if christina can do it...

Nobody really visits here, but what the heck. I write for the base newpaper every once in a while, and I might as well post what I have written here cause it is easy to do.

VOXAIR submission

Padre Bob Granholm

Renowned religious leader is fawned over by a well-known call-lady in public setting


It had all the markings of a scandal. It was a scandal. “Renowned religious leader is fawned over by a well-known call-lady in public setting” is how the website headlines read. When asked, the owner of the establishment where this was alleged to have occurred, a local community council member, expressed his shock and outrage over the incident: “She embarrassed everyone- she was crying, kissing him- why, she even dumped a bottle of expensive massage oil over him. The smell filled the room. We all just wanted her to go away!”, he reported, speaking on a talk-show program. “This guy should not have tolerated this. In fact, he seemed to be enjoying it! We all wondered how he knew her- maybe he should be more careful. It wasn’t so long ago that others fell from power over slipups like this.” he said, referring to the ex-governors’ recent divorce and remarriage to an exotic dancer.

What wasn’t so well reported was the response of the religious leader to the accusations. Far from denying things, he used the whole incident to make a point about abstract theological concepts. Those talking with him about the event had trouble really understanding what he was saying. Well, as one news organization says: “We report, You decide”, so here is what the Jewish Rabbi named Jesus had to say when he appeared with Greta Van Susteren, On the Record:
“After the woman poured oil on me, and washed my feet with her hair, I turned to the host and said "Simon, I have a story to tell you." "Tell me, Rabbi," he said.
"Two men owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him fifty thousand dollars, and the other five hundred dollars. Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he cancelled the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?"
Simon replied, "I suppose the one who had the bigger debt cancelled.” “You have judged correctly," I said.
Then I turned toward the woman and said to Simon, "Do you see this woman? I came into your guest house, and you did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little loves little."
Then I said to her, "Your sins are forgiven." The other guests began to say among themselves, "Who is this who even forgives sins?" I said to the woman, "Your faith has saved you; go in peace."*
So Jesus seems to be claiming that he can do what really only Jews think God can do- forgive sins. And he equates the forgiveness of sins with extravagant expressions of love- and suggests that, despite her background, she can have peace. We are all still scratching our heads over that one.
*Luke 7: 36 ff

everyone should read christina's blog

Barak Obama will go down as one of the worse presidents in history

I am appalled at the shallowness, arrogance and hypocrasy of this administration.

In the words of scott johnston

Why I am depressed
Share Post PrintMarch 22, 2009 Posted by Scott at 8:02 AM
Victor Davis Hanson asks why so many Americans are depressed. Suggesting five themes that might provide an answer, he thinks it might be more than the economy that explains our state of mind. I agree, but none of Dr. Hanson's themes accounts for my despair.

I feel utterly powerless to do anything about the fellow in the Oval Office who combines infantile leftism and adolescent grandiosity in roughly equal measures. It seems to me that every day he is responsible for assaults on the freedom and well being of the American people. I can't keep up and I can't stand to pay attention.

His aim seems to be to reduce us to government dependents. His inattention to rehabilitation of the financial system in lieu of vastly expanding the size and scope of the government is a dead giveaway, as is his lack of concern over the vast destruction of wealth his policies are working (and will continue to work).

Perhaps most depressing to me is the manifestation of his adolescent grandiosity in his stewardship of foreign policy and national security. He doesn't understand that the government of Iran is intent on acquiring nuclear weapons it can put to evil purposes. He thinks he can sweet-talk them out of achieving this objective.

He doesn't understand that the government of Iran is a tyranny that oppresses the Iranian people. He thus addresses the mad mullahs as though they represent the people of Iran.

Contrast the new year's messages to the Iranian people promulgated by James Kirchick (the 25-year-old assistant editor of the New Republic) and of Shimon Peres (the 85-year-old president of Israel) with Obama's palaver. By contrast, the president of the United States is disgracing us.

Get a clue, man! The mullahs who rule Iran with an iron fist hate you and everything you represent. They hate you in part because they view you as an apostate. They hate you in part because you represent the United States. They hate you in part because you represent the American people. They don't hate us becasuse President Bush didn't talk nice to them!

Make no mistake. The mullahs love the weakness and stupdity that President Obama transmits at ear-shattering levels in his message to them (and in his earlier Al Arabiya interview). They rebuff his advances because they know he will only treat their rebuffs as reasons to pursue them with renewed ardor.

Obama believes his cluelessness represents the higher wisdom. It is a source of his monumental self-regard. Thus his response to Vice President Cheney's criticism of Obama for undoing, and vowing to undo, the Bush administration policies that kept the American people safe from attack safe for seven years after 9/11:

President Obama, rejecting former Vice President Dick Cheney's contention that Obama has put the nation at greater risk of terrorism, suggests in an interview airing tonight on "60 Minutes" that the previous administration's stance was an "advertisement for anti-American sentiment."

"How many terrorists have actually been brought to justice under the philosophy that is being promoted by Vice President Cheney?" Obama asks. "It hasn't made us safer. What it has been is a great advertisement for anti-American sentiment."

"Brought to justice"? Good god, man, what the hell are you talking about? I don't know what he is talking about -- they haven't seen the inside of the United States District Court for the District of Colulmbia? -- but I do understand what Obama means when he says the Bush policies were "a great advertisement for anti-American sentiment." Obama and his fellow Democrats helped make them so by spreading pernicious falsehoods about their illegality and cruelty. Even worse, like the pitiful Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Obama aspires for us to be be well liked!

I am depressed because the president of the United States is a fool who will immiserate us, render us wards of the state and lose us our life and liberty to those who understand what they are about.

global warming skeptic

over 700 peer-reviewed publish scientists dispute global warming hysteria.

Its a scam folks.

Kudos to President Bush

I think Debra Saunder (SF Chronicle) is pretty accurate in this analysis of the Bush years. I, like her, expected better management of the government, but overall Pres. Bush was a success for the reasons Saunders lists.

the case for Israel

This article by Natan Sharanski is a great sumation of why Israel has acted as it did in Gaza.

ok, back to blogging

I have been away from this a long time, but there is so much good writing out there, I wanted a forum to once again share this with you all.

some optimism on Iran/Iraq

Here are a couple of good reports which suggest some grounds for optimism in facing down the enemies of freedom in Iran and Iraq. Those who dismiss out of hand the possibility of success from the American liberation of Iraq should, but probably won't, read these. Taken together, they paint a picture which is credible and begins to justify the enormous cost and effort of the US in the region.

From Amir Tahari in the Jan 31 edition of the Washington Post:

"That at least part of the Khomeinist leadership might want ways to defuse the situation is not surprising. The sanctions, though nothing more than a gentle rap on the knuckles, have already started to bite - with a disproportionate psychological impact on some players in the Iranian economy. Iranian businessmen see the measures as a kind of aperitif for a deadlier main course to be served later."

And from Fouad Ajami (John Hopkins University):

"The truth of Iraq will assert itself on the ground, but the age of Sunni monopoly on power has passed. One of Iraq's most respected scholar-diplomats, Hassan al-Alawi, has put the matter in stark terms. It is proper, he said, to speak of an "American Iraq" as one does of a Sumerian, a Babylonian, an Abbasid, an Ottoman, and then a British Iraq. Where Iraq in the age of the Pax Britannica rested on an "Anglo-Sunni" regime, this new Iraq, in the time of the Americans, is by the logic of things an American-Shia regime. The militant preachers railing against the fall of Baghdad to an alliance of the "American crusaders" and the "Shia heretics" are the bearers of a dark, but intensely felt conviction. We should not be apologetic, in Arab lands seething with bigotry and rage, about our expedition into Iraq. We shouldn't fall for Arab rulers who tell us that they would have had the ability to call off the furies had we had in place a "process" for resolving the claims of the Palestinians, and had we been able to "deliver" Israel. Those furies have a life of their own: In truth, they are aided and abetted by these same rulers in the hope of tranquilizing their own domains and buying off the embittered in their midst."

Carolinem Glick makes the case for action against Iran

Caroline Glick is clearheaded as usual in this very good article from the Jerusalem post. The current conflict between Hezbollah and Israel is a foreshadow of the larger conflict that we are engaged in- the conflict between western democracy verses Islamic theocratic totalitarianism.



An excerpt:




This new information means that the time line for Iranian acquisition of
nuclear bombs has been shortened dramatically. If just months ago US
intelligence officials claimed that Iran would not acquire nuclear weapons until
2011, and if just six weeks ago Mossad chief Meir Dagan told the Knesset's
Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that Iran needed two years to acquire the
bomb, the report that Iran could test a nuclear weapon by the end of 2007 means
that there is reason to fear that Iran will have the means to launch a nuclear
attack against Israel next year.

Cost of defeat

Few can match Victor David Hason in clairity of insight about the requirement for an American victory in Iraq. This article is a must read.

an excerpt:

In contrast, stabilize Iraq under horrific conditions, and the world is reminded
that there is nothing that a brilliantly led and highly trained American
infantry cannot accomplish. Win in Iraq, and there will be fewer future calls on
the Army and Marines to repeat their victory; lose — and there will be far more
need to do what they cannot.

Kaplans Insight

Here is an important and necessary insight into one of the key issues facing reconstruction and democratic renewal in the Arab world: the failure of current nation states. Robert Kaplan of the Atlantic Monthly explores the background and suggests some dire conclusions. An excerpt:

Indeed, the more artificial the state, the more extreme the secular ideology had
to be to hold it together. To secure unwieldy tribal assemblages, for instance,
an austere state socialism was required in Algeria, and a form of "Dear Leader
Absolutism" in Libya. Because Syria and Iraq were also artificial constructs,
these two states resorted to Baathism — another bastardized form of state
socialism.

full article here.