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July 2007 Stats for The Big Picture.
STUDENT GETS F GRADE FOR MENTIONING GOD:
The mother of four from Apple Valley, Calif., [Bethany Hauf] is now demanding an apology from the school, as well as a regrading of her 10-page report.
“I don’t lose my First Amendment rights when I walk into that college,” she said.
...”I have one limiting factor – no mention of big ‘G’ gods, i.e., one, true god argumentation,” [Professor] Shefchik stated.
...Judy Solis, chair of the English department, says Hauf was given three options: submit the report with God included, make revisions and edit out the G-word, or rewrite the entire report.
“She continued to write her paper,” Solis told the Press. “She knew what the consequences were.”
Bethany has contacted, and is being support by, an organization called the American Center for Law & Justice.
...”Bethany’s paper discusses some of the evidences supporting a hypothesis that, while the Constitution prohibits an established church, religion was essential to the founding of the Nation and to its governance thereafter,” [Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the ACLJ] writes.
It sounds like a great paper.
Zell Miller, in a recent radio interview:
“Probably the Republicans ought to be cheering [Dean] on, because he’s doing more harm than good for the Democrats. Here is a man who should be trying to broaden the base of his party, a party that has been shrinking now for many, many years. Instead, he is narrowing the base even more. How can you broaden the base of a party when you are talking about independents and Republicans having no sense, being evil, not working a day in their life? It is ridiculous.”
Saddam’s Iraq Was Motel 6 for Terrorists:
Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a veritable Motel 6 for the world’s worst terrorists – a gang of mass murderers who had killed hundreds of Americans – well before the U.S. invaded.
The article lists leading terrorists who were living in Iraq under Hussein.
This racist Mexican stamp fits right in with Vicente Fox’ statement that Mexican migrants do jobs “that not even blacks want to do.” It also fits in with Fox’ encouragement of his people to look down on U.S. immigration laws.
We do need to control the borders.
From AP:
After Sept. 11, it was necessary to “draw a line in the sand here, and the country to do it with was Iraq because they were in breach of U.N. resolutions going back over many years,” [Blair] said. “I took the view that if these people ever got hold of nuclear, chemical or biological capability, they would probably use it.”
Blair was asked about the leaked memos, which suggest strong concerns in the British government that the Bush administration was determined in 2002 to invade Iraq — months before the United States and Britain unsuccessfully sought U.N. Security Council approval for military action.
...According to the minutes of the meeting, Sir Richard Dearlove, then chief of Britain’s intelligence service, said the White House viewed military action against Saddam Hussein as inevitable following the Sept. 11 attacks. Bush “wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD” (weapons of mass destruction), read the memo, seen by the AP. “But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
In the interview, Blair said raising such concerns was a natural part of any examination of the cause for war.
“The trouble with having a political discussion on the basis of things that are leaked is that they are always taken right out of context. Everything else is omitted from the discussion and you end up focusing on a specific document,” he said. “It would be absolutely weird if, when the Iraq issue was on the agenda, you were not constantly raising issues, trying to work them out, get them in the right place,” he said.
I don’t get the criticism of GWB based on these memos. Is the theory that the GWB administration should not have considered military action against Iraq until the morning it went to the U.N. Security Council seeking approval to do so? Was GWB expected to seek such approval from the U.N. without wanting to get it?
I’ll be out of the office today, so there will be no blogging here until possibly very late tonight. See you soon.
Great posts from around the blogosphere.
Barack Obama aimed criticism at Abe Lincoln today. How pathetic, that to show himself as a future leader of the Dems, Obama felt it necessary to insult the memory of Lincoln, a man surely much greater than Obama is. It’s unbelievable that Obama should do this rather than trying to contribute something in the way of leadership or of grand ideas, to his party and his country. It’s an indictment of the paucity of leadership on the Left.
SCIENTISTS have created eerie zombie dogs, reanimating the canines after several hours of clinical death in attempts to develop suspended animation for humans.
...this should be enough to save lives such as battlefield casualties and victims of stabbings or gunshot wounds, who have suffered huge blood loss.
...”The results are stunning. I think in 10 years we will be able to prevent death in a certain segment of those using this technology,” said one US battlefield doctor.
That’s just weird.
[SUPREME] COURT: FILE-SHARING SERVICES MAY BE SUED.
Internet file-sharing services will be held responsible if they intend for their customers to use software primarily to swap songs and movies illegally, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, rejecting warnings that the lawsuits will stunt growth of cool tech gadgets such as the next iPod.
This looks to me like another great decision. Copyright must be protected.
Don’t miss these latest posts from two leading Iraqi bloggers. From The Mesopotamian:
Dear Friends,
Just a quick note, to the American public: this is no time to lose heart, the fight is just now changing gear. We the Iraqis are confident of winning this battle. This so-called “insurrection” may be characterized as the “Unpopular Revolt” rather than the opposite. It is doomed to failure. We have never pretended that this can be achieved overnight. It takes time and struggle, but to those who think that the insurgency is growing I would like to say this: It is the power of the people that is growing, it is the strength and effectiveness of the new patriotic security forces that is growing, such forces that are for the first time in our history representative of the majority of the people. Time is on the side of the people and not their enemies.
Yes, this is no time to lose heart friends.
And from Iraq the Model:
Now after you have probably listened to our losses through the media, I’d like to carry the news of their losses…I hate to parrot what others say.
It’s not only us who bleed, they’re bleeding too end even more profusely and obviously the media has a purpose behind focusing on our losses while mentioning the terrorists losses in the inner pages or in many cases pretending that they don’t exist.
Iraqi and multinational forces are still scoring victories over terrorists and here on this blog, we’d like to summarize the victories of the latest 48 hours:
[A long list of victories against the terrorists is provided.]
Who thinks that a war can be won without losses and sacrifices is far from reason.
Yes, sacrifices, efforts, time and costs are all factors that make us seriously worried but we have to remind ourselves that abandoning the mission before it’s fully done would be a disaster for all of us.
I’m positive that Iraqis have no intention of giving up and so do their allies and friends while those who think that our position is weak are actually allowing lies and illusions to control their thinking and were driven away from the larger image by the narrow image provided by the media.
The future is ours, there’s no doubt about that and we shall win.
The Washington Post headline—‘High Court Disallows Ten Commandments in Courthouses’—tries to make the most of the Court’s decision from the point of view of the Left. But in fact it is equally correct to say ‘High Court Allows Ten Commandments in Courthouses:’
Sending dual signals in ruling on the separation of church and state for the first time in a quarter-century, the high court said that displays of the Ten Commandments _ like their own courtroom frieze _ are not inherently unconstitutional. But each exhibit demands scrutiny to determine whether it goes too far in amounting to a governmental promotion of religion, the court said in a case involving Kentucky courthouse exhibits.
In effect, the court said it was taking the position that issues of Ten Commandments displays in courthouses should be resolved on a case-by-case basis.
That’s a huge loss for the ACLU. It means:
What’s more, the Ten Commandments and other religious displays are specifically allowed on government grounds:
A sharply divided Supreme Court on Monday upheld the constitutionality of displaying the Ten Commandments on government land…
...”Simply having religious content or promoting a message consistent with a religious doctrine does not run afoul of the Establishment clause,” [Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist] said.
It’s a huge relief to get a favorable ruling on this from the Supreme Court.
CRUDE SMASHES RECORD $60 PER BARREL. However, oil prices cannot remain permanently at such high rates, much less rise to permanently higher levels, without pricing themselves out of business. Concerns that ‘We’re Running Out of Oil’ appear to be equally unfounded. The reason is that an alternative energy supply is available at a lower price—in massive quantities.
It’s oil shale:
North America’s 3.7 trillion barrel resource base of unconventional fuels, exceeds by nearly 40 percent the entire World’s known remaining conventional oil supplies. America’s oil shale resources alone exceed 2 trillion barrels of oil equivalent.
Concentrated largely in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah, as well as in several eastern states, nearly 80 percent of the domestic oil shale resource base is on Federal lands. The quality and richness of the oil shale deposits makes the potential yields per acre very high relative to petroleum and the impacted surface area very low.
...An estimated 750 billion to 1 trillion barrels of shale oil could be recovered from America’s oil shale resource base providing oil for 100 years or more.
What’s the cost of converting oil shale to gasoline? A mere $40 a barrel:
Below forty dollars a barrel, oil-shale oil is not competitive with conventional crude oil. If the oil price were to stay permanently at over forty dollars a barrel (with no chance of declining, which could be the case if oil shale were to be exploited on a large enough scale), then companies would exploit oil shale.
So what’s the hold-up? It takes a lot of money to start an industry that converts oil shale to gasoline, and nobody wants to bother if oil prices are going to drop:
...During the oil crisis of the seventies, people thought that oil supplies were peaking, expected oil prices to be around seventy dollars a barrel for some time to come, and invested huge amounts of money in refining oil shale — money that they lost. Because of the astronomical sums that were lost last time around there is considerable reluctance to invest in oil shale this time around. Investors are waiting to see if oil prices really will remain this high (in mid-2005: $50+). Prices are rising because the newly capitalist Chinese are buying cars. Will high prices result in the discovery of more oil, as happened in the seventies, or will alternatives to drilling for oil have to be developed? Investors, burnt badly in the eighties for their enthusiasm of the seventies, are in no hurry to develop oil shale. Those who lost money then are inclined to believe that more oil will be found bye and bye.
So if you’re wondering why the country is so able to take high oil prices in stride, this is part of the answer.
By the way, the country could decide to slap a tariff on imported oil, such that imported oil prices could not be less than $40 a barrel. That would protect an internal oil shale industry. And that would be game over for America’s dependence on foreign oil.
90 STUDENTS ABDUCTED IN NEPAL:
KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP)—Communist rebels have abducted about 90 high school students from their classrooms in a remote mountain village in Nepal, the army has said.
This is a reminder of how uncivilized some parts of the world are, compared to the U.S. The rage shown by the Dean Liberals toward those who praise this country, appears to lack appreciation for the success Democracy and Capitalism have had, in giving Americans a good way of life.
The ad, from non-profit Move America Forward, slams Durbin for his remarks about our troops. View the ad here.
