Sunday Faith Blog

There is a new stone monument to atheism in Florida.  On it is inscribed:

"An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty banished, war eliminated."

The problem there is how many hospitals have been founded and run by Christian groups, how much good is done by Christian groups other than prayer, and how involved Christians are in the pursuit of saving unborn life.  And, of course, Christians also want disease conquered, poverty banished and war eliminated.  So, it's kind of an odd choice for the atheists, but pretty powerful proof of Christianity's goodness always winning out, to me.

I haven't been happy at all over groups desirous of ridding the Ten Commandments, for example, from public property, but the atheists have been so utterlytraumatized from those things that they decided to give up trying to get Christian messages and symbols banned and now will have their messages installed next to the Christian messages.  This, I'm very happy about because, as I took apart that quote on the new atheist monument, we see what will always win out.


"For I am convinced that neither death  nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord."  Romans 8:38, 39

I am, too.  Thank God.

How do you feel about THIS SITUATION?

Have a beautiful Sunday.
z

Paula and Alec

Paula Deen, thirty years ago, said the "N" word and did a few other unsavory, rather racist things.

Alec Baldwin, three days ago, Tweeted to a Daily Mail reporter who's apparently gay:
"George Stark, you lying little bitch. I am gonna f%#@ you up," he continued. "I want all of my followers and beyond to straighten out this f***ing little b****, George Stark. ... My wife and I attend a funeral to pay our respects to an old friend, and some toxic Brit writes this f***ing trash."
Baldwin's rant - which included threats - continued with, "[I would] put my foot up your f***ing a**, George Stark, but I'm sure you'd dig it too much. ... I'm gonna find you, George Stark, you toxic little queen, and I'm gonna f***...you...up."  (Z: sorry if this offends...)

So...."toxic little QUEEN"  "bitch", etc?

Paul Deen's been dropped by Target, Food Channel, Smithfield hams, etc.etc..

Think Alec Baldwin might be dropped from all the television commercials he does?  Or will he never work in Hollywood again?  You know, that same Hollywood that's so sensitive to homosexuals and any kind of aspersions?

Think that'll happen? :-) If NOT, WHY not?

P.S. I just read that Baldwin's apologized to the gay community.
Dean apologized, too.   let's see.............

z

Illinois versus Arizona........

Illinois:

The Governor of Illinois is jogging with his dog along a nature trail. A coyote jumps out and attacks and kills the Governor's dog.

1. The Governor ...starts to intervene and the coyote bites him. He reflects upon the movie "Bambi" and then realizes he should stop because the coyote is only doing what is natural.

2. He calls animal control.. Animal Control captures the coyote and bills the State $200 testing it for diseases and $500 for relocating it.

3. He calls a veterinarian. The vet collects the dead dog and bills the State $200 testing it for diseases.

4. The Governor goes to hospital and spends $3,500 getting checked for diseases from the coyote and on getting his bite wound bandaged.

5. The running trail gets shut down for 6 months while Fish & Game conducts a $100,000 survey to make sure the area is now free of dangerous animals.

6. The Governor spends $50,000 in state funds implementing a "coyote awareness program" for residents of the area.

7. The State Legislature spends $2 million to study how to better treat rabies and how to permanently eradicate the disease throughout the world.

8 The Governor's security agent is fired for not stopping the attack. The State spends $150,000 to hire and train a new agent with additional special training re: the nature of coyotes.

9. PETA protests the coyote's relocation and files a $5 million suit against the State.

Arizona:

The Governor of Arizona is jogging with her dog along a nature trail. A Coyote jumps out and attacks the dog.

1. The Governor shoots the coyote with her concealed carry pistol and keeps jogging.

The Governor has spent $0.50 on a .45 ACP hollow point cartridge.

2. The Buzzards come along later and eat the dead coyote.

And that, my friends, is why Illinois is broke and Arizona is not

Z:  You get the picture!  Any thoughts?  Can we even stop the madness at this late date?  We all know Illinois is not alone and Arizona's governor would probably get put in jail by Eric Holder because he'd put the poor coyote on an endangered species list, sue the NRA for supplying ammunition and put the buzzard in a prison with a new gym and plasma TVs!! :-)

geeeeeeeeeeeeZ

I need a day off

.........I wish you a really good one!

I will probably never give up blogging but I threaten to from time to time and, if I were, today would be the day...after all the horrible scandals, Obama's reaction to the NSA leaker (see post below) and the IDIOT post the one down under that.  There's a limit, right?

Have you reached YOURS?



Z

Snowden "A made-for-TV movie.." suggests Obama?

Is Obama kidding?  Did you see THIS?  Please read that, you'll be stunned.
Did you know he hasn't called Putin or anybody in China?
Here's a couple of quotes from the article....

"The Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, has said Snowden still has perhaps more than 200 sensitive documents.
"I get why it's a fascinating story," Obama said. "I'm sure there will be a made-for-TV movie somewhere down the line.""

That's how Obama views the Snowden situation?  "a fascinating story" which will be a MOVIE?"...suggesting that's the only interest?   Or is he trying to show Putin he doesn't care?  Or is he showing that he doesn't have a clue as to the severity of the leaks as Feinstein says?

This morning we should all feel so humiliated.   I'd have thought he'd take this seriously.  Unreal.
On the other hand, when you're trying to underplay yet another scandal.................

Z

"A country run by idiots.........."

This was all emailed to me and I had to share it.

 
 Food For Thought
 
If you can get arrested for hunting or fishing without a license, but not for being in the country illegally ... you might live in a country run by idiots.

If you have to get your parents’ permission to go on a field trip or take an aspirin in school, but not to get an abortion ... You might live in a country run by idiots.

If the only school curriculum allowed to explain how we got here is evolution, but the government stops
a $15 million construction project to keep a rare spider from evolving to extinction ... You might live in a country run by idiots.
 
If you have to show identification to board an airplane, cash a check, buy liquor or check out a library book, but not to vote who runs the government ... You might live in a country run by idiots.
 
If the government wants to ban stable, law-abiding citizens from owning gun magazines with more than
ten rounds, but gives 20 F-16 fighter jets to the crazy new leaders in Egypt ... You might live in a country run by idiots.
 
If, in the largest city, you can buy two 16-ounce sodas, but not a 24-ounce soda because 24-ounces of a sugary drink might make you fat ... You might live in a country run by idiots.
 
If an 80-year-old woman can be stripped searched by the TSA but a woman in a hijab is only subject to
having her neck and head searched ... You might live in a country run by idiots.
 
If your government believes that the best way to eradicate trillions of dollars of debt is to spend trillions
more ... You might live in a country run by idiots.

If a seven year old boy can be thrown out of school for saying his teacher’s "cute," but hosting a sexual
exploration or diversity class in grade school is perfectly acceptable ... You might live in a country run by idiots.
 
If children are forcibly removed from parents who discipline them with spankings while children of addicts
are left in filth and drug infested “homes”... You might live in a country run by idiots.
 
If hard work and success are met with higher taxes and more government intrusion, while not working
is rewarded with EBT cards, WIC checks, Medicaid, subsidized housing and free cell phones ... You might live in a country run by idiots.
 
If the government's plan for getting people back to work is to incentivize NOT working with 99 weeks
of unemployment checks and no requirement to prove they applied but can’t find work ... You might live in a country run by idiots.

If being stripped of the ability to defend yourself makes you more "safe" according to the government ... You might live in a country run by idiots.


Z:   so............which of this do you disagree with?  I'd be interested in hearing.........let's talk about it.


have a great Thursday.
me

Disappointed Eric Holder

The Supreme Court today ruled that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 relies on 40-year old data no longer reflective of racial progress and changes in US society. By nullifying Section 4 of the act, the Supreme Court remands this issue to the Congress.

What is this issue all about? It was a lawsuit initiated by Shelby County, Alabama that questioned whether a 2006 congressional decision, to reauthorize Section 5 of the Act under the pre-existing coverage formula in Section 4(b), exceeded the authority of Congress under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and in violation of the Tenth Amendment and Article IV of the US Constitution.

Okay, so let’s review. From 1865 to 1964, Democrats in southern states did everything they could to deny black Americans their constitutional rights. These were called Jim Crow laws (Jim Crow being an epithet for black persons). In 1965, the federal government intervened to prohibit these Democrats from discriminating against black Americans, which was a de facto assault against the sovereignty of states. Specifically, Section 4 of the Act used a formula that intended to determine which jurisdictions within states had to gain federal permission to modify its voting laws.

Today, states that were once guilty of these civil rights violations are no longer discriminating against black Americans because democrats no longer control these states. So it is appropriate for the court to remand this issue to the Congress, which must now redevise its formula as a condition of continuing to interfere in matters that belong exclusively to the states.

The court's decision disappointed Eric Holder, however. In his response to the Supreme Court decision, he said, “Now like many others across the country, I am deeply disappointed—deeply disappointed with the Supreme Court’s decision in this matter. This decision represents a serious setback with reference to voting rights, and has the potential to negatively affect millions of Americans across the country.”

Mr. Holder must be talking about the setback in suffrage that resulted from his refusal to prosecute black thugs who attempted to intimidate voters in 2009.  But Holder is right: all is not well in America when in some states during the 2012 general election, black rednecks and white liberals voted numerous times to reelect Barack Obama, thereby stealing the election —efforts, which some believe, began as early as 2009.

Yes, indeed; America has a lot of work left before we achieve voting honesty. What has changed since 1965 is that it isn’t a bunch of white democrats denying votes to black Americans. It is rather progressive communists denying fair and honest voting to everyone else.

—Mustang Sends

The Chicago Way should sink in............

...........I posted it last night and I think we should all take a look.   It sure sounds familiar.
"Don't complain, don't make waves, don't protest or you're in trouble.............."

Don't miss reading the story below.

z

The Chicago Way

The Chicago Tribune 

John Kass 

IRS scandal: a reminder of how I learned about

'The Chicago Way'

          

May 19, 2013

As the IRS scandal attests, President Barack Obama brought

The Chicago Way to Washington.

(Andrew Harrer, Bloomberg / May 19, 2013)

The Internal Revenue Service scandal now devouring the Obama administration — the outrageous use of the federal taxing authority to target tea party and other conservatives — certainly makes for meaty partisan politics.

But this scandal is about more than partisanship. It's bigger than whether the Republicans win or the Democrats lose.

It's even bigger than President Barack Obama. Yes, bigger than Obama.

It is opening American eyes to the fundamental relationship between free people and those who govern them. This one is about the Republic and whether we can keep it.

And it started me thinking of years ago, of my father and my uncle in Chicago and how government muscle really works.

Because if you want to understand The Chicago Way of things in Washington these days, with the guys from Chicago in charge of the White House and the federal leviathan, there's one place you start:

You start in Chicago.

My father and uncle ran a small business, a supermarket on the South Side. Uncle George worked in the front, my father in the butcher shop in the back. My uncle had been a teacher. My father had plowed his fields with a mule.

They were immigrants who came here from Greece with nothing in their pockets but a determination to work, and the belief that here, in America, no other power could roll in with tanks and put their boots on the necks of their children.

My father and uncle, like the rest of the family, valued education and books and free political debate. And so at large extended family Sundays, we'd all sit around the dinner table, many uncles and aunts and cousins, young and old.

There were conservatives and socialists, Roosevelt Democrats and Reagan Republicans and a few bewildered, equivocal moderates in between, everyone squabbling, laughing, telling stories.

No matter whose house we were visiting, the TV was never turned on after dinner. Instead, we'd have coffee and fruit and dessert and argument. We had different views, we loved each other, and even strangers who showed up were expected to join in, to debate education, the presidency, social issues, the war, drugs, bluejeans, long hair, baseball, everything.

Uncle Alex was the uncle who told us young people how best to make our points. He ran a snack shop in the Bridgeport neighborhood — the legendary home of Chicago mayors and Democratic machine bosses.

"Don't wait for a ticket," he'd say, and puff on his cigar, always in a white shirt and tie, on those family Sundays. So we'd just jump in when we could, like the rest.

One Sunday, I must have been 12 or 13, I decided to ask what I thought was an intelligent question that was something like this:

We talk politics every Sunday, we fight about this and that, so why aren't you politically active outside?

Why don't you get involved in politics?

There was an immediate silence. The older cousins looked away. The aunts and uncles stared at me in horror, as if I'd just announced I was selling heroin after school.

You could hear them breathing. No one spoke. I could feel myself blushing.

Someone quickly changed the subject to some safe old story. It could have been the one about how our grandfather named the family mule — a white, big-headed animal — after President Truman. My sin seemed forgotten.

But I couldn't forget it. I couldn't understand how we could argue about politics over baklava and watermelon and coffee, but not put it into practice.

We could support a political candidacy, we could donate or work for one or another politician that we agreed with.

This is America, I said.

"Are you in your good senses?" said my father. "We have lives here. We have businesses. If we get involved in politics, they will ruin us."

And no one, not the Roosevelt Democrats or the Reagan Republicans, disagreed. The socialists, the communists, the royalists, everyone nodded their heads.

This was Chicago. And for a business owner to get involved meant one thing: It would cost you money and somebody from government could destroy you.

The health inspectors would come, and the revenue department, the building inspectors, the fire inspectors, on and on. The city code books aren't thick because politicians like to write new laws and regulations. The codes are thick because when government swings them at a citizen, they hurt.

And who swings the codes and regulations at those who'd open their mouths? A government worker. That government worker owes his or her job to the political boss. And that boss has a boss.

The worker doesn't have to be told. The worker wants a promotion. If an irritant rises, it is erased. The hack gets a promotion. This is government.

So everybody kept their mouths shut, and Chicago was hailed by national political reporters as the city that works.

I didn't understand it all back then, but I understand it now. Once there were old bosses. Now there are new bosses. And shopkeepers still keep their mouths shut. Tavern owners still keep their mouths shut.

Even billionaires keep their mouths shut.

One hard-working billionaire whose children own the Chicago Cubs dared to open his mouth. Joe Ricketts considered funding a political group critical of Obama before last year's campaign. Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Obama's former chief of staff, made it clear that if the Cubs wanted City Hall's approval to refurbish decrepit Wrigley Field, Ricketts better back off.

It happened. He backed off. It was sickening. But it was and is Chicago.

And now — with the IRS used as political muscle and the Obama administration keeping that secret until after the president was elected — America understands it too.

Where was the TEA PARTY?

How many of us have asked ourselves this question about the last presidential election?  It all seems to come together now.

WHERE WAS THE TEA PARTY? (from The Wall Street Journal)

By Peggy Noonan;  June 21, 2013

One of the great questions about the 2012 campaign has been “Where was the tea party?” They were not the fierce force they’d been in the 2010 cycle, when Republicans took back the House. Some of us think the answer to the question is: “Targeted by the IRS, buried under paperwork and unable to raise money.”

The economist Stan Veuger, on the American Enterprise Institute‘s blog, takes the question a step further.
The Democrats had been badly shaken by the Republican comeback of 2010. They feared a repeat in 2012 that would lose them the White House.

Might targeting the tea-party groups—diverting them, keeping them from forming and operating—seem a shrewd campaign strategy in the years between 2010 and 2012? Sure. Underhanded and illegal, but potentially effective.

Veuger writes: “It is a well-known fact that the Tea Party movement dealt the president his famous “shellacking” in the 2010 midterm election. Less well-known is the actual number of votes this new movement delivered—and the continuing effects these votes could have had in 2012 had the movement not been demobilized by the IRS.”

The research paper Veurger and his colleagues have put out notes that, in Veuger’s words, “the Tea Party movement’s huge success [in 2010] was not the result of a few days of work by an elected official or two, but involved activists all over the country who spent the year and a half leading up to the midterm elections volunteering, organizing, donating, and rallying. Much of these grassroots activities were centered around 501(c)4s, which according to our research were an important component of the Tea Party movement and its rise.”

More: “The bottom line is that the Tea Party movement, when properly activated, can generate a huge number of votes—more votes in 2010, in fact, than the vote advantage Obama held over Romney in 2012*. The data show that had the Tea Party groups continued to grow at the pace seen in 2009 and 2010, and had their effect on the 2012 vote been similar to that seen in 2010, they would have brought the Republican Party as many as 5-8.5 million votes compared to Obama’s victory margin of 5 million.”  (*Z: which many of us wondered about because so many Americans identify as Conservatives but didn't vote, or didn't vote that way)

Think about the sheer political facts of the president’s 2012 victory. The first thing we learned, in the weeks after the voting, was that the Obama campaign was operating with a huge edge in its technological operation—its vast digital capability and sophistication. The second thing we learned, in the past month, is that while the campaign was on, the president’s fiercest foes, in the Tea Party, were being thwarted, diverted and stopped.

Technological savvy plus IRS corruption. The president’s victory now looks colder, more sordid, than it did. Which is why our editor, James Taranto, calls him “President Asterisk.”


Money was stopped, new groups were thwarted, questions from the IRS kept many, many groups from proceeding for a couple of YEARS, just long enough to get through the election without having raised money by which to put the same OOMPH in the 2010 elections.  How could it be anything else?  

Z

China and Snowden

So....The Chinese say the extradition papers weren't correct so they let Snowden out........Is this the beginning of unfriendly countries using our disdain at Eric Holder against us? The Chinese know about the scandals and how thinking Americans don't trust the DoJ anymore. 
If China had wanted to respect us, they could have said "This isn't correct...redo, or we're getting him to Russia"...but they just sent him out.  Because Holder's reputation is fun for nasty countries to make fun of? 

If the papers weren't correct, WHY NOT?  Is this yet another Holder scandal?  Or SHOULD it be? I have heard very little about that aspect of his leaving Hong Kong.

What do you think?

Z

Sunday Faith Post

Coming on the heels of yesterday's post below, and the comments, I'm going to ask today that we all keep Black America in mind and pray that they will start to come to Conservatism in larger numbers.  THIS shouldn't be happening.
Let's pray that the hackneyed attitude of Democrats being 'on their side' reveals itself for what it really is and that our Black neighbors start a conversation in their communities and, particularly, with their children.

We all see Zonation videos from time to time on our friends' blogs, and I urge you to send them to Black friends and family.  There's a young Black man who really says it how it is.   More people speaking out like him will finally make it easier for other Black Americans to wake up and see that at least they should regard both sides with respect and consider Conservatism even if they decide it's not where they're going to necessarily vote.

Pray that the media highlights more Conservative Blacks.  Pray about all of this! Pray hard!  Pray for Black churches because many still teach the values of Conservatism whether they realize it or not.  The Black Christian community is largely against abortion so pray that this issue changes their hearts and minds toward those of us who want to protect human life.


"Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another."  1 John 4:11

Talk about Conservatism with a Black friend in the spirit of love....

Have a great day.  It'll be a better day if you read the original poem below!   thanks.

Z

A poem I had to share

Courage a Generational Poem

1 I come to my father in tears

I cry out my inability to move forward

2 He says to have courage and overcome your fears

To go, to go half a league, half a league onward

3 He tells me stories of old

Of a father who’s treasure lay not in gold

But in his sons and daughter

4 He was not a perfect father

But he taught his son this

5 That life is not about gain rather

It is the love of a father that will save us from the abyss

6 And this love is one that you must also demonstrate

You must take it with you wherever you go

7 But it is not simply a mental state

It is one act of courage after another

8 My Father leaned forward

 To me and said I love you, now love others and move

Half a league onward

This is by our friend and fellow blogger/commenter Elmer's Brother's son.

I thought it was so terrific that it's a privilege to publish it for you all.

Z