Don Imus Quote of the Day!

When discussing on his show yesterday the idiotic decision to try KSM in New York, with FULL constitutional rights instead of in a Military Tribunal where he deserves to be treated as a war criminal, Don Imus summed it up best by describing the Obama Administration as "Jimmy Carter-Stupid".

I couldn't have put it better!

Bill Clinton's Nightmare

Fascinating article - worth a read!

Our Daily Krauthammer

Medicalizing Mass Murder


By Charles Krauthammer



WASHINGTON -- What a surprise -- that someone who shouts "Allahu Akbar" (the "God is great" jihadist battle cry) as he is shooting up a room of American soldiers might have Islamist motives. It certainly was a surprise to the mainstream media, which spent the weekend after the Fort Hood massacre downplaying Nidal Hasan's religious beliefs.



"I cringe that he's a Muslim. ... I think he's probably just a nut case," said Newsweek's Evan Thomas. Some were more adamant. Time's Joe Klein decried "odious attempts by Jewish extremists ... to argue that the massacre perpetrated by Nidal Hasan was somehow a direct consequence of his Islamic beliefs." While none could match Klein's peculiar cherchez-le-juif motif, the popular story line was of an Army psychiatrist driven over the edge by terrible stories he had heard from soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.





They suffered. He listened. He snapped.



Really? What about the doctors and nurses, the counselors and physical therapists at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who every day hear and live with the pain and the suffering of returning soldiers? How many of them then picked up a gun and shot 51 innocents?



And what about civilian psychiatrists -- not the Upper West Side therapist treating Woody Allen neurotics, but the thousands of doctors working with hospitalized psychotics -- who every day hear not just tales but cries of the most excruciating anguish, of the most unimaginable torment? How many of those doctors commit mass murder?



It's been decades since I practiced psychiatry. Perhaps I missed the epidemic.



But, of course, if the shooter is named Nidal Hasan, whom National Public Radio reported had been trying to proselytize doctors and patients, then something must be found. Presto! Secondary post-traumatic stress disorder, a handy invention to allow one to ignore the obvious.



And the perfect moral finesse. Medicalizing mass murder not only exonerates. It turns the murderer into a victim, indeed a sympathetic one. After all, secondary PTSD, for those who believe in it (you won't find it in DSM-IV-TR, psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), is known as "compassion fatigue." The poor man -- pushed over the edge by an excess of sensitivity.



Have we totally lost our moral bearings? Nidal Hasan (allegedly) cold-bloodedly killed 13 innocent people. In such cases, political correctness is not just an abomination. It's a danger, clear and present.



Consider the Army's treatment of Hasan's previous behavior. NPR's Daniel Zwerdling interviewed a Hasan colleague at Walter Reed about a hair-raising Grand Rounds that Hasan had apparently given. Grand Rounds are the most serious academic event at a teaching hospital -- attending physicians, residents and students gather for a lecture on an instructive case history or therapeutic finding.



I've been to dozens of these. In fact, I gave one myself on post-traumatic retrograde amnesia -- as you can see, these lectures are fairly technical. Not Hasan's. His was an hour-long disquisition on what he called the Koranic view of military service, jihad and war. It included an allegedly authoritative elaboration of the punishments visited upon nonbelievers -- consignment to hell, decapitation, having hot oil poured down your throat. This "really freaked a lot of doctors out," reported NPR.



Nor was this the only incident. "The psychiatrist," reported Zwerdling, "said that he was the kind of guy who the staff actually stood around in the hallway saying: Do you think he's a terrorist, or is he just weird?"



Was anything done about this potential danger? Of course not. Who wants to be accused of Islamophobia and prejudice against a colleague's religion?



One must not speak of such things. Not even now. Not even after we know that Hasan was in communication with a notorious Yemen-based jihad propagandist. As late as Tuesday, The New York Times was running a story on how returning soldiers at Fort Hood had a high level of violence.



What does such violence have to do with Hasan? He was not a returning soldier. And the soldiers who returned home and shot their wives or fellow soldiers didn't cry "Allahu Akbar" as they squeezed the trigger.



The delicacy about the religion in question -- condescending, politically correct and deadly -- is nothing new. A week after the first (1993) World Trade Center attack, the same New York Times ran the following front-page headline about the arrest of one Mohammed Salameh: "Jersey City Man Is Charged in Bombing of Trade Center."



Ah yes, those Jersey men -- so resentful of New York, so prone to violence.

Stossel Nails it!

The U.S. House of Presumptuous Meddlers


By John Stossel



As an American, I am embarrassed that the U.S. House of Representatives has 220 members who actually believe the government can successfully centrally plan the medical and insurance industries.



I'm embarrassed that my representatives think that government can subsidize the consumption of medical care without increasing the budget deficit or interfering with free choice.



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John Stossel RealClearPolitics

Health care



It's a triumph of mindless wishful thinking over logic and experience.



The 1,990-page bill is breathtaking in its bone-headed audacity. The notion that a small group of politicians can know enough to design something so complex and so personal is astounding. That they were advised by "experts" means nothing since no one is expert enough to do that. There are too many tradeoffs faced by unique individuals with infinitely varying needs.



Government cannot do simple things efficiently. The bureaucrats struggle to count votes correctly. They give subsidized loans to "homeowners" who turn out to be 4-year-olds. Yet congressmen want government to manage our medicine and insurance.



Competition is a "discovery procedure," Nobel-prize-winning economist F. A. Hayek taught. Through the competitive market process, we producers and consumers constantly learn things that force us to adjust our behavior if we are to succeed. Central planners fail for two reasons:



First, knowledge about supply, demand, individual preferences and resource availability is scattered -- much of it never articulated -- throughout society. It is not concentrated in a database where a group of planners can access it.



Second, this "data" is dynamic: It changes without notice.



No matter how honorable the central planners' intentions, they will fail because they cannot know the needs and wishes of 300 million different people. And if they somehow did know their needs, they wouldn't know them tomorrow.



Proponents of so-called reform -- it's not really reform unless it makes things better -- have shamefully avoided criticism of their proposals. Often they just dismiss their opponents as greedy corporate apologists or paranoid right-wing loonies. That's easier than answering questions like these:



1) How can the government subsidize the purchase of medical services without driving up prices? Econ 101 teaches -- without controversy -- that when demand goes up, if other things remain equal, price goes up. The politicians want to have their cake and eat it, too.



2) How can the government promise lower medical costs without restricting choices? Medicare already does that. Once the planners' mandatory insurance pushes prices to new heights, they must put even tougher limits on what we may buy -- or their budget will be even deeper in the red than it already is. As economist Thomas Sowell points out, government cannot really reduce costs. All it can do is disguise and shift costs (through taxation) and refuse to pay for some services (rationing).



3) How does government "create choice" by imposing uniformity on insurers? Uniformity limits choice. Under House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's bill and the Senate versions, government would dictate to all insurers what their "minimum" coverage policy must include. Truly basic high-deductible, low-cost catastrophic policies tailored to individual needs would be forbidden.



4) How does it "create choice" by making insurance companies compete against a privileged government-sponsored program? The so-called government option, let's call it Fannie Med, would have implicit government backing and therefore little market discipline. The resulting environment of conformity and government power is not what I mean by choice and competition. Rep. Barney Frank is at least honest enough to say that the public option will bring us a government monopoly.



Advocates of government control want you to believe that the serious shortcomings of our medical and insurance system are failures of the free market. But that's impossible because our market is not free. Each state operates a cozy medical and insurance cartel that restricts competition through licensing and keeps prices higher than they would be in a genuine free market. But the planners won't talk about that. After all, if government is the problem in the first place, how can they justify a government takeover?



Many people are priced out of the medical and insurance markets for one reason: the politicians' refusal to give up power. Allowing them to seize another 16 percent of the economy won't solve our problems.



Freedom will.

Mexican Standoff

How delicious is it to watch the Democrats wrangle with the Mexican Standoff they have just gotten themselves into.

With the Stupak ammendment (which disallows ANY private insurance bought on the "exchange" as part of the public "option" from being used to abortion) the Democrats were able to barely pass the House of Representatives.

Now it appears that shrill shrieking Marxists like Representative Wasserman-Schultz of Florida have realized that, if that ammendment stays in the Bill, their ultimate goal of putting all Private Health Insurance out of business (which is the ultimate goal of this so-called "reform" effort) will have an unitended consequence of essentially making all abortions in the country illegal.

Oh the delcious irony!  In order to socialize medicine they have to outlaw abortion.   In order to protect abortion they have to kill the public option and give up the dream of socializing medicine.  If the bill does not have a public option or outlaws abortion, the progressives will walk.  If the bill allows for federal funds to ever be allowed for abortions, Blue Dogs will walk, and if either group walks, the bill dies. 

 I think the odds of this bill passing just got a LOT worse over the weekend.

And the best part about it will be that it is the leftists that will kill it.

Sit back and enjoy the show.

Father Zakaria Boutros

Speaking of Ugly Ugly Truth, here is a man, a hero, who is not afraid to speak it.




Ugly Ugly Truth about Islam


More on Father Boutros here, very interesting reading.

Father Zakaria Boutros

2 Presidents, 20 Years, Compare & Contrast

This week Germans will be celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall.  For historical purposes, let's look at how 2 different presidents, seperated by 20 years have responded.  Some events illuminate much more than people think.

1987

2009

Compare and contrast and draw your own conclusions.

Ask an adorable Kitten

From MSNBC:  MSNBC is proud to annouce its newest member to join it's team of special experts, Bitsy, the adorable Kitten.  Bitsy will head up MSNBC's special expert panel on Islamic Terrorism.  Below is a Q&A session with Bitsy on the attack at Fort Hood.

Question:  Bitsy, given the horrorifc attack on Fort Hood on Thursday, many people are troubled by the ties the murderer had  to Radical Islam.  Do you know how the FBI or Homeland Security is investiating these links.

Bitsy:  People were mean to Dr. Hasan and that is what should be investigated.  Imagine!  A poor defenseless Major in the Army is being ridiculed for his beliefs that Suicide Bombers are justified in killing American Soldiers in their war on "terrorism".  This is the real tragedy, see what meanness gets you!  This is a warning for all Americans.

Question:  Bitsy, you really can't be serious are you?  I mean, this man had a history of posting anti-American rants on the internet and claimed he was a Muslim first and an American second.  Shouldn't that be what is investigated?

Bitsy:  Absolutely NOT!  I think the fact that this poor man was going to be forced to fight in our Imperialistic Endeavors in Afghanistan is what the real root of this problem is.  What the real mystery is is why MORE soldiers aren't killing each other over our wrong-headed policies.

Question:  Bitsy, are you saying that this guy was justified in what he was doing?  No one FORCED this guy to join the army and have us pay for his schooling?  This guy was a Major for God's sake, this is not some downtrodden crazy guy, this guy appears to be a terrorist.

Bitsy:  Mean people suck.  I would like some milk now.

Question:  Don't you think it SIGNIFICANT that Hasan was chanting Alah Akbar as he was killing innocent soldiers?  Don't you think it might have some relevance that this guy was seen at various Homeland Security events on Palestine/Israel tensions?  Don't you think the guys activities prior to the murders (giving away Korans, writing Allah on his door, etc) might lead the FBI to consider a terrorist link?

Bitzy:  Meow, do you have any yarn?  I am getting sleepy now.

Question:  Ok, well ladies and gentlemen, Bitsy has dozed off, so we are going to have to cut our interview short.  Thank you for tuning in, and join us next time for another session with "Ask and Adorable Kitten".

Our Daily Krauthammer

The Myth of '08, Demolished


By Charles Krauthammer



WASHINGTON -- Sure, Election Day 2009 will scare moderate Democrats and make passage of Obamacare more difficult. Sure, it makes it easier for resurgent Republicans to raise money and recruit candidates for 2010. But the most important effect of Tuesday's elections is historical. It demolishes the great realignment myth of 2008.



In the aftermath of last year's Obama sweep, we heard endlessly about its fundamental, revolutionary, transformational nature. How it was ushering in an FDR-like realignment for the 21st century in which new demographics -- most prominently, rising minorities and the young -- would bury the GOP far into the future. One book proclaimed "The Death of Conservatism," while the more modest merely predicted the terminal decline of the Republican Party into a regional party of the Deep South or a rump party of marginalized angry white men.



This was all ridiculous from the beginning. 2008 was a historical anomaly. A uniquely charismatic candidate was running at a time of deep war weariness, with an intensely unpopular Republican president, against a politically incompetent opponent, amid the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. And still he won by only seven points.



Exactly a year later comes the empirical validation of that skepticism. Virginia -- presumed harbinger of the new realignment, having gone Democratic in '08 for the first time in 44 years -- went red again. With a vengeance. Barack Obama had carried it by six points. The Republican gubernatorial candidate won by 17 -- a 23-point swing. New Jersey went from plus 15 Democratic in 2008 to minus 4 in 2009. A 19-point swing.



What happened? The vaunted Obama realignment vanished. In 2009 in Virginia, the black vote was down by 20 percent; the under-30 vote by 50 percent. And as for independents, the ultimate prize of any realignment, they bolted. In both Virginia and New Jersey they'd gone narrowly for Obama in '08. This year they went Republican by a staggering 33 points in Virginia and by an equally shocking 30 points in New Jersey.



White House apologists will say the Virginia Democrat was weak. If the difference between Bob McDonnell and Creigh Deeds was so great, how come when the same two men ran against each other statewide for attorney general four years ago the race was a virtual dead heat? Which made the '09 McDonnell-Deeds rematch the closest you get in politics to a laboratory experiment for measuring the change in external conditions. Run them against each other again when it's Obamaism in action and see what happens. What happened was a Republican landslide.



The Obama coattails of 2008 are gone. The expansion of the electorate, the excitement of the young, came in uniquely propitious Democratic circumstances and amid unparalleled enthusiasm for electing the first African-American president.



November '08 was one-shot, one-time, never to be replicated. Nor was November '09 a realignment. It was a return to the norm -- and definitive confirmation that 2008 was one of the great flukes in American political history.



The irony of 2009 is that the anti-Democratic tide overshot the norm -- deeply blue New Jersey, for example, elected a Republican governor for the first time in 12 years -- because Democrats so thoroughly misread 2008 and the mandate they assumed it bestowed. Obama saw himself as anointed by a watershed victory to remake American life. Not letting the cup pass from his lips, he declared to Congress only five weeks after his swearing-in his "New Foundation" for America -- from remaking the one-sixth of the American economy that is health care to massive government regulation of the economic lifeblood that is energy.



Moreover, the same conventional wisdom that proclaimed the dawning of a new age last November dismissed the inevitable popular reaction to Obama's hubristic expansion of government, taxation, spending and debt -- the tea party demonstrators, the town hall protesters -- as a raging rabble of resentful reactionaries, AstroTurf-phony and Fox News-deranged.



Some rump. Just last month Gallup found that conservatives outnumber liberals by 2 to 1 (40 percent to 20 percent) and even outnumber moderates (at 36 percent). So on Tuesday, the "rump" rebelled. It's the natural reaction of a center-right country to a governing party seeking to rush through a left-wing agenda using temporary majorities created by the one-shot election of 2008. The misreading of that election -- and of the mandate it allegedly bestowed -- is the fundamental cause of the Democratic debacle of 2009.

The Beginning of the End of Healthcare Reform

Not So Fast: Reid Signals Delay in Health Reform

By Karen Tumulty / Washington Tuesday, Nov. 03, 2009

Senate majority leader Harry Reid at a news conference on Capitol Hill on Nov. 3, 2009


Still struggling to line up the 60 votes that are needed to overcome a potential filibuster of health care reform, Senate majority leader Harry Reid sent a strong signal on Tuesday that President Obama is unlikely to be signing his top domestic priority into law this year, as Democrats had hoped. "We're not going to be bound by timelines," Reid told reporters as he emerged from a weekly lunch with Democratic Senators. He vowed to pass a bill "as expeditiously as we can," which is another way of saying it will probably be slow going over the weeks to come.


Reid: Reconciliation Not Needed for Health CareReid's comments were such a departure from the official line that, as soon as reports of them began appearing, his office issued a statement attempting to take the edge off of them. "Our goals remain unchanged. We want to get health insurance reform done this year, and we have unprecedented momentum to achieve that," Reid spokesman Jim Manley said. "There is no reason why we can't have a transparent and thorough debate in the Senate and still send a bill to the President by Christmas."



No reason, that is, except for the fact that it is already November.



All year, Democratic strategists on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue have made no secret of the fact that they do not view time as their friend on enacting health reform, a goal that has eluded every President since Harry Truman who has attempted it. At one point, Democrats hoped to have the bill passed by both houses over the summer and on Obama's desk in the fall. Instead, the August recess was dominated by cable-television images of near riots at congressional town-hall meetings, and it took a dramatic, game-changing presidential address to a joint session of Congress to get health reform back on track.



But with the turning of a page in the calendar comes a new challenge — Congress will be entering an election year, not normally a time when it likes to take big political risks. Nor are lawmakers generally prone to be quick off the starting blocks when they return to Washington from the holiday recess, which means that the health care debate could drag on through the winter.



Reid's decision to include a public option in the bill that he takes to the floor has also complicated matters. While applauded by the party's liberal base, the idea of adding a government-run alternative plan to the choices for covering the uninsured faces resistance from some of the Senate's more conservative Democrats as well as Olympia Snowe of Maine, the only Republican who has shown any serious interest in supporting the bill. And to get anything over the hurdle of a threatened GOP filibuster, Reid will need to hold together his entire caucus of 60 Democrats. At this point, said a senior Democratic aide, the majority leader is only "cautiously optimistic" that he has the votes to simply bring the bill to the floor — under a normally non-controversial "motion to proceed" — and is still at least several votes short of 60 on the more serious subsequent procedural vote, known as cloture, that would be needed to cut off debate.



There are also more practical hurdles, including the fact that Reid has not yet received an official analysis of his legislation from the Congressional Budget Office, and may not until late next week. Senators will not want to begin debating the legislation until they have the CBO's projection of how much it will cost and how it will affect the deficit. Between next week's Veteran's Day recess and the subsequent Thanksgiving break, that means it may well be December before the bill even gets to the Senate floor.



If that is so, the best-case scenario becomes this: both the House and the Senate pass their versions of the health care bill before leaving at the end of the year, and a conference committee begins its work while they are gone; a conference committee report, while controversial, would likely pass a Democratic Congress. If not, a loss of momentum could dampen the sense of inevitability that, as much as anything else, has brought health care reform to the point of being nearly within reach.

How we got to where we are

Fascinating interview with a former KGB agent from the early 1980s who defected to the United States.  Amazingly predictive of how we ended up with the situation we have now.  The truth not only is very ugly, but it hurts to admit it.  Ignore some of the whacky comments on youtube about this video, and just watch it for what it is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBshLCx2elI&feature=PlayList&p=FF4416BEE5D2ED02&index=9&playnext=2&playnext_from=PL

Top Visual Metaphors for the Democrats Performance Tonight

Get Involved!

Nothing gets politicians more worried than Voters, and Voters who write letters worry them more than Voters who do not.

Do your part and email or mail your Senator your thoughts on WHY they should oppose Health Care Reform. 

If you don't know how to contact your senator, here is a website that will guide you how to do it:

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm


Being from Virginia, I wrote both my Senators and emailed them my thoughts.  It is best to keep things polite, short and professional.  Below is the text of my letter to Senator Webb.  Feel free to cut and paste and make it your own for your own Senator.



Tuesday, November 03, 2009




The Honorable James Webb

144 Russell Senate Office Building

Washington, D.C. 20510-4604



Dear Senator Webb,



I writing to urge you to oppose efforts currently moving through the House of Representatives and the Senate to Nationalize our Healthcare system under the fig leaf of “so-called” reform. Our country since its founding has been based on the concept of the free-market system, and this system has allowed our nation to have the most advanced and prosperous country on the earth.



The Health Care bills that have been proposed are so monstrously ill-conceived that I and a majority of voters in Virginia believe they will essentially set our country on a path towards socialized medicine. The bills are so flawed as to have no merit for passage, and must be opposed entirely. Whether there is a public option or a trigger, the long-term effect will be the same, and that will be the destruction of the free-market in Health Care and the inevitable decline in quality and innovation that that destruction will bring forth.



The increased governmental regulation on every aspect of our lives is an affront to liberty. The regulations that this will impose on private individuals and small business will cripple and stifle our economy. The enormous costs involved in this proposed system, over a trillion dollars, and most likely to really be many times more that cost, will saddle future generations with unsustainable debt and enslave our children and grandchildren for generations.



The enormous power shift away from individuals and states to the federal government that these bills represent, make a mockery of the founding principles of our Republic. Being a Senator from the great Commonwealth of Virginia, and the home of James Madison, you should be particularly offended by this power grab that is an offense to the founders memory.



I urge you strongly to oppose Health Care reform in whatever form it emerges from conference. Very few votes you will make as a Senator will be more important, and there are legions of Virginians that will remember if you voted for the enlargement of the Federal Government over the wishes of your state, and will hold you accountable at the next election.

Old Cartoon from 1948

As true today as it was then!

http://nationaljuggernaut.blogspot.com/2009/09/this-cartoon-seemed-far-fetched-in-1948.html

The Costs of Medical Care

November 3, 2009


The "Costs" of Medical Care

By Thomas Sowell



We are incessantly being told that the cost of medical care is "too high"-- either absolutely or as a growing percentage of our incomes. But nothing that is being proposed by the government is likely to lower those costs, and much that is being proposed is almost certain to increase the costs.



There is a fundamental difference between reducing costs and simply shifting costs around, like a pea in a shell game at a carnival. Costs are not reduced simply because you pay less at a doctor's office and more in taxes-- or more in insurance premiums, or more in higher prices for other goods and services that you buy, because the government has put the costs on businesses that pass those costs on to you.


Costs are not reduced simply because you don't pay them. It would undoubtedly be cheaper for me to do without the medications that keep me alive and more vigorous in my old age than people of a similar age were in generations past.



Letting old people die would undoubtedly be cheaper than keeping them alive-- but that does not mean that the costs have gone down. It just means that we refuse to pay the costs. Instead, we pay the consequences. There is no free lunch.



Providing free lunches to people who go to hospital emergency rooms is one of the reasons for the current high costs of medical care for others. Politicians mandating what insurance companies must cover is another free lunch that leads to higher premiums for medical insurance-- and fewer people who can afford it.



Despite all the demonizing of insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies or doctors for what they charge, the fundamental costs of goods and services are the costs of producing them.



If highly paid chief executives of insurance companies or pharmaceutical companies agreed to work free of charge, it would make very little difference in the cost of insurance or medications. If doctors' incomes were cut in half, that would not lower the cost of producing doctors through years of expensive training in medical schools and hospitals, nor the overhead costs of running doctors' offices.



What it would do is reduce the number of very able people who are willing to take on the high costs of a medical education when the return on that investment is greatly reduced and the aggravations of dealing with government bureaucrats are added to the burdens of the work.



Britain has had a government-run medical system for more than half a century and it has to import doctors, including some from Third World countries where the medical training may not be the best. In short, reducing doctors' income is not reducing the cost of medical care, it is refusing to pay those costs. Like other ways of refusing to pay costs, it has consequences.



Any one of us can reduce medical costs by refusing to pay them. In our own lives, we recognize the consequences. But when someone with a gift for rhetoric tells us that the government can reduce the costs without consequences, we are ready to believe in such political miracles.



There are some ways in which the real costs of medical care can be reduced but the people who are leading the charge for a government takeover of medical care are not the least bit interested in actually reducing those costs, as distinguished from shifting the costs around or just refusing to pay them.



The high costs of "defensive medicine"-- expensive tests, medications and procedures required to protect doctors and hospitals from ruinous lawsuits, rather than to help the patients-- could be reduced by not letting lawyers get away with filing frivolous lawsuits.



If a court of law determines that the claims made in such lawsuits are bogus, then those who filed those claims could be forced to reimburse those who have been sued for all their expenses, including their attorneys' fees and the lost time of people who have other things to do. But politicians who get huge campaign contributions from lawyers are not about to pass laws to do this.



Why should they, when it is so much easier just to start a political stampede with fiery rhetoric and glittering promises?

History Favors the Motivated

Tomorrow is election day in Virginia, New Jersey and upstate New York.  NOW is the time to begin the long slog to take back America by electing Bob McDonnell Governor in Virginia, Chris Christie Governor in New Jersey and Doug Hoffman congressman in upstate New York.  This election is part of a continum that has been building for MONTHS and is a key event in stopping Obama in his tracks.

The Town Hall meetings over the Summer, the 100,000 Tea Party members that marched on Washington on 9-12 and now hopefully a Conservative sweep in the off-year elections is and will send a message loud and clear to congress that Americans are beginning to fight back.

Many people do not realize that almost 100 democratic congressmen are in  essentially conservative districts, and approximately 10 democratic Senators are from Red States.  YOU have an opportunity tomorrow to send these people a message, clear and loud, that you are PISSED OFF and Taking Names.  They need to be spooked into stopping this Socialistic takeover of America, and if enough of us show up tomorrow and vote these candidates into office in high enough numbers, it is possible that the entire Obama Agenda will collapse as endangered Democrats flee the leftist plans their party is trying to shove down our throats.

We lost in 2008 not because our ideas were wrong, or even that most people aren't conservative.  Polls consistently show that not only are Conservatives the highest polling idealogical group in the country, there has been a markedly sharp increase in their numbers since Obama was elected.  We lost because our "party" lost its way and we were dispirited and unmotivated.  Their side on the other hand were highly motivated and that is how they won.

Well, the shoe is on the other foot now, and history has shown repeatedly that History favors the motivated.  Well, time to get motivated!!!!

More Halloween Goodies!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deoJUBW9CI8&feature=related

Happy Halloween

31 October and 1 and 2 November are called, colloquially (not officially), "Hallowtide" or the "Days of the Dead" because on these days we pray for or remember those who've left this world.




The days of the dead center around All Saints' Day (also known as All Hallows') on November 1, when we celebrate all the Saints in Heaven. On the day after All Hallows', we remember the saved souls who are in Purgatory being cleansed of the temporal effects of their sins before they can enter Heaven. The day that comes before All Hallows', though, is one on which we unofficially remember the damned and the reality of Hell. The schema, then, for the Days of the Dead looks like this:







31 October:

Hallowe'en: unofficially recalls the souls of the damned. Practices center around the reality of Hell and how to avoid it.

1 November:

All Saints': set aside to officially honor the Church Triumphant. Practices center around recalling our great Saints, including those whose names are unknown to us and, so, are not canonized

2 November:

All Souls': set aside officially to pray for the Church Suffering (the souls in Purgatory). Practices center around praying for the souls in Purgatory, especially our loved ones



The earliest form of All Saints' (or "All Hallows'") was first celebrated in the 300s, but originally took place on 13 May, as it still does in some Eastern Churches. The Feast first commemorated only the martyrs, but came to include all of the Saints by 741. It was transferred to 1 November in 844 when Pope Gregory III consecrated a chapel in St. Peter's Basilica to All Saints (so much for the theory that the day was fixed on 1 November because of a bunch of Irish pagans had harvest festivals at that time).



All Souls' has its origins in A.D. 1048 when the Bishop of Cluny decreed that the Benedictines of Cluny pray for the souls in Purgatory on this day. The practice spread until Pope Sylvester II recommended it for the entire Latin Church.



The Vigil of, or evening before, All Hallows' ("Hallows' Eve," or "Hallowe'en") came, in Irish popular piety, to be a day of remembering the dead who are neither in Purgatory or Heaven, but are damned, and these customs spread to many parts of the world. Thus we have the popular focus of Hallowe'en as the reality of Hell, hence its scary character and focus on evil and how to avoid it, the sad fate of the souls of the damned, etc. 1



How, or even whether, to celebrate Hallowe'en is a controversial topic in traditional circles. One hears too often that "Hallowe'en is a pagan holiday" -- an impossibility because "Hallowe'en," as said, means "All Hallows' Evening" which is as Catholic a holiday as one can get. Some say that the holiday actually stems from Samhain, a pagan Celtic celebration, or is Satanic, but this isn't true, either, any more than Christmas "stems from" the Druids' Yule, though popular customs that predated the Church may be involved in our celebrations (it is rather amusing that October 31 is also "Reformation Day" in Protestant circles -- the day to recall Luther's having nailed his 95 Theses to Wittenberg's cathedral door -- but Protestants who reject "Hallowe'en" because pagans used to do things on October 31 don't object to commemorating that event on this day).



Some traditional Catholics, objecting to the definite secularization of the holiday and to the myth that the entire thing is "pagan" to begin with, refuse to celebrate it in any way at all, etc. Other traditional Catholics celebrate it without qualm, though keeping it Catholic and staying far away from some of the ugliness that surrounds the day in the secular world. However one decides to spend the day, it is hoped that the facts are kept straight, and that Catholics refrain from judging other Catholics who decide to celebrate differently.



For those who do want to celebrate Hallowe'en, customs of this day are a mixture of Catholic popular devotions, and French, Irish, and English customs all mixed together. From the French we get the custom of dressing up, which originated during the time of the Black Death when artistic renderings of the dead known as the "Danse Macabre," were popular. These "Dances of Death" were also acted out by people who dressed as the dead. Later, these practices were moved to Hallowe'en when the Irish and French began to intermarry in America.



From the Irish come the carved Jack-o-lanterns, which were originally carved turnips. The legend surrounding the Jack-o-Lantern is this:



There once was an old drunken trickster named Jack, a man known so much for his miserly ways that he was known as "Stingy Jack," He loved making mischief on everyone -- even his own family, even the Devil himself! One day, he tricked Satan into climbing up an apple tree -- but then carved Crosses on the trunk so the Devil couldn't get back down. He bargained with the Evil One, saying he would remove the Crosses only if the Devil would promise not to take his soul to Hell; to this, the Devil agreed.

After Jack died, after many years filled with vice, he went up to the Pearly Gates -- but was told by St. Peter that he was too miserable a creature to see the Face of Almighty God. But when he went to the Gates of Hell, he was reminded that he couldn't enter there, either! So, he was doomed to spend his eternity roaming the earth. The only good thing that happened to him was that the Devil threw him an ember from the burning pits to light his way, an ember he carried inside a hollowed-out, carved turnip.