Saturday, September 11, 2010

Wasilla Rally

Palin dropped by a Wasilla rally to remember 9/11 this afternoon:
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She then asked all military veterans to stand and led a round of huge applause before saying, "It's really, really good to be home, and tonight I think I'll see some of you at the Glenn Beck event."

The rally was a prelude to Saturday evening's Glenn Beck event in Anchorage. Palin is scheduled to make an appearance alongside Beck tonight.

The former governor's short speech focused on freedom and values. She said Alaska is "the most perfect state in the nation," that "there is no place I would rather be," and "It's our pioneer spirit that America needs more of."

It is unusual for Palin to make a public appearance in Alaska. She appeared at a National Rifle Association rally shortly after she resigned as governor last July, and has had at least one public book signing. Other than those, and a few sightings while staring in a reality television show about the state, she's kept a low profile here. Today might be an indication that that might start changing and that she might begin to try to re-ingratiate herself to Alaskans, some of whom feel betrayed after she quit her job as governor.

After her speech, Palin stepped off the stage and began a long round of handshakes and autograph signing, where she shook hands with everyone from Mead Treadwell to Sam Little, and signed everything from copies of her book to the back of a little girl's shirt to a small rock that a middle-aged woman handed her with a smile.

The crowd was happy and excited to be so close to their former governor, pressing close to shake her hand and get a quick picture. When a reporter asked Palin to identify the biggest threat to the U.S., she answered "Our debt, which is a natural security issue," before turning back to her admiring fans. Palin's daughter, Piper, quickly became bored with the whole scene and asked her mother when they could go.

As Palin walked outside the sports center into the bright Wasilla sun and stepped up into a black Escalade, men standing in the parking lot yelled out "Praying for you!" and "Love you, Sarah!"
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Let me read that part again:

As Palin walked outside the sports center into the bright Wasilla sun and stepped up into a black Escalade, men standing in the parking lot yelled out "Praying for you!" and "Love you, Sarah!"

I thought everyone in Wasilla hated her. The "undercurrent of fear" thing. Weird.

2012 and Recessions

Some random thoughts.

I've noticed a few columns today about how Palin might be a superstar (at least they're conceding that point now), but she could never be President. After all, she'll have to prove she's better than the others running.

First off, one of the reasons I support her is because of the others running. They stink.

Secondly, if you think we're going to work our butts off to put conservatives in Congress for a change, and then willingly hand over the White House to Mr. Romneycare, you're out of your mind. I will actively work against Mitt Romney, even if he becomes the nominee. I don't believe he has any real respect for the Constitution or for the boundaries of his office. This is one quality that I know Palin possesses, and it's what solidified my support of her in the first place.

As for her being Governor for two and a half years, I say this. Would it have been better if she'd been able to get a couple of terms under her belt? I think so. But I also know that she did the right thing given the situation she found herself in. Oh, they'll holler "quitter!" from now until Doomsday. Let them. It doesn't matter.

As for whether or not she can perform in debates, they have no idea what they're dealing with. I personally believe the Katie Couric interview was a blessing in disguise. She is underestimated. Many refuse to see beyond it and will be crushed as a result.

I won't say anymore until it actually becomes necessary.

Now, my other random thought for the day: recessions.

I actually don't mind recessions too much. Honestly, I think they're necessary. If we grew and grew and grew all the time.... I think we'd be horrible people, eventually. Every so often you've got to burst that bubble, deflate a little bit, get back to what really matters, learn that you're not invincible.

Speaking as a young person, I'm actually thrilled that real estate and other things went down. I mean, come on. No way I could have afforded much of anything with the way the market was going.

Good times are good, but they often lead to excess. We should be teaching things like hard work and thrift in our classrooms, and those good old-fashioned princples that say things like, "Don't buy what you can't afford."

Only through good morality lies lasting prosperity.

Mark Levin's Audio Tribute to 9/11

"Let us remember":

9/11

Friday, September 10, 2010

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Selective Religious Outrage

Article:

I should start by stating the obvious, Pastor Terry Jones is an idiot. The other obvious point is that most media outlets are selective in their religious outrage.

Is burning the Koran the Christian thing to do? Of course not. In doing so Pastor Jones and his Dove Center set back the image of Evangelicals substantially.

Then again, that’s the joy some folks in the media get from speaking to Evangelicals, especially ones with a southern accent. It’s a case of “Hey everybody, look at this hillbillie I found! Why he’s even got a Bible!”

As for media selectivity in religious outrage I’m waiting for the endless stream of stories about Pakistani gunmen killing Christians in the name of Islam.

Haven’t heard of this?

Odd if you haven’t because it is a fairly regular occurrence. When I was a weekend news editor for an all-news radio station I remember these stories coming across the wire on a regular basis. They still do but they don’t get nearly the play.

Here’s just a few recent headlines:

Family in hiding following accusations of blasphemy

Update: Christian exonerated of blasphemy charges

Two Christian girls raped in Punjab

Christian nursing student brutally assaulted

Two Christians murdered after accusations of blasphemy

Churches attacked by Islamic militants

Muslims kill Christian woman and children

Family rescued from mob, accused of blasphemy


Those are just the headlines from one country since July 1st.

A Christian group based in Canada keeps track of all of this, not just in Muslim countries where Christians are the minority, but anywhere Christians are persecuted.

Much of what takes place is horrific and barbaric but it won’t make the news wheel of endless repetition on CBC or CTV.

Why would they show those stories when got a pastor with a southern drawl to put on TV.

Go to the article for links to the stories.

I think this episode does a lot to demonstrate that going to Saudi Arabia, bowing to people, etc... in the end accomplishes nothing. One looney pastor and they're out to get us again.

Comment on Hot Air:

"It is the duty of Muslims to react,” said Mohammad Mukhtar, a cleric and candidate for the Afghan parliament in the Sept. 18 election. “When their holy book Quran gets burned in public, then there is nothing left. If this happens, I think the first and most important reaction will be that wherever Americans are seen, they will be killed. No matter where they will be in the world they will be killed.”

This is what our men and women overseas are fighting for???????

picklesgap on September 8, 2010 at 9:06 PM

Ann Coulter: Bonfire of the Insanities

First, I would also like to say something about burning stuff in general. I'm not sure how to phrase this. Hopefully it makes sense.

Acts 19:18-19

And many that believed came, and confessed, and shewed their deeds.

Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all [men]: and they counted the price of them, and found [it] fifty thousand [pieces] of silver.

The general idea with the burning of, in that case, witchcraft/sorcery type stuff, is that it was once a part of those people's lives. Now that they'd gotten right with God, they wanted to destroy that part of their lives, a symbolic bridge being burned, so to speak. Never going back.

Every now and then it happens today. Growing up, I heard stories of how former druggies would get saved and flush all their drugs down the toilet. Or rockers would destroy all their old albums. Or former Satanists would burn all their old books. It's a personal cleansing thing. A destruction of your old life. Turning your back on it, burning it all away.

But the whole, "Let's burn Korans to make a statement" thing is different.  It's a protest. Aren't liberals usually the ones who burn things, like the American flag, in protest? Besides, if the Telegraph can be believed, the pastor sounds kinda nuts.

And now, I leave you with Ann Coulter:
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In response to Gen David Petraeus' denunciation of Florida pastor Terry Jones' right to engage in a symbolic protest of the 9/11 attacks by burning copies of the Quran this Sept. 11, President Obama said: "Let me be clear: As a citizen, and as president, I believe that members of the Dove World Outreach Center have the same right to freedom of speech and religion as anyone else in this country."

Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida lauded Obama's remarks, saying America is "a place where you're supposed to be able to practice your religion without the government telling you you can't."

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg called Obama's words a "clarion defense of the freedom of religion" -- and also claimed that he had recently run into a filthy jihadist who actually supported the Quran-burning!

Keith Olbermann read the poem "First they came ..." on air in defense of the Quran-burners, nearly bringing himself to tears at his own profundity.

No wait, my mistake. This is what liberals said about the ground zero mosque only five minutes ago when they were posing as First Amendment absolutists. Suddenly, they've developed amnesia when it comes to the free-speech right to burn a Quran.

Weirdly, conservatives who opposed building the mosque at ground zero are also against the Quran burning. (Except in my case. It turns out I'm for it, but mostly because burning Qurans will contribute to global warming.)

Liberals couldn't care less about the First Amendment. To the contrary, censoring speech and religion is the left's specialty! (Any religion other than Islam.)

They promote speech codes, hate crimes, free speech zones (known as "America" off college campuses), and go around the country yanking every reference to God from the public square via endless lawsuits by the ACLU.

Whenever you see a liberal choking up over our precious constitutional rights, you can be sure we're talking about the rights of Muslims at ground zero, "God Hates Fags" funeral protesters, strippers, The New York Times publishing classified documents, pornographers, child molesters, murderers, traitors, saboteurs, terrorists, flag-burners (but not Quran-burners!) or women living on National Endowment of the Arts grants by stuffing yams into their orifices on stage.

Speaking of lying dwarfs, last week on "The Daily Show" Bloomberg claimed he was having a hamburger with his "girlfriend" when a man came up to him and said of the ground zero mosque: "I just got back from two tours fighting overseas for America. This is what we were all fighting for. You go and keep at it."

We're fighting for the right of Muslims to build mosques at ground zero? I thought we were trying to keep Muslims AWAY from our skyscrapers. (What an embarrassing misunderstanding.) PLEASE PULL THE TROOPS OUT IMMEDIATELY.

But back to the main issue: Was Bloomberg having a $150 Burger Double Truffle at DB Bistro Moderne or a more sensible $30 burger at the 21 Club when he bumped into his imaginary veteran? With the pint-sized mayor shrieking at the sight of a saltshaker, I assume he wasn't having a Hardee's No. 4 Combo Meal.

Adding an element of realism to his little vignette, Bloomberg said: "I got a hamburger and a pickle and a potato chip or something."

A potato chip? Translation: "I don't know what I was eating, because I'm making this whole story up -- I wouldn't be caught dead eating 'a potato chip' or any other picaresque garnish favored by the peasants." At least Bloomberg didn't claim the man who walked up to him took credit for setting the Times Square bomb because he was a tea partier upset about ObamaCare -- as Sherlock Bloomberg had so presciently speculated at the time.

Gen. Petraeus objected to the Quran-burning protest on the grounds that it could be used by radical jihadists to recruit Muslims to attack Americans.

This is what liberals say whenever we do anything displeasing to the enemy -- invade Iraq, hold captured terrorists in Guantanamo, interrogate captured jihadists or publish Muhammad cartoons. Is there a website somewhere listing everything that encourages terrorist recruiting?

If the general's main objective is to hamper jihadist recruiting, may I respectfully suggest unconditional surrender? Because on his theory, you know what would really kill the terrorists' recruiting ability? If we adopted Sharia law!

But wait -- weren't we assured by Fire Island's head of national security, Andrew Sullivan, that if America elected a "brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy," the terrorists would look like a bunch of lunkheads and be unable to recruit?

It didn't work out that way. There have been more terrorist attacks on U.S. soil by these allegedly calmed Muslims in Obama's first 18 months in office than in the six years under Bush after he invaded Iraq.

Also, as I recall, there was no Guantanamo, no Afghanistan war and no Iraq war on Sept. 10, 2001. And yet, somehow, Osama bin Ladin had no trouble recruiting back then. Can we retire the "it will help them recruit" argument yet?

The reason not to burn Qurans is that it's unkind -- not to jihadists, but to Muslims who mean us no harm. The same goes for building a mosque at ground zero -- in both cases, it's not a question of anyone's "rights," it's just a nasty thing to do.

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Obama and Born Alive


And I suppose it never occurs to people that these babies are also alive in their mother's womb before an abortion doctor kills them, whether or not they manage to survive it and are born still alive.

Thought for the Day

"I have sometimes asked myself whether my country is the better for my having lived at all? I do not know that it is. I have been the instrument of doing the following things; but they would have been done by others; some of them, perhaps, a little better."

–Thomas Jefferson, 1800


Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Flashback: Glenn Beck Slams Newsweek

Maybe I should call these "Flashbeck's." I know, I'm so very clever. /s

Glenn takes on the silliness of Newsweek's "Sarah Palin wouldn't appear on stage with pro-choicers or anti-drillers."

From November 11, 2008:

Palin Meets Girls in D.C.

Story in the Gladwin County Record and Clarion:

When best friends Heather Baker and Makayla Kocur hopped a Haines Tour Bus with around 50 people to take a trip to our nation’s capital, they probably weren’t thinking about meeting former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, but that’s exactly what happened.

The pair, who have been friends since Pre-K, traveled to the Restoring Honor Rally in Washington, D.C. where they had volunteered to work backstage at the event. It was there that Sarah Palin stopped to offer her thanks to the girls.

“She thanked us for being there,” said Makayla. “It was amazing. She shook our hands and everything.” “She is so nice, and she’s so real,” she added.

Makayla’s father, Kurt Kocur, who made the trip along with the girls, agreed.

“She seemed to me to be down to earth,” he said. “The fact that she stopped and talked to them was really great.”

Picture at the link.

Disclaimers and Piper Palin on the Bob and Mark Show

I see some are throwing up disclaimers on their blogs. Basically just FYI's - "just for the record, Governor Palin has nothing to do with us. These are our opinions, etc...." Standard procedure.

(Sigh) Do I have to put one up too? I think I'm too lazy.

Let's just say that if you think that anything on this blog is in any way connected to Governor Palin herself, you're nuts. These are all my own stupid opinions, most of which are probably wrong. Palin probably doesn't even know I exist, nor does she care.

There, that should do it.

Now, on to the Piper Palin stuff.

Bob and Mark are on the radio for 4 and a half hours every weekday. Suffice it to say, I don't catch every second of it. I rely on others to tip me off when there's a Palin mention or interview. Somehow, this one slipped through the cracks. Thank goodness they replayed it yesterday:



I'm assuming based on this tweet that this interview probably occurred around the morning of August 24th, the day of the primary. If I knew what day Piper started school, I could be more exact, but I think August 24th is a pretty good guess.

A Good-Old Fashioned Book-Burning

Protests, sometimes violent protests, a guy almost beheaded here and there... Almost an everyday occurrence these days. All because somebody gets offended.

So there's this church in Florida that's going to burn copies of the Koran.

First off, what good is that going to do? It's not illegal, I don't think, but still. Kind of a waste of energy, don't you think?

Well, apparently, Afghans found out about it somehow, and they're not happy:
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Hundreds of Afghans protested Monday in Kabul over the decision by the Gainesville, Fla.-based Dove World Outreach Center to burn copies of what Muslims consider the word of God.

Petraeus said he's concerned that the protests could spread across the country.

"It could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort in Afghanistan. It is precisely the kind of action the Taliban uses and could cause significant problems. Not just here, but everywhere in the world we are engaged with the Islamic community," Petraeus said in a statement provided to Fox News.

Though Dove World Outreach Center has been denied a permit to hold a bonfire, the Koran burning is still scheduled to proceed on Saturday. The burning -- set to mark nine years since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks -- follows a campaign last year in which the church distributed T-shirts that said "Islam is of the Devil."

In a blog on the church's website, writer Fran Ingram offered the groups’ reasoning for burning the Koran, arguing that it is not God's word and denies Jesus is the son of God, that Islam is totalitarian and that the religion teaches idolatry, paganism, rites and rituals.

"We are using this act to warn about the teaching and ideology of Islam, which we do hate as it is hateful. We do not hate any people, however. We love, as God loves, all the people in the world and we want them to come to a knowledge of the truth," the blog reads.

Other writings by the same blogger include headlines like "Islam is Cursed by Cursing Israel" and "The Koran: A Sorcerer's Scroll."

The U.S. Embassy in Kabul issued a statement condemning the church's plans, saying Washington was "deeply concerned about deliberate attempts to offend members of religious or ethnic groups."

But outside the U.S. Embassy, where as many as 500 protestors chanted "Long live Islam" and "Death to America," demonstrators argued that the church isn't acting of its own will.

"We know this is not just the decision of a church. It is the decision of the president and the entire United States," said Abdul Shakoor, an 18-year-old high school student who said he joined the protest after hearing neighborhood gossip about the Koran burning.

Burning a Koran is considered by Muslims among the most offensive actions taken against Islam. In 2005, 15 people died and scores were wounded in riots in Afghanistan sparked by a story in Newsweek magazine alleging that interrogators at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay placed copies of the Koran in washrooms and had flushed one down the toilet to get inmates to talk. Newsweek later retracted the story.
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Yeah, looks like Obama's outreach to the Muslim world is going really well. He's made great strides. So great that these people think this is the policy of the entire United States right off the bat.

Setting all else aside, let me just talk to this church for a moment.

If nothing else, think of the troops. People could get killed because of this, and what will you have accomplished?

I haven't looked into the church, but this whole incident reminded me of this clip:

Monday, September 6, 2010

Happy Birthday, Todd

I went lookin' for some vids, and I found these:


Yes. Happy birthday. You're a feminist. ;)

This is a video I thought had disappeared down the rabbit hole:

,


And my absolute favorite:

Flashback: Glenn Beck After the RNC Convention

September 5, 2008:

Mama Palin Dances Too

I ran across this today. From a newsletter published in February of 2007:

Alaska Native elder leaders from throughout Alaska convened at the Alaska Native Heritage Center on Jan. 27 in Anchorage, to welcome Alaska's newest and first female governor, Sarah Palin of Wasilla.

The governor attended with her family: husband Todd, daughters Willow and Piper, and Dillingham Yup'ik elder Helena Andree, Todd's grandmother.

All elders had a chance to speak and welcome the new governor, some did so in their Native language. Many presented Gov. Palin with Native crafted gifts, which she respectfully accepted.

Gov. Palin expressed her appreciation for the welcome, and spoke of the importance of Alaska's cultural heritage and traditions as a way to preserve the past and to help shape Alaska's future.

Gov. Palin joined Native dancers in closing the event, delighting her youngest daughter, Piper, who proudly watched as her mother danced.

Natives in attendance were impressed by Gov. Palin's participation in the event, as well. Many felt they were witness to a bridge being built.

Welcome, Gov. Palin.

The pictures in the article with the captions in the article:

Bethel elder, Peter Jacobs, addresses and welcomes Alaska's new governor, Sarah Palin, and family at the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage, January 2007.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin greets Alaska Native elders at the Alaska Native
Heritage Center.

Bethel elder Peter Jacobs presents a necklace gift to Gov. Palin.


An elder presents a birch basket gift to Gov. Palin.

Gov. Palin joins dancers at the end of the event, to the delight of her
youngest daughter Piper (green jacket, bottom left of picture)

Gov. Palin addresses the attendees at the Heritage Center.

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Cool. This is the event where one of my all-time fave pics of Palin was taken:

What a smile.