The "christian" candidate?

It appears Huckabee's surge in the polls have caused quite a debate as to who the "Christian" candidate should be, or more importantly, struck a real debate as to the role of faith in elections.

NixGuy, RedState, Right on the Right and Brian Shavings have all got good takes on the issue.

While these guys have some insight, I like to refer to the man himself, Jesus Christ, on the issue.

In Matthew 22:21 Jesus says Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God those things that are God's. NIV

Many Christians have interpreted this to mean "My wealth is not Caesar's so I'm going to give it to God".

But I think what Jesus was saying is (to crudely paraphrase) "I'm not here to deal with Caesar's, or Hitler's or Stalin's. I'm here to connect your heart to God. Government's are going to do what government's are going to do. With that said, what will you do to clean up your relationship with God".

Jesus understood the world would always be full of tyrants, murderers and con men. He wasn't really interested in dealing with those issues. He was most interested in each individual person's soul.

With that said, it does beg the question, WWJE? "Who would Jesus endorse"?

First, I don't think he would even vote let alone endorse. But I don't think he would encourage any of us to vote for a moron just because he was a "Christian".

Second, remember who Jesus had the most problems with? The religious types. Pharisees, I believe.

So all that's a long winded way of my saying, I don't care how close to God Mike Huckebee is; I could never vote for him simply based on his speech that's all over youtube. Anyone that at ease to increase taxes is not a good candidate in my mind.

Once again, where's the daddy?

Meet 17 year old Julian Douglas. Charged withe murdering 53 year old Gary Secone.

Once again, no mention of a daddy in the story. Maybe if Julian had one, he wouldn't be looking at a life time in prison.

You know... as a conservative, it would go a long way if liberals could just own for once that Julian here is a product of the welfare state. After all, once welfare allowed a families to exist without fathers, guess what? They did. And Julian here is going to pay the price.

Once we can all agree on the fact that welfare has caused a disintegration of the family, we can really start to look at things that might help keep families together and kids like Julian here out of the penal system.

My father was far from perfect, but I know my life was so much better for having him in my home than without. You could ask my friends growing up if they would have preferred having their fathers in the home, except you can't. They are now dead. My guess is, they would have agreed.

Count those votes

Remember when hanging chads were the only thing we had to worry about when it came to voting?

Since that was such a big problem, the state of Ohio, has spent 100 million on new voting machines and technology.

That's all good except for

"To put it in everyday terms, the tools needed to compromise an accurate vote count could be as simple as ... using a magnet and a personal digital assistant," she said.

More.....

The Democrats new slogan, "finding problems and making them worse since 1932".

Funny Friday

A clip from Animal House. The Language is R rated. You are now warned

Friday Friday

It's an "R" rated video from Rodney Carrington.

Funny Friday

Flight of the Conchords

Trouble for Hillary?

Now that the conventional wisdom is "Hillary's in trouble", I think I need to be the contrarian once again.

As I said last week, the early primaries are less about running against your opponent than running against expectations.

You can pull 10% of the vote in Iowa, but if the talking heads predicted 5%, you're going to dominate the headlines for a few days. The converse is also true. If Rudy's looking at 30% in the polls and only draws 20%, put a stake in 'im.

Now that Hillary's poll numbers are going down faster than one of Bill's skanks, she's effectively lowered expectations; especially for the media. It's a perfect set up, she's now looking at potentially losing one or more of these early elections.

But what happens if she wins them all by a slim margin? or loses but it's tight? The media's going to be on it like bears on honey.

Welcome to government health care

Now that we're married, Mrs. Gekko has to go through the process of changing her name on everything.

So this morning, I went to the social security office with Mrs. Gekko so I could get my social security card replaced (my original is over 30 years old and you can barely see the number through the coffee stain).

Now keep in mind, the Social Security Administration does what? Class? Class? They administer a government run pension plan.

After 50 minutes, I finally got to speak with a live person and have my card request taken care of. It will now take another 10-14 days to get my card.

Now imagine walking into a bank or brokerage house and waiting 50 minutes to get an account statement, would you put up with that? Also imagine that while you're waiting those 50 minutes, you are not allowed to work on a computer or talk on a cell phone. In fact, you're not even allowed to have a cell phone on (it can't be on vibrate or silent) inside the building.

How long would you put up with that kind of service?

Well, welcome to government health care.

The Delta House Congress

Last week, I mentioned how I could never be elected to office as a result of "the incident" which included a drunk Gordon, in a toga, demanding he be referred to as Senator Blutarsky.

Apparently, I'd fit right in this congress, just ask the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt

In the movie "Animal House," the fraternity brother known as Otter reacts to the Delta House's closure with the classic line, "I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part." To which Bluto, played by John Belushi, replies, "We're just the guys to do it." The movie ends by noting that Bluto becomes a Senator, so perhaps this explains the meltdown among Democrats on Capitol Hill.

More.....

Liberal Education Standards

I've preached often about the Pygmalion Effect as it relates to inner city education... Or as George Bush would call it "the soft bigotry of low expectations".

Here's an article that illustrates how liberals have implemented the bigotry in public education.

Excerpt

The principal of an East Harlem high school last month stunned his staffers by suggesting they dumb down their classes.

"If you are not passing more than 65% of your students in a class, then you are not designing your expectations to meet their abilities," Principal Bennett Lieberman wrote in a Nov. 28 memo to teachers at Central Park East High School. "You are setting your students up for failure, which in turn, limits your success as a professional."

More.....

Don't worry. You've bought the credits.

So you've cheated on your wife but you want to continue to say you've been faithful.

Well now, mirroring global warming carbon offset credits you can now purchase "cheatneutral" credits. So you can cheat all you want.... Simply pay me to remain monogamous and we're all good.

What a great idea for that next trip to Bali and you're really looking to score with some global warming scientists.

Can Dems win over white males

A really good piece in the Huffington Post, with a lot of thoughtful insight among many liberals.

The question? Can the Democratic Party ever win back the white male vote without aliening it's other constituencies? And if they can, should they?

Excerpt from one of the writers

When the top-tier Republican candidates skipped a debate geared toward African-Americans, the media rightly pointed out that it sent an awful signal to the black community. But for decades Democrats have sent a similar signal to a far larger constituency. More than a third of the American electorate was told the party they once built did not need them.

Democrats have not won more than 38 of every 100 white men who voted since Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford. It is no coincidence that 1976 was also the last time Democrats won a majority. Yet this causes remarkably little concern on the political left. One reason is that some liberals are depending upon an ever-diversifying nation. But white men will be at least a third of the electorate for the coming decade. And they will be larger than the Hispanic bloc for far longer.

Quoting Ronald Reagan "I didn't leave the Democratic Party... It left me".

Tis the season

Looks like Santa consumed a little too much egg nog.

That's a relief

Baseball finally came out with their Mitchell Report and guess what? Baseball players took performance enhancing drugs.

The finding of the next report... the sky is blue

Mr Gorbachev, let's build that wall

What's in this picture?

These are the pylons installed to build a wall along this stretch of interstate.

Gordon, it's about time the feds finally started building that wall to keep illegals out of the country.

Except this picture wasn't taken in Texas, Arizona or California; it's Ohio.

And the wall the feds are building has nothing to do with immigration.

This is one of those sound walls. You know.... graffiti magnets.....the thousands of miles of wall built near interstates so people don't have to hear noise from the freeway. Even though many built their homes well after the freeway was built, knowing full well the noise pattern.

So I would like someone to explain to me how we have billions upon billions of dollars to build sound barriers that are no more effective than a good planting of trees, yet we can't seem to find enough money to patrol 1969 miles of border.

Around the blogger world

Several good post to read.

Maggie Thurber on Ohio's economic ranking
Tom @ Bizzyblog on federal spending
Nasty, Brutish and Short on an Obit that shouldn't have been
The Boring Made Dull on Strickland and the Ohio Civil Right Commission

Yet Another UC attack

The second UC attack this week.

I've decided to start reporting each and every one of these as they occur. Maybe if the University and city of Cincinnati are humiliated enough, they actually do something about the problem.

Don't ask me why, but the media coverage on these assaults is downright deplorable. The cynic in me tells me it's a political correctness issue. But the realist in me tells me it's become so common place, it's no longer newsworthy.

Bronson

Pete Bronson on the latest in the Lakota Schools "Diversity" shakedown.

Excerpt

Don't tell Gary Hines to quit protesting a student play in Lakota Schools and go mind his own business. Race problems are his business. And that might explain a lot.

Hines is the local NAACP president who wants to make a federal case out of the high school production of "And Then There Were None," because the play once had an obscure, racially offensive title nearly 70 years ago. But he's also the owner of a diversity-training company that profits from racial problems, GPH Consulting.

So when Hines demands that the Lakota Schools receive more sensitivity training, it's not unfair to ask if he's trying to get a contract to provide that training. He has tried in the past, but Lakota hired other diversity experts. In 2002, Hines accused Lakota Schools of "systemic racism."

Avoid death

This sign is the winner of this year's Wacky Label Contest awarded by the Michigan Lawsuit Abuse Watch.

More.....

Harvard for free

Last week the WSJ had a piece about why people give to college endowment funds despite the already incredible size of these endowments. He used Harvard, with a 35 billion dollar endowment as his prime example. Today, they have a piece about why Harvard cost so much in the first place.

Harvard must have been listening. This week, they announced a plan to pay for the education for any who's family earns less than $60,000/year.

Good for Harvard, now if we can just get the rest of these endowments to start kicking in, we might start to see some reduction in education inflation.

Class Act

I really couldn't care less about Bobby Petrino leaving the Atlanta Falcons for the Arkansas Razorbacks.

But you have to rank this letter from Petrino to his players announcing his resignation, as an all new low for classlessness..... Even for a football coach.

Click on the image to enlarge.

Why does race matter?

I'm reading an article on the Las Vegas shooting and the "journalist" threw this sentence in the end of the article...

Mojave had some 2,300 students last year, about evenly divided among blacks, whites and Hispanics, according to district materials.

That sentence appears after this sentence

"At this point, the indicators that we have found ... it's a dispute over a girlfriend," Gillespie told reporters.

What does this information have to do with the price of beans? As of this posting, there does not appear to be a racial component behind the attack. So why put it in? Because this is a fight over a girlfriend, we need a racial census on the school.

I guess I'm not a "journalist" so I'm not smart enough to figure it out.

Endorsements

We've got Oprah out there making her endorsements and this blog has already covered endorsements from Jenna Jameson, Heidi Fleiss, et al.

But we've got some really important endorsements from key constituents that haven't declared yet.

Notables

Gene Simmons of KISS
Al Lewis from the Munsters
Don Johnson & Philip Michael Thomas from Miami Vice
Jerry Springer
Clifford the Big Red Dog
K-Fed
Ice T, Ice Cube, Vanilla Ice and the whole rapper's named "Ice" community
Tyra Banks
Bea Arthur
Joe Frazier
George Jetson
Truman Capote
The Junk Yard Dog
Boutros Boutros Ghali

Now I know what your saying.... Some of these people are dead. Just remember, these are democratic candidates and dead people will vote. Someone has to speak for those disenfranchised voters.

Ahhhh, the good old days

Remember the good old days when you used to break thermometers so you could play with the mercury in them?

Now we lock down schools when a thermometer breaks.

Article

Best of Battlebots

Last night Mrs. Gekko and I were watching an old CSI where a victim was killed by a "battlebot". She had never heard of them before so I thought I would post this for her.

Another attack at UC

Two more students attacked and robbed at UC.

Two more crimes have been reported near the University of Cincinnati campus with students as the victims. A UC senior had his wallet stolen from two men at Emming and Clifton while walking home from work around 8:30 Monday night. On campus, two graduate students had a scare when two men tried to steal their money and pizza. The students were returning to Scioto Hall when they say they noticed the two men behind them with masks over their faces. They say one of the men swung a red metal bat at them, but missed. They ran and were able to get away. The suspects are described as black and about six-feet-tall. One was wearing camouflage jacket, the other, a dark colored hoodie. If you have any information that could help police, call CrimeStoppers at (513) 352-3040.

WLW News

Count those votes

Once again, the party of "count every vote" is suing to halt a primary in Michigan.

Of course, why would you vote in this primary? None of the favorites are on the ballot in an effort to force Michigan to change the date.

Racial Cleansing

Reading this column on the razing of projects in New Orleans made my blood boil.

Excerpt

All told, 4,600 low-income housing units will be razed in a shocking act of class and racial cleansing disguised as reconstruction. All the former residents of those projects, after all, were not only low-income, they were all black, say Hann and housing advocates in New Orleans.

So what's supposed to happen here. Leave these projects as is so they can become the crime cesspools they were prior to Katrina?

Hello Larry

Ever since the Larry Craig debacle this past summer, I’ve been uneasy about using a public restroom.

This morning, I’m in the stall when a person in the stall next to me used, what I would call, an unusually wide stance. I really wasn’t sure what to do.

So I throw out this question to the readers. Should I have.....

1) Called security?

2) Taken a wide stance myself to assure I keep my personal space?

3) Said “Hey man, this place is more of a library than a bar”?

4) Said “Hi Larry”?

5) Screamed “I’m not a republican for cryin’ out loud”?

6) Said “Look dude, I’m an accountant, not a US senator”?

Geez, I just wanted to read my paper in solitude.

Darfur

Mia Farrow in a piece in the WSJ about Sudan.

She has been to Darfur 7 times and cannot understand why the UN hasn’t passed Resolution 1769 in order to help the starving people in the region.

Can anyone name one problem the UN ever solved?

The UN is nothing more than one big international committee that has lots of meetings.

Think about it. When’s the last time a committee meeting solved anything? When I worked in a Fortune 500 company, I cannot remember one meeting that actually resulted in some problem actually being solved. More often than not, we ended our meetings with an agreement to have more meetings.

The UN is worthless and, once again, unless the US is willing to go in there as the world’s cop more people will needlessly die in refugee camps. More talking isn’t going to get it done.

Thoughts on Colorado

Thought one

If you are an opponent of the death penalty, do you oppose what Jeanne Assam did to the church shooter in Colorado?

But Gordon, they are hardly the same thing.

In my mind, they are exactly the same thing. Jeanne Assam was confronted by evil. She didn’t try to figure out why the shooter was evil, she didn’t try to negotiate with evil, she didn’t weigh God’s commandment not to kill, she didn’t wait around for the police to arrived and sort it out, she knew she had to confront evil and manage the situation so more innocent people were not injured or killed.

That’s the same thing as capital punishment. We as a society have a duty to protect the citizenry from evil.

But Gordon, we can put people in prison forever so they won’t hurt people.

Right. Tell that to the family of Robert Valandingham, a guard at Lucasville prison who was killed by a pack of death row inmates.

You can also tell that to other prisoners who are raped and/or injured by these lifers. After all, what are you going to do with them…. Sentence them to life? Lifetime prison makes other prisoners fair game to violence.

Thought two

After the Jeanne Assam shot this murderer, it did give me pause to think about one particular issue.

What if there was an ongoing shoot out when the police arrived, how would the police be able to tell who the bad guy was?

In this case, I’m assuming Ms. Assam had some type of uniform, but that wouldn’t necessarily be the case if she were a public person with a concealed carry permit.

My guess would be the concealed carry person would identify themselves, but they could be at risk of getting shot themselves if police arrived on the scene & saw an armed person shooting.

Thought Three

When are people going to get that good guys with guns are a good thing, not a bad one?

Thought Four

Has anyone noticed that since the University of Cincinnati has banned guns from campus, it’s become open season for criminals to victimize their students. There’s been at least 10 armed robberies of students on or around the campus since the school year began. When will they allow students and faculty to carry guns on campus?

Thought Five

If you own a business with a gun ban sign on it, do you realize how many people you put at risk by declaring you have a business full of defenseless people. When’s the last time someone opened fire in a gun range or a police office? For that matter, a biker bar?

Thought Six

Can you see how Jeanne Assam’s management of this situation is not unlike Bush’s management of terrorism?

People forget that the whole war effort is an effort to confront evil at the door; to confront it before it gets on planes and flies them into buildings. You cannot negotiate with people who want to kill you. You can only take the offensive and stop the threat.

So you can be critical of the Bush Administration on the execution of the war but you can’t fault the rationale. Unless you’re the kind of person who would simply let the Colorado shooter run around a church killing people until the police arrive and arrest him.

Let’s face it, since 9/11, how many US targets have been hit as compared to the time prior to 9/11.

Thought Seven

A long time ago, I heard Dennis Prager discuss the differences between liberals and conservatives and he made a point I will never forget. In a liberal belief system, there is no effective way to confront and manage evil.

Final Thought

I’m sure when Jeanne Assam woke up Sunday morning, she didn’t anticipate shooting and killing someone. Since it appears that she’s a Christian, I’m sure the whole incident will cause much stress to her. She should know that she did a good thing and saved a lot of people’s lives.

Another right wing nut judge

You have to know that this is some kind of republican appointed jurist, when you see this headline...

Judge gives San Leandro cops paid time to don, doff uniforms

Yep, if you're in San Fransisco, you get paid time for just putting on your uniform.

Where do these crack pot judges come from?

Reason #1,299 why you should move your company overseas.

If you have to say it.....

Once again, Bill Clinton proves my theory of "if you have to say it, then it's not true".

So on Monday her husband made a swing through Iowa in hopes of convincing voters that she is a sympathetic figure who gave up money and power for love and marriage.

"She has spent a lifetime as a change agent when she had options to do other things," he said at Iowa State University.

When guns solve a problem

"When the shots were fired, she rushed toward the scene and encountered the attacker there in a hallway. He never got more than 50 feet inside our building," he said. "There could have been a great loss of life yesterday, and she probably saved over 100 lives."

Do you think the folks in the Omaha shopping mall would have wished there was an armed good guy on the premises?

Out of contention again

Football notes....

The Bengals are officially out of the playoff picture after yesterday's games. That makes one, uno, 1 playoff appearance in 17 years. You have to try to have that kind of success (or lack there of) in the NFL.

Going into next year, the Bengals will have 31 million in available cap dollars; 6th most in the NFL. I'm already predicting that they'll turn that cap money into more mediocrity.

With the Bengals win, apparently all their ills are now solved; at least according to Carson Palmer (see below)

Michael Vick gets 23 months on federal dog fighting charges. As I once told a friend, "you did the wrong crime at the wrong time".

The Patriots look unstoppable, which is probably why they'll lose their next game.

I heard a sports cut in about some player from the Steelers who guaranteed a victory. Why is this news? As I like to say a guarantee is only worth what back's it; and this case, not worth anything, so why report it?

Who's the religious bigot here?

If you didn't get a chance to watch this, check out Lawrence O'Donnell's comments on the McLaughlin group last week.

I think this says a lot more about O'Donnell than Romney.

HT BOTW

Economic news

While I was in my CPE, I read a couple of great editorials in the WSJ.

I was planning to post on these but I see that Thurber's Thoughts and Liberally Conservative already did good jobs on them, so go check them out.

Of particular is the Arthur Laffer article showing a correlation between states with high tax burdens v. out flow of population.

Needless to say, Ohioan are moving out in droves. Thank God for Michigan. Do you think the brain trust in the statehouse actually reads this kind of information? Surely, there's a Wall Street Journal floating around with an intern or a janitor.

I'll say it once and I'll say it forever; people shop residences just like they shop for groceries. Life is nothing but a giant cost/benefit principle and states need to provide its residents more benefit for the cost. Unfortunately for Ohioans we keep paying more and more for amenities like humidity, bad schools, no mountains or beaches, crime and decay.

Get Wi-Fi access for only $695

This morning, I went down to the Duke Convention Center for the 40th annual UC Tax Conference.

I'm not a big fan of the conference because most of the presenters are dryer than Sub-Saharan Africa. Nonetheless, the CPE is cheap and there are a couple of presenters I go out of my way to see.

So I figured I'd take the old notebook down there and do some posting during the boring parts of the course.

So I boot up to get started and I get to the Duke energy screen that tells me for only $695.00 I can get WiFi for during the whole event (2 days).

Are you kidding me? This should be an amenity for holding your event there. By the way, I decided it was worth saving $695 to walk a block and a half during the lunch break to get my connection for free.

Keep him from traveling

Per Al Gore

The former vice president, who earlier urged the countries to speed up the timetable for reducing emissions by two years, said he was optimistic about tougher measures partly because growing public awareness of global warming was spurring "the world's first people power movement" on climate change.

He said that could force political leaders to take action.

"They have to find some courage to resist the special interests, the special fears, the concern that often have wider influences than they should and instead respect the demands of the human future," Gore said.

This year's Nobel Peace Prize is part of that process, Gore said, because it "has already caused increased attention to the problem of moving along to solve the crisis of climate."

Pachauri warned that, in his opinion, data coming in after the panel concluded work on its latest assessment suggests that "the future could very well be far more dire than we believe it is today."

He said the world cannot hope that technology alone will counter the threat, but that people must be prepared to change to way they live.

If governments are serious about ending global warming, they'll start with banning all of Al Gore's travel.

Tax cuts don't boost revenue... Not.

Justin Fox from the conservative print media known as Time Magazine notes that

Virtually every economics Ph.D. who has worked in the Bush Administration acknowledges that the tax cuts of the past six years haven't paid for themselves.

Now this is what bothers me most about these so called "journalists" who have people known as "fact checkers".

It took a little accountant blogger all of 45 seconds and a Google search to find this graph. Whereas the "Journalist" provided no detail to support his argument at all.

You tell me, does it look to you like tax cuts pay for themselves?

Second, who says tax cuts should "pay for themselves". That whole notion begins with the belief that all wealth is the government's first, yours second. It's a change in the vernacular that would have made George Orwell jealous in 1984. Let's say things like the government can't afford tax cuts.

For the record Mr. Fox, the government will afford what the public is damn well willing to give it. Now go get a fact checker.

6000 deaths a year

I saw this statistic in Time Magazine* this morning

6000 teens die in traffic accidents a year. Remember, that's four times more than die in Iraq in a given year

Coming soon to a liberal bumper sticker near you.

"Support our kids... take their cars away"

"How many more kids need to die for a mistake"

"Bush - creating enemies one dead teenager at a time"

* a member of the "journalistic" community so it has to be correct because they have fact checkers and all.

Cannibalism, Democrat style

Al Hunt reports on a focus group and this is what he reports...

Excerpt

The concerns about Clinton, 60, a New York senator, are that she is devious, calculating and, fairly or not, a divisive figure in American politics.

Probably the opinion of the right wing conspiracy, right. Except that this is the opinion of Democrats that already stated they will not vote republican.

With friends like these, who needs well, friends?