Will I Ever See the Inside of Church Again?

Why do I need to make a reservation to visit the Lord? He was never that busy before to not let me in. This time, however, it is not because He is busy, it is because government thinks it is safer to stay away from Church. Safer? Since when did visiting with God depend on my safety? I would rather place myself in harms way than to avoid the Almighty. Dying may not be so bad after all. Isn’t that the goal of life is to die? Dying gets us to the pearly gates, it may not get us in, but at least we may get to see the gates. Who knows perhaps I’d get a sneek peek at God Himself when the gate opens for someone to enter?

Religion is not something I normally discuss out loud and never in public. Unlike politics, which I shoot myself in the foot with all the time. Politics is different than religion, thank God for that. It would be nice, though if politicians practiced their faith more when running for office. I too often get the feeling that I am supposed to forgive all the lies and deceit spewed by politicians as political rhetoric. Somehow lies become allowed when speaking politically. I would really like politicians to tell me their personal definition of a lie.

One of the most common arguments comes from taking a statement out of context and labeling it a lie. For instance. Back in January, he said the Chinese COVID-19 Virus is harmless.” three months later after science has proved that COVID-19 is deadly, we claim the speaker told a lie. Duh! At the time he said it he based his statement on the scientific evidence of the day. It wasn’t a lie it was a statement that has been proven wrong by time. Yet, I detect false claims of lies almost daily on the news.

Polls are another form of lie. Yesterday I reported counting yard signs along the highway in Wisconsin and took an impromptu poll. I reported that Biden was ahead of Trump in Wisconsin. Did my poll really prove that? No. Polls need data, lots of data that can be statistically calculated with some degree of certainty that the prediction is correct. I venture to say that six yards signs on a short piece of highway is not statistically accurate. When I worked as an engineer, I was always placed in a situation where I needed to come up with answers immediately. Most times I was trying to determine if a new design was better, stronger, etc. than the standard. With the time I had to do the work I used a method I had developed to make the assessment. Years later After taking a course in statistics I learned that my method was one of pure guesstimating. I had a fifty fifty chance of making an accurate choice between designs. Now, when I hear reports stating that a poll shows one candidate ahead of another I laugh and dismiss it completely. The trouble is that average citizens do not look at the statistical relevancy of a poll, they merely remember the result they hear reported. To me that report constitutes a lie, but the result is touted as the truth.

When I look at candidates, I try to assess them relative to past performance. If it is a new candidate who never had a political life before, it is harder, but I then look at the candidates character and his record in his current job. If the candidate has been in office before I look at his promises and measure them against his results. Did he keep his promises. Did I believe the promises he made were in alignment with my own politics? If he kept his promises then I would be prone to vote for him. If he made promises, but absolutely no effort to fulfill them I will not vote for him, he is liar using political rhetoric only to gain my vote.

The one thing I had against Obama was his promise to “fundamentally change America.”

“Into what?” I asked, Obama never really answered that but during the course of the campaign he let out little hints that he was heading the country toward Communism. One particular hint came during a discourse with Joe the Plumber at a rally.

Another political scheme is to use the free press as your personal propaganda machine. It was no secret that the Democrats control the political message. The lazy free press buys the lies they are fed hook line and sinker and never challenge any of them. To this day, the free press that the Founder’s said was necessary to keep politicians honest has chosen to become an integral part of the machine. They constantly manufacture news by manipulating videos, photos, and interviews to lead people to their way of thinking. All of it is a giant lie. It is hard to understand which news organizations meet the Founder’s concept of reporting fairly.

My choices for political office all boil down to whose message and reporting do I trust the most. Of course that comes only after I chose the candidate that most closely agrees with my own political ideology.

Short Term History Lesson

This essay by Victor Davis Hanson is a comprehensive compilation of actions being taken by Liberals, Never Trumpers, and good old regular republicans against Trump. Hanson exposes the hypocrisy of the Left by listing Obama’s law bending actions many of which are unconstitutional. In short this is a great piece of history.

Regime Change by Any Other Name?

by Victor Davis Hanson May 22, 2017 10:08 PM @vdhanson

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Truth or consequences? Obama skated for far worse misdeeds.

Election machines in three states were not hacked to give Donald Trump the election.

There was never a serious post-election movement of electors to defy their constitutional duties and vote for Hillary Clinton.

Nor, once Trump was elected, did transgendered people begin killing themselves in alarming numbers.

Nor were there mass resignations at the State Department upon his inauguration.

Nor did Donald Trump seek an order to “ban all Muslims” from entering the U.S. Instead, he temporarily sought a suspension in visas for everyone, regardless of religion, from seven Middle Eastern states that the Obama administration had earlier identified as incapable of properly vetting travelers to the U.S.

The first lady did not work for an elite escort or prostitute service. She never said that she and young Barron Trump would not be moving to the White House. Barron does not have autism.

Trump’s father never ran racist ads as a supposed candidate in a purported political campaign. Kellyanne Conway denies that in a private conversation between segments on MSNBC, she privately remarked to hosts that she had to take a shower after working for Trump.

Donald Trump never suggested to the Mexican president that the U.S. was going to invade Mexico. Nor did Trump plan to mobilize the National Guard to send back illegal aliens.

He did not remove a Martin Luther King bust from the White House.

There was no evidence that he ever promised to ease Russian sanctions (much less that he promised the Russians he would be “flexible” after he was elected). He did not short the FBI of resources to conduct an investigation into supposed Russian collusion. He did not go to Moscow and watch prostitutes in his bed urinate where Barack Obama had previously slept.

His deputy attorney general did not threaten to resign over the Comey firing.

And we have no idea whether Trump really gets two scoops of ice cream while limiting his guests to one, or pads around in a bathrobe in the early evening, or cannot find the light switch in the White house.

Yet all that is what daily we hear and read.

Meanwhile . . .

Fake news crowds out real news. Here is what we do not read much about: North Korea, long appeased, could well send missiles against our allies, perhaps even with nuclear payloads. Afghanistan is at a crux and will either implode or need more American troops. China’s role is in the balance, and it may or may not help defang North Korea. The greatest tax- and health-reform packages in years are now in the hands of Congress. Executive orders have revolutionized the domestic energy industry and achieved a stunning and historic reduction in illegal immigration. The stock market is soaring, employment is up, and confidence in the economy has returned. Wall Street seems to dip only on talk of impeaching Donald Trump.

Commensurate Worry?

And here is what no longer troubles us at all. In 2008, candidate Barack Obama used back channels to communicate flexibility to the Iranians (as in the later assurance he gave, on a hot mic, to the Russians), which may have helped undermine the ongoing Bush-administration negotiations with Iran.

Hillary Clinton set up an illegal server, distributed classified information in an illegal and unsecured fashion, lied about it, and destroyed thousands of e-mails central to an investigation — and got off without an indictment.

In the 2016 election, the head of the DNC conspired to massage the debates and help swing the nomination to the Clinton campaign.

The prior attorney general of the United State met with the spouse of a presidential candidate under investigation, in a stealthy conversation on an airport tarmac, did not inform officials of that meeting until the get-together was discovered by a reporter, semi-recused herself under pressure only to turn over her prosecutorial discretion to the head of the FBI, in a fashion that was both improper and perhaps unconstitutional.

We do not hear how exactly Russian interests at Uranium One obtained market control over 20 percent of U.S. uranium holdings, or the connections between Uranium One and their prior multimillion-dollar donations to the Clinton Foundation, or that the Podesta Group had numerous financial dealings with Russian interests, or that Bill Clinton received $500,000 in 2010 from Russian oligarchic interests while his wife was secretary of state — ten times more than what Michael Flynn was alleged to have received.

We know now that many of the elements of the Iran Deal, the most important foreign-policy decision in the last 20 years, were designed to circumvent Senate ratification and hinged on secret ancillary agreements.

We know that unnamed intelligence officials during the Obama administration surveilled likely political opponents, unmasked their identities, leaked them to the press, either under the assumption that such skullduggery would not surface, or on the pretext that such monitoring was ordinary and involved national security.

We know that Obama’s director of National Intelligence lied under oath to Congress without ramifications. We know that a high IRS official subverted her duties for political purposes in a manner intended to alter the 2012 campaign, took the Fifth Amendment, refuses to testify further before Congress, and faces no consequences other than a plush, taxpayer-funded retirement.

Trump Agonistes

Of course, a media-targeted Donald Trump is weaponizing his enemies by his characteristic blunderbuss approach in interviews. Of course, in anger and without political experience, he tweets too much and says things better left unsaid. Of course, at 70, he has an in-your-face character that is unlike any other president’s and also unlikely to change. He mixes freely truth, rumor, and innuendo.

And of course his superb appointments and Reaganesque approach to foreign affairs, energy production, tax reform, and deregulation are all threatened by his own team’s inability to deal with a dishonest and largely corrupt Washington and New York media.

So Trump boasted and talked trash with the Russians? Terrible and stupid, no doubt. Worse than what Franklin Roosevelt communicated to Winston Churchill about the mass-murdering Stalin? (“I tell you that I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks, he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.”) Was Trump more Machiavellian than was Obama, with his “it’s important for him to give me space” requests to Vladimir Putin when he met President Medvedev before the 2012 election and apparently banked his reset policy on his ability to get away with misinforming the public?

All that said, none of the above is a reason to impeach, or remove on medical grounds, an elected president, or to suggest that he resign less than four months into office. Yet we hear exactly that not only from the progressive, in-the-street Left, but from many of the Never Trump Right.

In some sense, we are watching a sort of mass hysteria characteristic of pet-rock or hula-hoop democracy. (It reminds one not so much of the mob that went after Socrates –Trump is no Socrates — but of the mad fury of the French Revolution or the high-water point of the 1950s John Birch movement)

The ‘Resistance’

The “Resistance” peddled the yarn that the election tabulations were electronically rigged; then it was an appeal to electors not to do their constitutional duties; then it was reduced to street theater and demonstrations; then it turned to desperate deep-state leaks and media blitzes; now it’s mere hysteria.

The effort to remove the president is conducted by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the wire services, and the major networks. And we have seen nothing like it in our time. In the last six months, Americans have been told quite falsely so many untruths about the Trump administration by their news agencies that for all practical purposes, there is no such thing as a media as we once knew it.

Journalists are not shy about their prejudices. In some cases — James Rutenberg, Jorge Ramos, and Christiane Amanpour — they have admitted their view that the duty of the new media in the era of Trump is not to stay disinterested, but to become political opponents. Some have been exposed as colluding with Hillary Clinton’s campaign in an effort to prevent Trump’s election victory; they tried to keep those efforts secret because they knew what they were doing was unethical and self-interested.

A second effort to achieve a Trump removal is conducted by pop-culture celebrities — who make the Dixie Chicks’ anti-Bush furor of 2003 now look mild. This opposition is waged in a way that would have ruined careers if directed at Barack Obama.

Madonna dreams on Inauguration Day of blowing up the White House. Don Cheadle wanted Trump to die in grease fire. Snoop Dogg videotapes his mock execution of a Trump lookalike. Martha Stewart poses flipping the finger to a picture of Trump while flashing the Victory sign to a photo of the felon and former pimp Snoop Dogg. Icon Robert De Niro said eloquently of Trump: “He’s a punk, he’s a dog, he’s a pig, he’s a con, he’s a bullsh** artist.”

The efforts to demonize and thus delegitimize and so emasculate Trump have reached sick new heights.

On cable television, Bill Maher jokes that Trump’s daughter fellates her father; on national television, Steven Colbert laughs that Trump fellates Vladimir Putin. Mutatis mutandis: Both would have been fired for suggesting the same about the Obama first family.

Ad nauseam Trump is compared to Hitler by the likes of Ashley Judd and Chris Matthews. Hillary Clinton announces she is part of the “Resistance,” a reference supposedly to the French maquis who sought to ambush Vichy officials and SS patrols during the Nazi occupation of France.

The Democratic party — now bereft of political control in most state legislatures and governorships, as well as in the Senate, the House, the presidency and the Supreme Court — has modeled its opposition on 1960s street theater. More than 60 congressional representatives refused to go to the Inauguration. Some call for Trump’s impeachment; others refuse to hold hearings, block nomination appointments, and demand special prosecutors. The California head of the party leads group chants of “F*** Trump” with extended middle fingers.

The Never Trump right has gone from criticism to outright hysteria and is now calling for impeachment or removal on medical incapacity. The subtext of these latest demands is that a Mike Pence — a wonderful man who did not run for president and would never have been elected if he had run — might assume the presidency and return the Republican party to its former supposedly sober and judicious custodians who, after the proper catharsis, might resume their Washington–New York stewardship of the GOP. For these Trump critics, a defeat along the lines of 2008 and 2016 is far preferable to a 2016 victory. Being praised for being good losers is always preferable to being ostracized for being poor winners.

The Obama Standard

I thought — and so wrote — that Barack Obama subverted the Constitution when he refused to enforce federal laws concerning the ACA mandate, illegal immigration, and contractual provisions of the Chrysler bankruptcy.

I felt Obama, as a candidate and a president-elect, was unethically signaling both the Russians and the Iranians through back channels that he would soon be flexible, even as George Bush was conducting foreign policy as our president.

I thought President Obama had no constitutional right to strong-arm Boeing, the Little Sisters of the Poor, or the small Gibson Guitar company. His administration flat-out lied about the Benghazi catastrophe, the Bowe Bergdahl swap, the Iran Deal, and the chemical-weapons depots of Bashar al-Assad.

The Obama administration endangered U.S. security by yanking peacekeepers out of Iraq for a cheap campaign talking point, by destroying Libya without a follow-up plan, by setting faux red lines and deadlines, by allowing China to create an artificial island base to adjudicate trans-Pacific sea traffic, by appeasing and resetting relations with Vladimir Putin, and by turning a blind eye to North Korean stepped-up aggression. When the president of the United States promises the Russians that he will be more flexible after an election, the message is that he soon plans to do things that, if known, would likely cost him a victory with the American voters.

Obama high-fived the bin Laden raid to the extent of revealing classified protocols and turning over to pet reporters and Hollywood filmmakers some of the trove of bin Laden’s al-Qaeda communications, in hopes of advancing party-line narratives.

His administration helped ruin the reputations of the IRS and the VA. His DOJ went after an obscure video maker and the journalist Dinesh D’Souza largely for reasons of political reprisal and deterrence. His team ordered illegal surveillance of AP reporters and Fox News’s James Rosen; it may well have surveilled and unmasked political opponents and leaked their names to the media.

Obama invited a felon with a parole ankle bracelet into the White House and praised a visiting rapper whose latest album cover celebrated the murder of a white judge, whose corpse was being toasted over by rappers.

Obama was degreed but not educated; he could not pronounce “corpsmen,” had no idea how many states there were in the Union, and thought Hawaii was in Asia and the Falklands Islands off the coast of India. The media demurred — based in some cases on the finery of Obama’s pants crease or his rhetorical ability to cause electrical sensations in one’s leg — and announced him a god, the smartest president ever to enter office. Obama himself in 2008 buffoonishly announced his power to lower global temperatures and the seas, and declared himself more adroit than all his own political handlers and aides in all of their respective jobs.

Obama’s deputy national-security adviser admitted that the administration had misled the press on the Iran Deal by creating an artificial “echo chamber” among media naïfs. Obama’s comments about Trayvon Martin and the Skip Gates affair were incendiary and in line with his campaign smears about the clingers or his calls to supporters to take a gun to a knife fight and “get in their face.”

And yet, for all that and more, Barack Obama certainly did not warrant articles of impeachment; he was not unhinged, nor did he offer any evidence of medical incapacity. He would not deserve to have his family smeared with jokes about incest or autism. Any Madonna-like talk of blowing him up in the White House would have been obscene, perhaps illegal, and probably grounds for prosecution.

We are now watching insidious regime change, aimed at removing the president of the United States not because of what he has done so far, but because of his personality and what he might do to the Obama agenda — and because for a variety of cultural reasons, our elite simply despises his very being.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/447864/trump-critics-left-right-want-him-removed

Headlines To Laugh At

Since I am a generous and fair man I cannot place too much acrimony on fake news. I will only suggest that we are looking at fake news incorrectly. Newspapers have always been a source of a good laugh. We must take all fake news stories for what they are, mis-guided jokes. Shown below are a few examples of what I am speaking. Thank you Rich for sending this collection of beauties.

To all journalism students and to all journalists working for news please take note of the type of entertainment you create in the name of reporting facts.

Why we must not let newspapers die ….

 

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Ya Think?

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Sorry I missed it…

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N.S.S.

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No comment

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“Boy’s School Votes to Consolidate”

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“Spin” to help distance themselves from their sponsorship?

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Statistics be damned! I don’t believe it!

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What? Where?

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That’s what I would’ve called it!

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A record unlikely to be broken.

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I am speechless!

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I guess the head bone was attached to the leg bone after that happened.

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I think they may be onto something!

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Proof once again that politicians can’t relate to the real world…

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Somebody got paid to conduct this study?

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This actually makes sense – if you think about it.

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The judge apparently has a list of lawyers he doesn’t like.

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It must have been a concert “for teachers only”?

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Doctors are expensive – it must be a last-ditch effort.

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On advice from his attorney.

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Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss came up with this one!

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Can’t really blame ’em for protesting, but they could’ve sent those unruly kids somewhere else, surely!

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A lesson we learned from Karen Carpenter…

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I bet you couldn’t wipe the smile off this copywriter’s face!

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I suppose the school for the blind might have benefitted from this broadcast?

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They could advise those city officials about why the sewer smells so bad…

And finally…

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