Thursday, September 4, 2008
Why I love Sarah Palin
2) Not afraid of her femininity and honoring her husband
3) Strong charisma
4) Dynamic speaker
5) Clear with the facts
6) Funny
7) A great role model for younger women
8) Reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher (from my knowledge of Thatcher)
9) The future of the Republican Party (a party I'm able to support with passion)
10) Not afraid to burn the competition
For more on the Margaret Thatcher comparison check out the two following articles from the Wall Street Journal:
John Fund - A future Thatcher
Obama is the Anti-Thatcher
Why do you like Sarah Palin? Post your comments.
Establishing My Street Cred
Emily the Intern:
It is with great delight that we present a major new wingnut talent: Townhall summer intern Emily Shaheen. She has written a brilliant column about the profound and beautiful lessons taught by Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. Here are some highlights:
White Goodman (Ben Stiller) is the founder and owner of Globo Gym, frequented by the professional athlete and all around beautiful person. Peter La Fleur (Vince Vaughn) is the laid-back lackadaisical owner of Average Joe's Gym, which caters to the misfits of the community. Debt problems force La Fleur to come up with $50,000 to prevent Goodman from turning Average Joe's into a parking lot. This leaves his gang of misfits searching for a way to raise the money. They find it in an "Obscure Sports Quarterly" ad for The National Dodgeball Championships, which offers a grand prize of $50,000.
The Championships have no prizes for second, third, or fourth places. This is very different from the feel-good sports of today, including the Olympics, which give almost everyone a prize. Why should a 16th place finisher receive a ribbon? They have not achieved the goal of being the best.
Liberals espouse this same ideology in society. They want all winners and no losers, but this is not real life.
In real life, and in sports, the losers go home with shame.
Emily claims that liberals are outraged that "Bill Gates makes more money than Joe Schmo." See, in real life, Bill is a winner. Everybody else is a loser. They should go home in shame -- and not get any insurance or retirement benefits.
Liberals want everyone to be winners, but if everyone is a winner then there is no excellence. There's no motivation to become better if nobody is in front to beat. Failure creates motivation, motivation inspires work, and work leads to victory.
Emily, honey, you're a loser and a failure -- even Ben Shapiro and Mike Adams did better than you did. I hope this motivates you to work harder so you won't suck so bad next time.
Friday, May 2, 2008
I don't really like talking about my flair...
Excerpt from my latest column in the magazine I edit:
How many pieces of flair do you have? What are your favorites? Do you even know what a piece of flair is?
Pieces of Flair are the latest application on Facebook (a social networking site). Here’s the online description:
“Show off your interests with Pieces of Flair for your profile! Describe yourself with buttons. Send them to friends as gifts. Browse through our growing collection. If you don't find what you want, it's easy to make your own! Track how popular your creations become as they spread from friend to friend all over Facebook!”
This sounds very exciting to a teenager or a college student, or, I admit, even to a young professional like me. But, as I began sifting through all the different buttons with their unique phrases and designs, I caught myself wondering, what does describe me and my interests? How can I narrow that down to several buttons?
Most of the buttons say, “I love shoes,” “I love frogs,” “swimmers rule” or include movie quotes. There are buttons with different pictures of actors and actresses, singers, athletes and brand names. All designed to fit specific interests and to help the user display a broad picture of themselves so their friends can know more about them.
Am I really only about shoes, sports and my favorite movie catchphrases? Is that what I want people to see about me? What if I died and the only thing left were my Pieces of Flair? That doesn’t really describe my life, or at least I hope not. To truly know someone, you need to make a connection with them and get beyond the flair.
When voting for a candidate for office, don’t just latch onto the catchphrases and the media sound bites. Delve into their policy statements and their voting records. When reading about the numbers of women choosing an abortion, don’t assume that they made an informed decision, volunteer for a pregnancy care center and find out what’s really going on in their lives and offer them an option for life. When a strip club sets up shop in your small town, don’t assume that the goings-on are legal, go find out if you can fight for your community.
We need to get beyond the statistics and the news and get involved. Will you join me?
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Sunday, April 13, 2008
The Things that Divide Us
This theme of divisiveness has been used recently to attack the "religious right" who bring up those polarizing issues of abortion and "same-sex marriage." How dare they introduce legislation that makes people feel uncomfortable, bring up topics in conversation where people passionately disagree. That's not loving. That's not compassionate. This Sunday's Patriot-News featured an op-ed by the president of Messiah College talking about their forum they held with presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
"The Compassion Forum is an important step forward to broaden the religious-political dialogue. The time has come for people of faith to expand the dialogue beyond a few limited issues and include morally significant concerns such as the global AIDS epidemic, domestic and international poverty, climate change, abortion, genocide in Darfur, human rights and torture."Mrs. Phipps said their forum was going to be hospitable and gracious, not hostile and divisive. Good deal. EXCEPT, do we really believe that abortion and homosexuality are the only issues people disagree on? Let's talk about each of these topics mentioned in the quote above:
- global AIDS epidemic-
- side one: throw money at the problem, give them condoms and comprehensive sex education.
- side two: abstinence education, encouraging strong families. Very divisive. We have had debate on this very issue in Congress within the past few weeks.
- domestic and international poverty-
- side one: forgive all international debt and add more welfare programs and free handouts for poor Americans.
- side two: support beginning democracies and good money management, and domestically, focus on incentives to work and get out of poverty. Another passionate debate in the U.S.
- climate change-
- Wait, there are two sides to this issue? I thought we all agreed on this. Yeah, we don't. There are a large number of scientists who disagree with the whole global warming scare. This issue is so divisive that the pro-side chooses to act like the other side doesn't even exist!
- genocide in Darfur- I actually don't know two sides to this one, but I am sure there are.
- human rights-
- side one: right to abortion and right to marry anyone you want.
- side two: not everything is a right. Yikes, they kind of stumbled into very divisive waters here including the ones they wanted to avoid...(note: I was not at the forum so I don't know what this topic covered).
- torture-
- side one: waterboarding is evil.
- side two: we love Jack Bauer and waterboarding is A-ok. Pretty divisive. Did you see the protests in DC?
Please leave comments.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
There's a whole lot more!
I have six reasons why you should keep your registration unchanged:
1. State Attorney General
2. State Auditor General
3. State Treasurer
4. Representative in Congress
5. State Senator (odd-numbered districts)
6. State Representative
If you change your registration to Democrat, then you cannot vote for these races on the Republican ticket. Some of these races might be contested. Do you want to have a say for who represents the Republican party, which aligns more with conservative views than the Dems? Then don't change your registration. And if you're registered as an Independent...well then your opinion doesn't matter a whole lot since you shut yourself out.
Just remember that there's a whole lot more to this election than just a presidential candidate.
Monday, March 3, 2008
Obama - Bipartisan?
"How could someone possibly justify such a vote? In March 2001, Obama was the sole speaker in opposition to the bill on the floor of the Illinois Senate. He said: "We're saying they are persons entitled to the kinds of protections provided to a child, a 9-month child delivered to term. I mean, it would essentially bar abortions, because the equal-protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child." So according to Obama, "they," babies who survive abortions or any other preterm newborns, should be permitted to be killed because giving legal protection to preterm newborns would have the effect of banning all abortions."
Read the rest here.
