Memorial Service a campaign rally or a rock concert

"From the start, the atmosphere resembled a collective exhibition of bizarrely inappropriate responses and paraphernalia."

January 13, 2011
Was that a memorial service a or a pep rally?
Doug Lucas

Well, the cult members were out in full force tonight in Arizona. I was ashamed and disgusted by the spectacle that was called a memorial service.

President Obama's speech was fine, as always. He read the teleprompter with eloquence and did a fine chin in the air impersonation of Che Guevara, as usual. His words were appropriate for the most part and he rose above the political fray by making a point of chiding people that were playing the blame game.

My beef is not with Obama this time. It is his mindless minions in the crowd that draws my ire. Apparently the crowd was mainly composed of university students and from what I could gather they had already started tapping kegs for the wake.

This was more like an Arsenio Hall show than a memorial service. Catcalls, standing ovations, whistling and the whoop, whoop, whoop of the crowd dominated the night. What should have been a somber occasion for reflection turned into another Obama pep rally. It was as if these students had their guy up on stage and by God they weren't about to let a national tragedy get in the way of them having a good time and cheering on their messiah.

If these kids are our future then we are well and truly screwed.

Contributor Patricia McCarthy adds:

I've just watched the "memorial" service for those killed and wounded in Tucson. How are we to explain the lack of decorum and reverence displayed by that audience? Did those students forget that the families of the dead and wounded were in the room? Do they not understand the meaning of the word "murdered"? Is not everyone who watched horrified by the whistling, hooting cheerfulness of that crowd?

The audience turned what was to be a memorial into something between a campaign rally and a rock concert. They should all be ashamed of themselves. The event called for honor and quiet respect, not hooting and hollering for a celebrity. Perhaps it was the free t-shirts that set the tone.  Read More

Poll: 71% of Americans oppose raising the debt ceiling

posted at 12:55 pm on January 13, 2011 by Ed Morrissey

Has the mainstream gone Tea Party, or the Tea Party gone mainstream?  Despite warnings from the White House of the “deeply irresponsible” nature of “play[ing] chicken” with the national debt-limit ceiling, a Reuters poll of adults shows almost three-quarters of Americans opposed to further increases in the statutory borrowing cap.  Read More

America: Death by 'Intelligence,' Rebirth by 'Ignorance'

"Because in Obama's America, membership in an official elite trumps commonsense solutions, fact-based knowledge, and Judeo-Christian respect for individuals"

January 13, 2011
America: Death by 'Intelligence,' Rebirth by 'Ignorance'
By Stuart Schwartz

Ignorance. You gotta love it, because "ignorance" -- as seen by elitists -- is what will save the United States. Washington needs citizens of average intelligence who can take back government, a horde of drooling dimwits -- the kind that needs to be "nudged" into officially certified behavior by government dictate, says Obama's regulation czar and Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein -- to save it from the "smart" people. We're talking here of outside-the-Beltway dimwits that Time magazine columnist Joe Klein calls "too dumb to thrive" without the guidance of government-sanctioned behavior and policies such as carbon taxes, internet content restricted by regulation, and laws governing what and how much to eat.

Are you out of your mind, you ask? You want to turn Washington over to ordinary people, the stupid people "with short attention spans," as the sage of Yale -- also known as Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts -- sees them? Short answer: Yes. Long answer: Yes, because those considered dimwitted by our elites -- ordinary people with ordinary lives and ordinary education -- are savvy enough to defy what passes for wisdom in the New York-Washington corridor and recover both the soul and sense of a nation.
Read More

The answer is: Those without shame

January 13, 2011
American Thinker
Lee Cary

I'm retired now, but once upon a time, as a church pastor, I was called on to conduct funerals and memorial services. All too often.

I never saw them as opportunities to convert any possible unbelievers in attendance, exaggerate the virtues of the deceased, or advance some localized ecclesiastical agenda. That's not what they're about.

Funerals and memorial services are about looking beyond the moment where the cold immediacy of death has taken hold, and toward whatever divine, otherworldly, or transcendent beliefs are held by, most importantly, the family, but also their friends.

When the October 2002 memorial service for the late Senator Paul Wellstone (D. MN) turned into a political pep rally, many were offended. But who realistically expected it to be anything other than that? In that extravaganza, dignity was only moderately conspicuous by its absence. To paraphrase Rahm Emanuel: The goal is to never pass up an opportunity to take partisan advantage of a prominent politician's death.

It's happened again, this hijacking of mourning for political purposes, but this time the assault on dignity is more egregious. This time the props are innocent murdered civilians. And, this time they include a little girl.

Never mind what the President said last night. It was flat, harmless, boilerplate stuff, with no timeless, memorable quotes. It was the overall branding of the event, including special-event T-shirts (who bought them?), accompanied by applause as the various dignitaries entered the arena for the political theater, and the hob-knobbing that accompanies the gather of pols that collectively represented yet another amazing exercise of uncommonly bad taste by our political elite.  Read More

The Power & Danger of Iconography

OBAMA AT HALFTIME

Oh America, Sweet America, What Fate Awaits You?

The following article points out once again the obvious.  The answer to the fate of America lies in the hands of God and the hearts and minds of each individual.  Many public figures are stating the same message.  Glenn Beck, in particular, has been fact by fact educating the public concerning the history and power of the progressive/socialist mantra.

HOWEVER...Quote from the following article..."Until the masses wake up and decide to heal themselves, nothing will change! Even with Limbaugh, Hannity, Ingraham, Beck, Savage, Larson and a whole host of other conservative talk radio and TV folks, the masses are still dumbed down and bought off, and big government, big banks, big business, big unions and the one-world-order crowd still rule the day."

“FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMING AMERICA”
by Ron Ewart, ©2010

Each week, this author and a close friend have lunch together and discuss the issues and events of the day, political and otherwise. These are constructive discussions, as it allow us to expand our perspective on those issues. Over the last several years we have covered lots of ground and when we think we have come up with a solution to one or more of America’s problems, we are brought up short on how to implement them. Identifying the problems is not all that difficult. Coming up with a politically palatable solution is outright problematical.

The other day he said: “You are a good writer, but for the last 4 years you have found a thousand ways to say the same thing.” After mulling his ego-deflating statement over a few times, the tone of our articles was indeed, similar from one to the other ….. a description of the problems, over and over again, but without plausible solutions. It would appear he was probably right. We had no defense.

On many occasions, we exchange e-mail messages with others on these very same issues and we can sense the frustration of those who are engaged in trying to make sense of what is going on and searching for workable solutions.

One gentleman said the other day in an e-mail, in part: “I would like to identify the enemy before the fight begins and I want to know that we are going after the root cause of our problems …….” A logical goal if there ever was one. “Know thine enemy.”  Read More

Possible explanation for bird deaths

Earth's magnetic pole shift unleashing poisonous space clouds linked to mysterious bird deaths

January 13, 2011
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com

(NaturalNews) Following the unexplained deaths of several thousand birds over the last two weeks, events are now emerging that may offer a physics-based explanation for the mysterious deaths. It all begins on a runway in Tampa, where airport officials recently closed that runway in order to change the numeric designators painted there. Why are those numeric designators being changed? Because the Earth's magnetic poles are shifting and the numbers previously painted on the runway no longer match up with the magnetic measurements of sensitive airplane instruments (http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01...).

As Physorg.com explains:

The primary runway at the airport is designated 18R/36L, which means the runway is aligned along 180 degrees from north (that is, due south) when approached from the north and 360 degrees from north when approached from the south. Now the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has requested the designation be changed to 19R/1L to account for the movement of the magnetic north pole.  Read More

Constitutionalism Going “Viral”

An excellent well written article..."The Liberty Movement’s interest lay not just in the chaos of the present moment, but in the clarity of a possible future; one in which man’s individual sovereignty is valued, rather than feared."

By Giordano Bruno
Neithercorp Press – 1/12/11

Generally, when one is in the midst of national tragedy, unspoken but expected rules of social conduct tend to take effect. These rules require us to engage in a chorus of collective theater in which every person must act out their best teary-eyed monologue. We suddenly feel obliged to showcase for the world how much more empathetic we are to the plight of the victim or victims than others, or, we simply silence our dissent so that we might avoid appearing “insensitive” to the fads of cultural grieving. That is to say, if you dare to question the honesty behind the sobs, the outrage, or the reactionary zealotry of the ideologues hell bent on exploiting the latest calamity to their own benefit, then you are usually branded as monstrous as the villain or villains who carried out the terrible event in the first place.

Will we see a repeat of 1995? Will the event be wielded like a precision blade to cut down the Liberty Movement and the independent educational apparatus we have worked so hard to build? Not this time…

Neither the Giffords shooting, nor any other nationally condemned attack will derail the current social climate, or the Liberty Movement itself. Here’s why…

Constitutionalism Going “Viral”

Seeing The Big Picture

Legitimate Concerns, Not “Rhetoric

Anti-Gun Movements Now Sterile

Rights Taking Precedence Over “Safety

True Humanitarians Promote Freedom

Read More

Stand Tall...Stand on the Truth

"The Road Not Taken" is a poem by Robert Frost, published in 1916 in the collection Mountain Interval

Video: Shooter a nonpartisan nutcase, says friend

Arrogant and Authoritarian: Barack Obama and the New Progressives

January 12, 2011
Arrogant and Authoritarian: Barack Obama and the New Progressives
By Chuck Rogér

Blindness to physical reality, denial of human nature, and a consuming desire to use government force to impose fantasies on fellow human beings. Welcome to the mind of today's American "progressive."

Progressives veil sophomoric schemes in eloquent verbiage. Barack Obama's mastery of the technique got him elected president. Sixty-nine and a half million Americans would not have voted for Obama had he failed to conceal the differences between his campaign spiel and the contents of his heart.

Convinced of the goodness of their intentions, ideologues like Obama mistake tyranny for noble action. And to achieve their noble objectives, today's progressives bend the truth far more than did predecessors like John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR. Yet Obama has increasingly adopted a more direct modus operandi since becoming president. The "centrist" disguise has disintegrated.

Progressivism initially appeared on the American scene in response to problems that cried for solutions. Peter Berkowitz describes the movement's birth.  Read More

The Media Has Declared... WAR!

January 12, 2011
The Media Has Declared... WAR!
By John Fricke

Newsrooms and hospitals have one major thing in common: the "hush" is the loudest thing anyone ever hears. The "hush" is the moment when normal activity stops cold for an announcement of major events that will entirely reshape any usual activity. While both newsrooms and hospitals stop on that kind of news -- and then, following it, race into a whirlwind of overdrive -- the similarities end there.

Hospitals gird for the incoming and the flood of bad news to follow; most newsrooms do not. In a newsroom, tragic events are met with a different vibe: an electric jolt that energizes the room with a sense of self-importance.

The shot of adrenaline that surges through a newsroom is fascinating to watch. After the initial rush, the newsroom is never satisfied. There is a reason why the term "news junkie" exists; there is always the next twist, the next piece of fresh information, the next set of numbers (think of the alcohol shots of "news" that an election night provides with its changing and evolving big story).   Read More

Timeline of recent mysterious bird, fish deaths

Wednesday, January 12, 2011
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com

(NaturalNews) The recent mysterious deaths of birds and fish are causing alarm among naturalists around the world. Birds are literally falling dead out of the sky, and fish are washing up dead on shores and rivers across North America and around the world. The reaction from the mainstream media seems strangely subdued, as if they're all just blowing this off as some unexplained quirk about the natural world that should be largely ignored.

NaturalNews readers think differently. We are concerned when thousands of dead birds fall out of the sky for no apparent reason. The sky itself may not be falling, but previously live animals are clearly falling out of it. If that's not enough reason to wonder what the heck is happening to our planet, then what is?

These are clear signs that something is wrong. Red flags from nature, if you will. Here's the timeline of recent deaths that have been reported:  Read More

Green Tea health benefits better than previously thought

Green tea better at preventing cancer and dementia than previously thought

Wednesday, January 12, 2011 by: S. L. Baker, features writer

(NaturalNews) For years, NaturalNews has covered the mounting research linking green tea and its extracts to a host of disease-fighting benefits -- from halting the progression of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (http://www.naturalnews.com/029055_l...) and reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease to protecting the oxygen-deprived brain from memory loss (http://www.naturalnews.com/023375_g...) and preventing breast cancer (http://www.naturalnews.com/025687_g...). It almost sounds too good to be true, right? Actually, a new study has revealed that green tea is an even more incredible natural health enhancer than anyone knew previously.   Read More