Maryland lawmakers voted to repeal the death penalty following five other U.S. states that have ended capital punishment in the past six years. The House of Delegates today passed a bill that would stop prosecutors from seeking to execute those convicted of murder, the only crime for which the state allows capital punishment. The measure passed the Senate earlier this month, and Democratic Governor Martin O’Malley plans to sign it, said Takirra Winfield, a spokeswoman.Yes, a very, very few have been wrongfully convicted. So we should risk allowing some of these real monsters to be free? (And, yes, some will be.) I think not. and after they commit more of their heinous crimes most other people will not either. The experience of the 1970's show this.
I believe, however—and I could be wrong—that the reason some rage against the machine is that they hate God and love their sin, and bringing up Jesus in December is not the way they wanted to finish off the year. Indeed, Christ really rains on their parade … and they love their parade.His viewpoint is entirely orthodox and right. Go read it all.
Christmas, if you really get down to the brass tacks of it, isn’t about reindeer, elves, iPhones or Lindsay Lohan punching a gypsy, but about mankind’s sin problem and what God did to remedy it by sending His Son.
I know the chief facet most people focus on regarding Christ’s birth has been the peace on earth and good will toward men stuff, but if you dig around in the gospels a tad you’ll quickly see that the “peace on earth” thing is an ancillary perk to the main reason the second person of the godhead donned an earth suit and decided to hang out with us dunderheads. The core cause that necessitated Jesus’ incarnation was our jacked up carnality. Yep, Hambone, it was our sin. There, I said it. Sin. Yours, mine and ours.
Transgression was the reason for the season.
(CNSNews.com) - In a Sept. 14 policy memorandum, Col. Chuck Callahan, chief of staff of Walter Reed National Medical Center, banned family members from bringing Bibles and other "religious items" when visiting wounded military personnel at the facility.The piece goes on to say that this was just poor wording and that...
In a section entitled “Partners in Care Guidelines," describing what family members can bring to their wounded warrior in the hospital, the memo states: “No religious items (i.e., Bibles, reading materials and/or artifacts) are allowed to be given away or used during a visit.”
King and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) met with Navy officials and were told that the “memo was worded improperly” and a new memo will be drafted “to affirmatively assert that religious items and artifacts are welcome in the hospital, if they are welcomed by the patient.”A lie.
“We filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with Walter Reed Military Medical Center in hope of understanding who authorized the Bible ban and why,” Tony Perkins, FRC president, said in a press release about the request. “Although the Center's spokesmen assure us the policy has been rescinded, we have yet to see the revised policy. Until then, we'll push forward with our investigation to see who or what is driving the religious purging.”Good for them.
Unseasonable cold greeted delegates to the U.N. conference on climate change in Durban, South Africa, Nov. 28. They were chilled more by the impending collapse of one of the most brazen scams in the history of the world.But what about the "real scientists"?
The warnings of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the world faced doom from anthropogenic (man-made) global warming were based on peer-reviewed scientific literature, the IPCC chairman claimed. But when Canadian writer Donna LaFramboise checked the 18,531 references in the 2007 report, she found 5,587 were newspaper and magazine articles written by non-experts, unpublished theses and pamphlets produced by environmental groups.
Just in time for the Durban conference, 5,000 more emails have been leaked. In this batch, scientists admit the science supporting anthropogenic global warming is weak and depends on data manipulation. They conspire with politicians and journalists to conceal this from the public. "What if climate change appears to be just a multi-decadal natural fluctuation?" wrote one. "They'll kill us, probably."But why would they do this? There are a couple of reasons and the piece spends half of text discussing those. One of these;
The leading alarmist among American scientists, James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been as spectacularly wrong as Mr. Gore. Mr. Hansen said in a 1988 interview the sea level off Manhattan would rise 10 feet within 40 years (if atmospheric CO2 doubled). In the 23 years since, the sea level has risen just 2.5 inches. Sea levels fell over the past year.Go read the whole thing.
But alarmism has been good for his pocketbook. Mr. Hansen failed to report $1.6 million in outside income, much of it in violation of NASA's rules, according to Power Line's John Hinderaker.
State officials launched an investigation after an unusually high number of absentee ballots were cast in the July 2010 primary election. "As a result of their grand jury findings 12 individuals were indicted in that particular matter and we will be trying that case in a court of judicial law instead of a court of public opinion so that will be pending this next year," said District Attorney Joe Mulholland.The Party office to call when you want to get it done.
The exchange between Israel and its bitter Hamas enemy sees Israel freeing a total of 1,027 prisoners - hundreds of them from life sentences imposed for killing Israelis.For the murderous freaks of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, et al., this counts as a great victory. As far as I am concerned it says that the life of a single Israeli Jew is worth the lives of a thousand Palestinian Arabs. I don't believe that this is necessarily true, but then again I have no sympathy for a people that would chose the terrorism of Fatah and Hamas over peace and the opportunity to build their own State.
Buses of Palestinian prisoners are now moving from Israel into Egypt en route to Gaza.
The Christian preachers give universal supplications that include phrases like “O Lord, lover of all mankind and savior of all the world”; they quote biblical passages such as “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt 5: 44); they pray that God may “heal all people around the world of their diseases.”You can observe any Orthodox Christian service anywhere in the world and here prayers that are as quoted above and NEVER here a single prayer that asks for any harm to anyone under any circumstances EVER. We pray only for the salvation of all mankind. The same is true in the Roman Catholic Church. Not so in Islam. Read the entire piece, there is a lot more.
While such an approach is familiar, taken for granted even, the supplications of the Muslim preachers may surprise some. Popular Egyptian preacher Sheikh Muhammad al-Zoghbi was taped invoking his god thusly:
May Allah cut your tongue out! May he freeze the blood in your veins! May he inflict you with cancer and allow you no reprieve. … Allah, strike them with all sorts of disease, afflictions and pain! Allah, strike them with cancer! Allah, let your prophet overpower them! Allah destroy them! Allah destroy them! Allah destroy them! Allah destroy the criminals who challenge the noble prophet!
[Then, very serenely to his Muslim viewers] And peace upon you, and Allah’s mercy and blessings.
Likewise, Sheikh Abdullah Nihari supplicated Allah with outstretched arms accordingly:
Lord, Lord, we condemn them before you! Freeze the blood in their veins! Strike them with evil, or at the very least freeze the blood in their veins — until they pray for death, but do not receive it! O Lord! O Lord! O Lord!
Pakistan, which has issued a death sentence to a Christian mother of five for allegedly blaspheming the prophet Mohammed, and which regularly prosecutes Christians for allegedly blaspheming Islam, has passed the religious freedom test imposed by the Obama administration.The countries listed in the "Countries of Particular Concern" and eligible for sanctions are; Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Uzbekistan. Of these, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan will not have any sanctions applied against them.
“Freedom of speech was subject to ‘reasonable’ restrictions in the interest of the ‘glory of Islam,’ as stipulated in sections 295(a), (b), and (c) of the penal code,” says the report.Which is apparently ok with the State Department.
“The consequences of contravening the country’s blasphemy laws were death for defiling Islam or the prophets; life imprisonment for defiling, damaging, or desecrating the Qur’an; and 10 years imprisonment for insulting ‘another’s religious feelings,’” says the report.
Christians are the top target of these Pakistani laws. “Laws prohibiting blasphemy continued to be used against Christians,” says the State Department report.
IN Afghanistan's 10-year war, where acts of cruelty are commonplace and so many thousands have died, the account of one dog's extraordinary survival is an oddly affecting tale.Read the whole thing if you can. What this poor creature went through is unbelievable, and common in Islamic "culture".
Wylie, the Afghan mutt, was rescued in February by a convoy of British soldiers on patrol in a Kandahar bazaar, where a dog-fighting crowd was beating the smaller dog with lumps of wood to force the last fight out of him.
Back at Kandahar base, it was Australian Federal Police officer Narelle Jensz to whom the soldiers turned.
Jensz had gone to war to train Afghan police but it was as the unofficial dog rescuer, vet and dog-adoption agent in southern Afghanistan that she had become something of a legend.
In Sharifabad the dogs distinguished clearly between Moslem and Zoroastrian, and were prepared to go…full of hope, into a crowded Zoroastrian assembly, or to fall asleep trustfully in a Zoroastrian lane, but would flee as before Satan from a group of Moslem boys…The evidence points…to Moslem hostility to these animals having been deliberately fostered in the first place in Iran, as a point of opposition to the old (pre-Islamic jihad conquest) faith (i.e., Zoroastrianism) there. Certainly in the Yazdi area…Moslems found a double satisfaction in tormenting dogs, since they were thereby both afflicting an unclean creature and causing distress to the infidel who cherished him. There are grim…stories from the time (i.e., into the latter half of the 19th century) when the annual poll-tax (jizya) was exacted, of the tax gatherer tying a Zoroastrian and a dog together, and flogging both alternately until the money was somehow forthcoming, or death released them. I myself was spared any worse sight than that of a young Moslem girl…standing over a litter of two-week old puppies, and suddenly kicking one as hard as she could with her shod foot. The puppy screamed with pain, but at my angry intervention she merely said blankly, “But it’s unclean.” In Sharifabad I was told by distressed Zoroastrian children of worse things: a litter of puppies cut to pieces with a spade-edge, and a dog’s head laid open with the same implement; and occasionally the air was made hideous with the cries of some tormented animal. Such wanton cruelties on the Moslems’ part added not a little to the tension between the communities.I thinks that this says a lot about Islam.
Precisely of the kind Washington (exhibit B) just witnessed over its debt problem. You know: The debt-ceiling debate universally denounced as dysfunctional, if not disgraceful, hostage-taking, terrorism, gun-to-the-head blackmail.So, why the hysteria?
Spare me the hysteria. What happened was that the 2010 electorate, as represented in Congress, forced Washington to finally confront the national debt. It was a triumph of democratic politics — a powerful shift in popular will finding concrete political expression.
Notice how the loudest complaints about “broken politics” come from those who lost the debate. It’s understandable for sore losers to rage against the machine. But there’s no need for the rest of us to parrot their petulance.Of course, go and read the whole thing. Dr. Krauthammer also discusses the political turmoil in Wisconsin (exhibit A). His analysis is not in the "follow the herd" mentality. You are not going to read this from anyone else, but it is true. He nailed it.
