Corzine Wins NJ

Jon Corzine defeated Doug Forrester by a 9% margin...

In the week prior to the election there was an 11% swing vote...

Doug Forrester had Jon Corzine's ex-wife make a commercial putting Corzine down...

Forrester lost the swing vote...

Doug, do you see the connection?

When will Republicans and Conservatives learn how to fight in the political arena?

They either don't fight or they fight the wrong way!

Maybe they should start reading THE ART OF WAR and learn about strategy...

Intelligent Design: Yes and No

Dover Pennsylvania: All eight members up for re-election to the Dover school board that had been sued for introducing the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in biology class were swept out of office yesterday by a slate of challengers who campaigned against the intelligent design policy.

TOPEKA, Kansas - Risking the kind of nationwide ridicule it faced six years ago, the Kansas Board of Education approved new public-school science standards Tuesday that cast doubt on the theory of evolution.

The 6-4 vote was a victory for “intelligent design” advocates who helped draft the standards. Intelligent design holds that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by a higher power.

The new standards say high school students must understand major evolutionary concepts. But they also declare that the basic Darwinian theory that all life had a common origin and that natural chemical processes created the building blocks of life have been challenged in recent years by fossil evidence and molecular biology.

In addition, the board rewrote the definition of science, so that it is no longer limited to the search for natural explanations of phenomena.

The new standards will be used to develop student tests measuring how well schools teach science. Decisions about what is taught in classrooms will remain with 300 local school boards, but some educators fear pressure will increase in some communities to teach less about evolution or more about creationism or intelligent design.

Finally we see openminded people who are willing to accept the fact that Darwinism/Evolution is a THEORY and the there are other THEORIES that should be given time in the classroom too.

It's Shopping Time...

Stores are all jockying for position as we enter the Christmas season. Here just what a few of them are doing:

Walgreens has given $100,000 to help sponsor the Gay Games in Chicago next year.Oddly enough, Walgreens says they agreed to sponsor the Gay Games under the guise of helping prevent AIDS. But the official Gay Games web site has the following promotional statement, which promotes the very type of activity Walgreens says they are trying to prevent.

I wonder who's dollars they're after this year...

Target continues to stand by its decision to ban Salvation Army bell ringers from their stores, making it the largest retailer in America to do so. Target was going to sell a "vibrator toy"; a sex toy, as earlier suggested in a news article, but confirms it will sell the lotions, intimacy (stimulating) gels, and other products associated with it.

I wonder who they're trying to attract...

Wal-Mart has been under fire by various unions in the past two years and has come out with a "mini-movie" trying to place them in a good light with shoppers...

Hmmm; Union troubles, No Salvation Army Kettles but Sex toys are OK, $100,00 for Gay-Games... what's a shopper to do?

I think Syms said it best: "An educated consumer..."

Stay educated and shop smart AND even more importantly

DON'T FALL INTO THE CHRISTMAS SHOPPING GAME TO BEGIN WITH!

KEEP CHRIST IN CHRISTMAS... forget about all the rest... let's take Christmas back by keeping it simple and Christ focused.

Brian McClaren Quotes

"The true understanding of the Gospel is inherently relational (kingdom is a relational word--implying relationship with the king, with fellow citizens, with the territory, with the laws of the king and standards of justice and mercy, etc.) and missional (meaning it propels us into mission, for the kingdom is also a revolution against the status quo dominated by "“principalities and powers"”) and monastic (meaning it calls us to shared spiritual practices in community-- such as prayer and reconciliation-- racial, religious, economic, etc.). It can be diagrammed in contrast to our standard gospel understanding, which focuses on "“me and my soul,"” and then sometimes attempts to transfer concern from me to the church, and then occasionally attempts further extension of concern for the world:

me
world
church"”

-Brian McClaren

Wendell Berry Quotes

"People in movements too readily learn to deny to others the rights and privileges they demand for themselves. They too easily become unable to mean their own language, as when a “peace movement” becomes violent. They often become too specialized, as if finally they cannot help taking refuge in the pinhole vision of the institutional intellectuals. They almost always fail to be radical enough, dealing finally in effects rather than causes. Or they deal with single issues or single solutions, as if to assure themselves that they will not be radical enough." -Wendell Berry

"People in movements too readily learn to deny to others the rights and privileges they demand for themselves. They too easily become unable to mean their own language, as when a “peace movement” becomes violent. They often become too specialized, as if finally they cannot help taking refuge in the pinhole vision of the institutional intellectuals. They almost always fail to be radical enough, dealing finally in effects rather than causes. Or they deal with single issues or single solutions, as if to assure themselves that they will not be radical enough." -Wendell Berry

Catholic Church in LA comes clean on Abuse

NY TIMES:
Personnel files - some of which date from the 1930's - were produced as part of settlement talks with lawyers for 560 accusers in a civil suit in LA. The archdiocese has released them to the NY TIMES to make good on a promise to parishioners to come clean about the church's actions in the scandal, church officials said.

The confidential personnel files of 126 clergymen in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles accused of sexual misconduct with children provide a numbing chronicle of 75 years of the church's shame, revealing case after case in which the church was warned of abuse but failed to protect its parishioners.

The Los Angeles cases are in many ways typical of the sexual abuse claims that have stained the church around the country in recent years. The behavior of priests in Southern California was no worse than that seen elsewhere, and the response of senior church officials was generally no better.

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles is the nation's largest Roman Catholic diocese, covering 8,700 square miles and serving nearly five million Catholics. The size of the priestly abuse problem here rivals that in Boston, where more than 500 members of the clergy were accused of abusing children over the past 60 years and where the church paid $85 million in 2003 to settle civil claims against it.

Since then, the stakes have risen. Late last year, the Diocese of Orange County in California paid $100 million to settle 85 cases.

Let's hope that the Catholic church in all states "cleans up" it's act and no longer covers up priestly abuses of young boys. If not it may be time to get some "millstones" out to hang them around the necks of those priests who committed such egregious crimes against children and also a few more for those in the heirarchy who covered them up.

Bird Flu Found in Migrant Birds in Siberia

MosNews The bird flu virus has been discovered in migrant birds living in Novosibirsk region. Ducks and geese are thought to have brought the virus from South East Asia, the head of a local zoogenous infections laboratory, Alexander Shestopalov, was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying.

The tests made in spring and autumn are being analyzed and the results will be ready by December, the agency quoted him as saying. The virus was found in a test made last year, he added.Shestopalov noted that direct contact with migrant birds carrying the virus is unlikely because those birds live in thinly populated regions with many lakes.

However, the virus may be transmitted to birds constantly living in the Novosibirsk region, and then to domestic animals and people. In particular, a geese farm is near one of the lakes where the migrant birds live, the agency quoted him as saying.A person can become infected by the bird flu through contact with pigs. “Pigs transmit this disease without pronounced symptoms and it can be transmitted without being noticed,” Shestopalov said.

NY TIMES reports: Fear of the bird flu sweeping across Asia has played a major role in the government's flurry of preparations for a worldwide epidemic.
That concern prompted President Bush to meet Friday with vaccine makers to try to persuade them to step up production, and it led Health and Human Services Secretary Michael O. Leavitt to depart yesterday for a 10-day trip to at least four Asian nations to discuss planning for a pandemic flu.

Read the story here

Folks, this bird flu is a potentially lethal flu that could infect Millions and perhaps a Billion people!

The Bush administration is in the final stages of preparing a plan to deal with pandemic flu. A draft shows that the country is woefully unprepared, and it warns that a severe pandemic will kill millions, overwhelm hospitals and disrupt much of the nation.

Medical science cannot protect us so far...

This is a time for people to grow spiritually and to walk in faith...

Pray

1918 Flu that killed between 20-50 Million has been linked to the Bird Flu:

Researchers think more than one-fourth of the U.S. population was ill with the flu in the 1918-1919 outbreak and perhaps a billion people suffered from it worldwide. In a 10-month period, the flu killed between 20 million and 50 million people, including more than half a million Americans.

Pray

Italian "Terry Schiavo" Case

Man Wakes from Two-Year Coma – was Aware and Remembers Everything

Salvatore Crisafulli, 38, awoke Monday from a two-year long coma. Crisafulli was declared “nearly dead” by doctors after a serious auto accident that left him unresponsive.

His physicians, guided by modern bioethics movement that frequently rates personal autonomy above the value of life, gave up treating him and his family became his primary caregivers.

Crisafulli, a father of four, told Italian media through his brother, that he had heard and understood everything going on around him for two years and had been unable to respond. “I cried in desperation," he said.

Crisafulli’s case highlights a decision – made the same day Crisafulli “woke up,” – by the Italian National Bioethics Committee to recommend that the state must make it mandatory that such patients not be starved or dehydrated to death as in the US court-ordered death of Terri Schiavo earlier this year.

The Italian committee holds an advisory position to government equivalent to that of the President’s Council on Bioethics in the US.

The decision of the National Bioethics Committee flies in the face of the decision of many countries, Canada included, that says the delivery of food and water by any means other than mouth is “extraordinary medical treatment,” which may be withheld.

The Committee president, Francesco D’Agostino said, “To feed an unconscious patient through a tube is not a medical act. “It’s like giving a bottle to a newborn baby who can’t be nursed by its mother ... And then we reflect on the Schiavo case. The woman was left to die of starvation,” he said.

Perhaps our courts will stop taking life away when families will continue to care for their loved ones.

George Clooney: Rewriting History

"If Jesus Christ no longer satisfies your desire to worship a man as god, I suggest you buy a ticket for Good Night, and Good Luck, the new movie about legendary CBS News broadcaster Edward R. Murrow. Good Night, and Good Luck's Murrow burns cigarettes like altar incense. He speaks in a resonant, godly rumble. And he plods through the greatest story ever told about the hunting of communist hunter Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy like a man carrying all the world's sins."

So starts Jack Shafer's review of Clooney's new movie: GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK.

"Of course, Murrow was no god. Point of fact, he shouldn't be regarded as the patron saint of broadcast news his fans, among them Good Night, and Good Luck director George Clooney, make him out to be. But the passage of time, the self-serving testimonials from the broadcasters he recruited to CBS ("Murrow's Boys"), and the usual nostalgia for newsrooms choking on their own cigarette smoke have puffed the considerable accomplishments of a mortal and flawed newsman into modern miracles. Good Night, and Good Luck, a docudrama that pits Murrow against McCarthy, escalates the veneration to heavenly levels.

A terrific movie about the Murrow-McCarthy duel could be made, mind you, but Clooney and company ignore the material that might argue against their simple-minded thesis about Murrow, the era, and the press to produce an after-school special."

The problem with this movie is that it simply ignores the facts!

The Venona transcripts have shown definitively that American communists and Soviet sympathizers, such as Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg, did gather information for Moscow in the 1930s and 1940s.

If you want the real facts about Senator Joseph McCarthy read ANN COULTER'S book TREASON... it's an eye-opener!

Harriet Miers... Born Again Christian

NY TIMES: DALLAS, Oct. 4 - "By 1979, Harriet E. Miers, then in her mid-30's, had accomplished what some people take a lifetime to achieve. She was a partner at Locke Purnell Boren Laney & Neely, one of the most prestigious law firms in the South, with an office on the 35th floor of the Republic National Bank Tower in downtown Dallas."

That's how one of the top stories today in the NY Times starts out...

It continues to reveal how Miers made a decision that turned her life around and filled a void that success had not been able to fill.

"She decided that she wanted faith to be a bigger part of her life," Justice Hecht, who now serves on the Texas Supreme Court, said in an interview. "One evening she called me to her office and said she was ready to make a commitment" to accept Jesus Christ as her savior and be born again, he said. He walked down the hallway from his office to hers, and there amid the legal briefs and court papers, Ms. Miers and Justice Hecht "prayed and talked," he said.
She was baptized not long after that, at the Valley View Christian Church.

It was at that time that she left the Democratic Party too.

Tuesday on the "700 Club," Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the Christian conservative American Center for Law and Justice, said that Ms. Miers would be the first evangelical Protestant on the court since the 1930's. "So this is a big opportunity for those of us who have a conviction, that share an evangelical faith in Christianity, to see someone with our positions put on the court," Mr. Sekulow said.

From Pro-Choice to Pro-Life...

In a discussion with her campaign manager in 1989, Ms. Miers said she had been in favor in her younger years of a woman's right to have an abortion, but her views changed against abortion, as her born-again religious beliefs became a greater part of her life.

So, what do you think? How will Miers beliefs affect her as a Supreme Court Justice if she is confirmed?