though some liberals are predicting an Obama landslide.  On the other side, Tammy Bruce, filling in on the Laura Ingraham show Friday predicted a McCain win. I don’t know about you but these nail biters are taking their toll on me. As someone with strong political views and a solid conservative ideology, it has been pretty standard for me to place a great deal of confidence in my political philosophy.  That’s true both in the capacity of that philosophy to win the day in the arena of ideas and in its ability as a governing philosophy to create sound government.  I assume the other side feels pretty much the same way about their political philosophy and ideals.  For both, Wednesday will either be a day of celebration or a day of mourning. Following the ‘06 elections I was fairly depressed for several weeks.  I wondered how we’d survive as a nation with liberals in control again.  Certainly the results of that election haven’t exactly produced or inspired a lot of confidence in the American people.  The current Congress has the lowest approval ratings since congressional approval ratings have been taken.  But America is still here.  We haven’t disappeared into the abyss. Lately I’ve been ruminating on the wisdom of placing so much faith in a political philosophy.  While I’m not prepared to jetison sound political... [Read more]

What Does the GOP, and This Country, Need?

I know I wasn’t going to be posting here but this is just too important.  This is cross posted from Ft Hard Knox.   It’s an interesting question.  The GOP loses in the ‘06 election were widely attributed, both by GOP leadership and the media, to unhappiness over the Iraq war.  While there was certainly unhappiness over the war, it was clear to most conservatives that the war was not the reason for the loss.  Rather, the abandonment of conservative principles by the Republican Congress was the issue.  Under the Bush administration we saw the largest growth of the federal government since LBJ’s Great Society. Ronald Reagan wanted to eliminate the Department of Education.  George W. Bush grew it beyond all recognition and Congressional Republicans went right along.  Until the Democrats gained control of Congress the President had yet to use his veto pen.  All the while GOP leadership and President Bush claimed the mantle of conservatism. When Bush first ran in 2000 I knew he was no conservative.  I voted against him in the primaries.  Compassionate conservatism was nothing but a smoke screen for big government.  Since then GOP leadership embraced this big government "conservatism" and their governance was hardly distinguishable for the Democrats.  With spending out of control and government growing at an increasing rate, the conservative rank and file said "enough." ... [Read more]

40 Years Later: King’s Legacy

As expected, all three presidential candidates are giving speeches today commemorating the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.  And rightly so.  Dr. King’s struggle was a righteous struggle.  By the time of King’s rise to leadership, the plight of blacks in much of America was bleak.  The south in particular was engaged in such blatant racial discrimination there was little argument that it wasn’t happening.  Rather, it was being justified on all kinds of spurious grounds.  Racism was alive and well and many whites truly believed that blacks were inferior and therefore, discrimination was justified and justifiable. King worked against such thinking and he did so following the path Gandhi had followed to end British oppression in India.  King was committed to several things.  First he wanted equal treatment for blacks.  He wanted the end of black and white counters and water fountains.  He wanted the end of black seating at the back of the bus.  He wanted a "colorblind society" so that everyone was "judged by the content of their character" rather than the "color of their skin." And King was clear about how to achieve such a color blind society.  The civil rights movement would be successful not through terrorism and violence but through non-violent civil disobedience.  King, like Gandhi, believed accepting the consequences of his actions. ... [Read more]

UK Independent reports the Mecca orientation of the Flight 93 crescent

On Saturday, the conflict over Islamic symbolism in the Flight 93 memorial got its first international news coverage. One highlight is the conversation that Leonard Doyle, U.S editor of the UK Independent, had with Tom Burnett Sr.: Tom Burnett, whose son Tom Jnr died in the crash, said of the design that it is “aesthetically wonderful,” but “a lot of it contains Islamic symbols”. He added: “We ought to just throw the design out and start anew because it really dishonours those who died.” Towards the end, Doyle moseys around to the bombshell, reporting the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent as a fact. The bad news is that Doyle immediately tries to dismiss this explosive information by making a completely irrelevant and factually preposterous counterclaim: Part of the blame must lie with Paul Murdoch, architect of the winning design who initially described it as a “Crescent of Embrace”. The title caused the internet to erupt with conspiracy theories. Then someone noticed that the arc actually pointed towards Mecca. The fact that this was also the direction to Washington DC was lost on the conspiracy theorists. No, the direction to Mecca is NOT the direction to Washington. The shortest-distance direction to Mecca (the way that Muslims calculate the direction to Mecca) heads northeast from the western Pennsylvania crash-site. Some people find that counterintuitive, but Pennsylvania and Mecca are both in the northern hemisphere,... [Read more]