Separation of Church and Dumb
Nothing boils my blood faster than a conversation on the “separation of church and state”. The temperature rating will quickly escalate to levels comparable to the surface of the sun when I am additionally “informed” that the phrase is in the Constitution.
Michael Prell has a great article today on dumb people who get pissed off at anything to do with Christmas because it has the word Christ in it. Which if anyone recalls is the reason the holiday began in the first place. Best Buy and Amazon did not establish the event, though we have had Santa and given gifts for a very long time. But the point really is that the anti-Christmas sentiment is quite perplexing. Everyone knows Easter is about the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. People know that Thanksgiving was established to give thanks to Jehovah. But Target isn’t banning its employees from saying, “Happy Easter”.
Anyway, Prell talks about this guy who failed at bombing the “Holiday Tree” in Portland. And he points out the irony in that this Muslim terrorist tries to go blow up a Christian symbol that was already neutered by the city government and wasn’t even called a Christmas tree anymore. So basically this guy just wanted to murder people. Why? Because Islam is a peace loving religion…
(By the way, Prell mentions that after this guy tried to murder people in Portland via a weapon of mass destruction the Portland Mayor increased security around local mosques…not Christian churches…the local mosques. He wanted to make sure there was no backlash on the local Muslim community that is “peace loving”. You can’t make this stuff up.)
The kid was Somalian, and their Prime Minister assures us that Somalia is a peace loving country with peace loving people. He apparently forgot about that little incident with Mohamed Farrah Aidid. They made a movie about it. It was awesome!
One thing that I think is very important that Prell points out is the double standard that Christianity is treated with. It’s really treated like a plague by most of our government. Like they don’t want the stench of it anywhere near them or someone will complain. Only in America does the majority rule until a fraction of the population gets their feelings hurt.
What exactly is so threatening about Christians, at Christmastime, celebrating a national holiday which was proclaimed by Congress back in 1870? This is the part where the Anti-Christmas Brigade will jump up and recite from its holiest of holy scriptures: Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists, in which he wrote of “a wall of separation between Church & State.”
The funny thing about that wall is: it appears to only be impervious to Christians.
Earlier this year, President Obama smashed through that wall when he, too, invoked the name of Thomas Jefferson — not to oppose, but to defend the expression of religion in the biggest town square in America: New York City and the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque.” He said “Thomas Jefferson wrote that ‘all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion’” and he upheld “the principle that people of all faiths…will not be treated differently by their government.”
But people of different faiths are treated differently by their government.
Just a few miles down I-95 from the Ground Zero Mosque, the government of Philadelphia banned (and then unbanned) “Christmas Village.” In Portland, the “Christmas Tree Bomber” had to settle for trying to bomb a “holiday tree,” because the government of Portland already got to the infidels before him and changed “Christmas tree” to “holiday tree.” And, lest you think that this targeting of Christianity is limited to Christmastime, recall the case of 12 Christian students in Washington State who were suspended for praying at school. By contrast, USA Today reports that “some public schools and universities are granting Muslim requests for prayer times, prayer rooms and ritual foot baths, prompting a debate on whether Islam is being given preferential treatment over other religions.”
Figures…
-nick
Free Press Under-Reported Lobbying Expenses
Really great article over at Daily Caller on the discovery that Free Press under-reported lobbying expenses for lobbying Congress, the FCC, and NTIA. This is primarily a big deal because Free Press blatantly attacks the right on a daily basis on the grounds of transparency but routinely fails to open up about who is funding them along with much of their activities.
If you aren’t familiar with Free Press, you best get up to speed. The organization is a socialist playground started by Robert McChesney, a hard core socialist, who famously stated in the socialist magazine Monthly Review,
“…gains will only be made through an enormous class struggle from below. If won, they will not, we underscore, eliminate the evils of capitalism, or the dangers it poses for the world and its people. In the end, there is no real answer but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles. This is something that the great majority of the population will undoubtedly learn in the course of their struggles for a more equal, more humane, more collective, and more sustainable world.”
So if you aren’t familiar with Free Press or their activities, I greatly encourage you to start watch dogging them, and the post on Daily Caller is a good start.
UPDATE: More on the issue from Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.
-nick
Profiles in Courage in Georgia
Originally published at The Daily Caller.
I was recently speaking with one of my teachers from high school, reflecting on her summer reading assignment, JFK’s Profiles in Courage. If you have never read the book, it can be summarized quite simply in that it follows the actions of statesmen throughout the history of our country which took serious resolve and unwavering confidence. That’s not to say that these individuals who were profiled did not face fear in their hearts, fear for their jobs, and possibly fear for their lives. Fear is an emotion and it is understandable to have felt such emotion being placed in the situations that these men were embroiled.
Emotions however are not actions, and actions are not words. Words are funny things. They form sentences and go on to form speeches. Speeches stir emotions and cause people to talk about issues. Sometimes this causes people to become involved and take action, which is good. However the difference between words and actions is that a word may or may not cause an action, while an action will always be the process of doing. And the men of Kennedy’s most renowned work were doers.
In February of this year, my Congressman, John Linder, announced his retirement from public office. I’ve always liked Mr. Linder even though I was turned down for a position at his state office when I was 20 and looking for work while in college. It has always given me a sense of pride for some reason that my congressman introduced the Fair Tax legislation, even though I obviously had nothing to do with it. So now Linder will take his leave, and Georgia’s 7th District looks for new leadership. The heart of the 7th is Gwinnett County, a suburb of Atlanta, home of the Tripple-A Gwinnett Braves and 800,000 of your closest friends (except during rush hour). The district also contains other metro counties including Forsyth, Barrow, Newton, and Walton.
The district will be won by a Republican. That’s not a prediction, it is a statement.
So the question many are asking in the 7th at this moment is, “Who can be as good as Linder?” That’s the wrong question. Let’s ask who can be better than Linder. And that’s not a knock on Linder. That’s simply American to raise the bar and our expectations of our leaders. And to Linder’s credit, he set the bar rather high.
In the past months we’ve seen a lot of candidates in the 7th. Some have come late and some have gone early. Some even left the race to return to houses of waffles only to wind back up in state politics. There are many candidates for the seventh. Most of them have words. Some of them have even had years of career political words.
There is one candidate, however, who is a candidate of action and most certainly can raise the bar.
Some of you will recognize the name Jody Hice from The Jody Hice Show, a nationally syndicated talk show featured on over 400 stations across the country. Others of you will recognize the name from his courageous battle with the American Civil Liberties Union. Several years ago, the ACLU journeyed to Georgia to force the Ten Commandments out of the Barrow County courthouse. Jody formed an organization which raised money to fund the county’s defense, standing toe to toe against one of the most anti-American institutions of the last hundred years.
Ultimately, this fight against the ACLU later led to legislation that was passed in Georgia allowing the display of the Ten Commandments in front of government buildings as long as it was displayed in historical context along with the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
In the Fall of 2008, Dr. Hice stood with 33 other pastors across the country to challenge an IRS code that strips pastors of their right to freedom of speech by way of threatening the removal of the tax-exemption status of the churches they pastor. Get this: He mailed a copy of his speech to the IRS daring them to come after him. They didn’t. Probably a good decision on their part.
Earlier this year in January, Hice decided to step down from the pulpit. He felt strongly that his current call was in defense of his nation and he had determined that he would make a bigger push with his radio show. Now before dollars start clouding your vision, understand that Hice is not paid to run his radio program. He stepped down from a paying gig in order to do a non-paying gig full time having no idea how he would support his family all for the sake of restoring the Republic. Take a second with that in this economy. Don’t brush over that fact.
In March of this year Hice was approached and recruited to run for Congress and was made aware he could retain his radio show while representing the people of Georgia. So Hice accepted being tapped to run.
In case you didn’t catch that, I’ll write it again. The Jody Hice Show will be retained in some fashion even if Dr. Hice is elected to Congress.
Hice will be the only member in Congress who can walk out the door of the assembly chamber and walk into a radio station and sit there and tell you exactly what is going on in your government. We aren’t talking about members of Congress getting 30 seconds here and there on your favorite news network. We are talking about a radio show of several hours for a Representative to sit down and hash out with the public what is actually happening in the chamber.
That’s political Direct Media at its finest.
In the coming weeks, individuals will begin to pull levers here in Georgia during early voting leading up to the 20th of July. The vote will be of vital importance for the second most populated district in Georgia.
I have personally endorsed Dr. Jody Hice. And in full transparency so has ConservativeCongress.com, a conservative candidate evaluation platform of which I am a co-founder. But that group has also endorsed other candidates in the district who met organizational criteria as well. I was not paid to write this, I don’t work for Hice, and I have not donated to any primary campaign. Rules of which all members of ConservativeCongress.com agreed to abide by at the projects onset.
The simple truth is that I am of the conviction that actions speak louder than words. And the profiles in courage of Dr. Jody Hice putting his feet to the fire speaks for itself as the representative leadership that we need in Washington, D.C.
