Today is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. The Great Emancipator was fond of saying that God created all men as equal, and proved as such with the Emancipation Proclamation, and laying the foundation for what would become the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
An evil Republican, Lincoln did more for the black American than any Democrat of his time. They were too busy seceding from the Union and keeping the black American chained in slavery. Lincoln also signed in to law the act of Congress which placed the motto “In God We Trust” on our national currency. Lincoln didn’t have a problem with this because he was educated enough to know that there is no such thing as the separation of church and state, since he was familiar with the principles upon which our nation was founded.
Happy Birthday, Mr. President. May we not squander the legacy you left us, so “that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
You have to love the Left. When it comes to liberating the Iraqi people, ousting a sociopathic dictator in possession of weapons of mass destruction, hunting down and exterminating terrorists bent on the destruction of the United States, and Western civilization in general, we are “not at war.” They claim it’s not a “real war,” since Congress has not declared such. Right. Like Congress can declare war on a relatively faceless entity with no geographic boundaries (al-Qaeda). Or if we go to war in Iraq, President Bush doesn’t have the authority because Congress hasn’t declared war on Iraq. Gee, just like Kennedy and Johnson in Vietnam, right Demos?
Oh, but let the conversation turn to money, and specifically taxes, and the Left suddenly reverses course:
“If Bush is a serious war President he would increase taxes. This is a time for sacrifices. This is a real war and we need money to pay for it.” –Evan Thomas
So evidently we are at war, so long as half of the citizens of this country are forced to carry a larger tax burden while the other half contributes nothing.
I have an idea for Mr. Thomas (Assistant Managing Editor of Newsweek, by the way): how about the federal government end funding of unconstitutional social programs and departments like midnight basketball leagues, the Department of Education, the Social Security Administration, foreign aid to “allies” like France and Germany, and our subsidization of the “United” Nations. Then the government of the United States would have the money to pursue its primary constitutional duty, the defense of our nation “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
“Meanwhile, the peacenik predisposition of the other Continentals is a useful cover for French ambition. Last year Paavo Lipponen, the Finnish Prime Minister, declared that ‘the EU must not develop into a military superpower but must become a great power that will not take up arms at any occasion in order to defend its own interests.’ This sounds insane. But, to France, it has a compelling logic. You can’t beat the Americans on the battlefield, but you can tie them down limb by limb in the UN and other supranational bodies.
“In other words, this is the war, this is the real battlefield, not the sands of Mesopotamia. And, on this terrain, Americans always lose. Either they win but get no credit, as in Afghanistan. Or they win a temporary constrained victory to be subverted by subsequent French machinations, as in the last Gulf War. This time round, who knows? But through it all France is admirably upfront in its unilateralism: It reserves the right to treat French Africa as its colonies, Middle Eastern dictators as its clients, the European Union as a Greater France and the UN as a kind of global condom to prevent the spread of Americanization. All this it does shamelessly and relatively effectively.” —Mark Steyn
A Pekingese from Kenner won the toy dog category at the Westminster dog show this week, though she lost out in the Best in Show finale. Why do I care? I called Kenner home for three years, and my wife’s parents live there. She moved there when she was 7, grew up there. Her father was a city councilman for 12 years. I worked for the Pontchartrain Center.
For the uninitiated, Kenner is actually where the New Orleans International Airport is located. Leaving from the airport, you drive through Kenner, then Metairie, before entering Orleans Parish and New Orleans proper. Kenner is the 5th largest city in Louisiana.
We watched the Best in Show judging, and Yakee was simply adorable, waddling along with her fur all poofed out. Cute as a button. It would not surprise me to learn that my father-in-law knows the owners…
“How many folks saw Colin Powell at the UN? I thought he was pretty persuasive, but a lot of folks are still demanding more evidence, you know, before they actually consider Iraq a threat. For example, France. France wants more evidence, they demand more evidence. And I’m thinking, the last time France wanted more evidence it rolled right through Paris with a German flag.” –David Letterman
As of this morning, our household is free of computer CRT monitors. Last night, we purchased a NEC 17″ LCD for my wife’s PC. With just a slightly smaller viewable area than the 19″ CRT she was using, she now has more desk space, along with the LCD’s crisper, easier-on-the-eyes view, and low power consumption. The NEC joins my Apple 15″ LCD as the household desktop monitors. All other systems in the house–PowerBook G4/500, iBook/300, and IBM ThinkPad–are laptops.
I’m always a little leery of third-party applications which modify or “enhance” another application. I like to live on the bleeding edge, but I also like my system stability. So I’m just getting around to trying Gordon Byrnes’s freeware Safari Enhancer, and my recommendation, if you’re a Safari user, is to download it immediately.
What finally prompted me to give it a whirl was its bookmarking importation abilities, especially from Camino Chimera, my previous browser of choice. Others may have reported problems, but Safari Enhancer pulled off the importing of my Camino Chimera bookmarks perfectly, which is something Safari itself never did right with IE. Now I get to spend some time re-organizing my newly imported bookmarks in my new favorite browser. Hats off to Gordon!
“Not all Hollywood celebrities are ungrateful, anti-American lefties.” The MRC reports on an interview on Fox News Channel with actor Ron Silver, who offers a few choice bits:
bq. “But at that dinner, the EU had a dinner that night about the ‘new Europe,’ and they were being very self-congratulatory about their values, and implicitly they were suggesting that America was an imperial country, trying to impose their values on the rest of the world, which I don’t think is a bad idea by the way, I kind of think our values are fairy universal and might be helpful.”
bq. […]
bq. “I kind of link Rumsfeld’s ‘old Europe versus the new Europe,’ and we saw it in the last two weeks, with France and Germany, who were not with us on June 6, 1944, I don’t know why we expect them to be with us today.”
bq. […]
bq. “My opinion is that the entertainment community along with other advocates–human rights organizations, religious organizations, are always on the front lines to protest repression, but they’re always usually the first ones to oppose any use of force to take care of these horrors that they catalogue repeatedly, and I find that inconsistent as well.”
Kudos to Silver for standing against the Hollywonk culture. It is a testament to his acting skill that he can play such a leftie on The West Wing.
Yet another instance where I am ashamed to share a surname with this moronic windbag:
Monday morning on Today, however, Turner maintained that Iraq is “too small to pose a threat” to the U.S. and kept up the usual liberal mantra about how poverty fuels terrorism as he told Matt Lauer that “trying to make it a better world is my top priority. A more equitable world, that’s really the best way to combat terrorism is to, is to build a world where nobody’s angry enough to want to be a terrorist.”
You can read the full analysis here. I’d like to see poverty erased from this planet as much as the next person, but you don’t go about it in a way that smacks of communism. We have seen that experiment fail in our lifetime, yet people still think it is the answer.
Good news for those of us stuck in Exchange server-using corporate environments: Microsoft’s Mac BU has officially announced that Entourage will be updated as the official Exchange client for Mac OS X. (via MacMinute.com)