The Director’s Blog – Rob Shearer, Francis Schaeffer Study Center, Mt. Juliet, TN
Andrew Breitbart at the Tea Party Convention in Nashville (referring to the outrageously biased mainstream media coverage of the Tea Party movement):
“That my friends is not media bias. That is contempt for the American people”
Then, he looked into the cameras and addressed the mainstream media:
“Your days of doing this are over. It’s not your business model that sucks, it’s you that sucks.“
watch the video (3 minutes)
hat tip to NRO & the Llama Butchers
“I want to steer markets.”
“I want them set free!”
Nice visual play on the mal-investment hangover!
If you’re going to watch the sixth (and final) season, then you need to watch this review. If you’ve never watched before: take notes, memorize characters (even dead ones have a way of returning), and resign yourself to the mysteries of the island.
I quickly downloaded the AP results by city for Massachusetts. Now Massachusetts is unique in the US, in that the entire state is divided in townships. Counties exist in name only and all local government functions are carried out by the township governments. Another way of putting this: There are no unincorporated parts of Massachusetts.
But, of course, the townships vary quite a bit in their size – both in area and in population. It was quickly clear from the AP table that Coakley had carried most of the largest cities in the state. She carried 10 of the 15 largest with 59% of the vote. She won Boston, Worcester, Newton, Springfield, Brockton, Brookline, Arlington, Medford, New Bedford, & Framingham. Brown won Quincy, Weymouth, Lowell, Barnstable, and Peabody. In those 15 towns/cities she collected 278,620 votes to Brown’s 193,063.
But Brown won 183 of the next 235 towns/cities and racked up an impressive total of 862,627 votes to Croakley’s 657,560.
Brown’s margin of 205,000 votes from the 2nd tier of 235 cities easily overcame Coakley’s margin of 85,000 from the top 15 cities.
In the 3rd and final tier of 75 towns/cities, Coakley won 54 and Brown only 21, with Coakley again winning 57.5% of the vote. But there just aren’t that many people in the small cities. In the 3rd tier she won 26,657 votes to Browns 19,695.
Conclusions: I think what the pattern shows is simply confirmation of the conventional wisdom. Coakley won the urban areas (and some significant liberal suburbs). Brown won the suburbs. And he won them with big enough margins that he won the state. It’s also a confirmation that you don’t have to win over every constituency in order to win an election. You have to win big on your turf and not lose too badly in areas outside your strengths.
yes he did.
Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee said THIS about Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat…“Why would you hand the keys to the car back to the same guys whose policies drove the economy into the ditch and then walked away from the scene of the accident?” “For the Republicans to say vote for us and bring back the guys who got us into this mess in the first place, I don’t think it’s a winner.”
I mean, it is Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, but this is unseemly!
Does this strike anybody else as weird?
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (which is run jointly by all of the current Democrats in the US Senate) thinks that all they have to do to persuade folks to vote against Scott Brown is to link him to the Tea Party movement.
Maybe it’s just me. But national polling has shown that the Tea Party movement has higher favorability ratings that either the Republican or the Democratic Party.
While the choir might respond well to this attack, I think the majority of independent voters greet news of Brown’s affilation with the Tea Party movement as a positive, not a negative.
Apparently, it’s not just the Coakley campaign in MA that’s out of touch. From inside the beltway it appears to be axiomatic that Tea Party = Evil.
I don’t think most voters agree. We’re going to find out tomorrow.
According to the weatherman, sometime between 9am and noon tomorrow, the temperature will reach 32 degrees and by 3pm will climb all the way up to 38. It will be the first time since the evening of January 2nd that the temperature here in middle Tennessee has gotten above freezing. According to the National Weather Service the last time that we had nine consecutive days of below-freezing temperatures was in 1899. That was 111 years ago.
It was warmer at McMurdo Station, Antarctica yesterday than it was in Nashville, TN.
As someone else has observed, when it’s hot it’s global warming; when it’s cold it’s just weather.
I think the percentage of folks in Middle Tennessee who believe in global warming has fallen with the thermometer.
For the past several years, Cyndy has been preparing the Sunday School lessons for our church. There are about two dozen children, ages 6 to 12, all in one class. Needless to say, this has been a challenge. Cyndy has been committed to preparing lessons that teach children the stories from scripture, systematically, both Old and New Testament. I think she’s done a marvelous, creative, inventive job. And of course, I’m completely unbiased!
Today’s lesson was from the book of Genesis. During the next 8 week segment, the kids will be going over both the Tower of Babel and the Flood sections, but today was the introductory material. You might not think there would be much for kids in the passages from Genesis 4 & 5 that cover the genealogy of the Patriarchs – but there is! There are ten figures named starting with Adam and ending with Noah. For each one the text gives their age when their son was born and how long they lived. From these figures, it is possible to construct a timeline showing how much time elapsed from Adam to Noah and the Flood.
If we take the year of Adam’s birth as 0 and then add the ages of each Patriarch to the age of their father in the year of their birth we come up with a total of 1,656 years from Adam’s birth to the Flood. But there’s more to think about here than just how much time passed. It’s also intriguing to look at how much the lives of the Patriarch’s overlapped each other. There’s also the fascinating story of Enoch, who did not die, but was taken by God directly into heaven.
To help kids see these relationships, Cyndy planned and laid out a “living timeline” for the kids on the floor of our fellowship hall.
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At the start of the lesson, ten children sat in ten chairs and picked up the name of a randomly assigned Patriarch. The teacher called the first name, “Adam.” The student started walking the taped timeline at Adam’s birth, paused when Seth was born, and then continued to walk the rest of the years of their life. Then Seth was called, and so on.
There were two lines drawn across the lifelines of the Patriarchs. A blue ribbon marked the year of Adam’s death. At the conclusion of the class the students were asked, “How many of the other nine Patriarchs could have talked to Adam?” The answer is eight. The tenth Patriarch, Noah, is the first one born after Adam’s death.
When we got to Enoch, by the way, rather than walking to the end of their lifeline, we had one of the teachers wheel the student out in a chair to show that the end of Enoch’s life was different.
The second line drawn across the lifelines was red crepe paper marking the year of the flood. A very concrete illustration of the meaning of Methuselah’s name which is “after me it comes.”
The kids had a good time and the visuals really drove the point home. I was in the sanctuary doing communion at the end of our morning worship service, so I challenged the adults to go find a child from Sunday School and find out how many of the Patriarchs could have talked to Adam.
Here’s what Cyndy wrote the teachers in the teachers’ guide to the lesson:
What we want the kids to take away from all this:
An appreciation for the historicity of Scripture.
Understanding that ALL Scripture, even the “begats” are profitable.
That the genealogies show us that there an eyewitness to Eden was alive for 900 years. This means that Noah could not have talked to Adam about what it was like before the fall, but Noah’s father could have.
