The Germans are scrapping their voting machines because of concerns about the vulnerability to manipulation – and the inability of voters to verify that their vote was properly recorded. Story from the German Foreign Ministry in the US.
Ballot security is the cornerstone of free elections.
So why are State Sen. Ketron and State Rep. Todd sponsoring a bill to scrap the recently mandated return to paper ballots? See HB 0614 & SB 0872.
NASA climatologist James Hansen has joined the call for civil disobedience at tomorrow’s Capitol Climate Action Demonstration – March 2nd 2009. The organizors are targeting the Capitol Power Plant, a coal-fired plant in DC which supplies heating and cooling to the Capitol and Congressional office buildings.
The Capitol Climate Action Project is explicitly calling for massive civil disobedience:
“We will surround the plant, disrupting access, and refuse to leave when asked.”
– Capitol Climate Action – Action Guidelines
There’s going to be just one little PR / Public image /perception problem tomorrow. They’re going to be having a snowstorm in DC.
Monday
Cloudy. Occasional snow in the morning…then a chance of snow in the afternoon. Additional snow accumulation around an inch. Total snow accumulation 5 to 8 inches. Brisk with highs in the upper 20s. Northwest winds 20 to 25 mph with gusts up to 35 mph. Chance of snow 80 percent.
It’s now so common as to be downright laughable – whenever a public protest about global warming is scheduled, it seems almost guaranteed to produce a blizzard and/or record low temperatures.
Proof that God has a sense of humor.
What seems to be lacking amongst the main-stream media’s love fest is a little historical perspective.
Obama remains, at this point, neither the messiah nor the devil. The best adjectives to describe him are untested, little known, unproven. We will not really be able to discern the arc of his presidency for some time yet.
Sort of like the Greek proverb, “Call no man happy until he is dead.”
To supply some historical context, I offer the following bit of data:
Presidential approval ratings, ~30 days into office
(Johnson & Ford omitted for obvious reasons)
Barack Obama 2/21/2009 59%
George Bush (43) 2/21/2001 61%
Bill Clinton 2/14/1993 51%
George Bush (41) 2/27/1989 60%
Ronald Reagan 2/16/1981 55%
Jimmy Carter 2/15/1977 71%
Richard Nixon 2/25/1969 59%
John Kennedy 2/15/1961 72%
Eisenhower 2/26/1953 66%
Source: The American Presidency Project, UC-Santa Barbara
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/popularity.php
In God we trust.
All others, bring data!
CPSIA = The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act
Heather Idoni, of The Homeschooler’s Notebook and BelovedBooks.com, with help from her friend, Jodi Whisler, of HomeGrownHearts.com, has written a delightful spoof (a la Dr. Seuss) exposing the stupidity of Congress’ attempt to improve the safety of children’s products.
Congress’ ham-fisted efforts may very well bankrupt a number of companies who make products for children. Even more alarming, it may result in the destruction of all children’s books published before 1985. THAT, gentle readers, would be a tragedy of immense proportions. In my more cynical moments, I wonder if the wholesale destruction of several centuries of politically incorrect books was not somebody’s intention all along.
Idoni & Whisler’s ode is brilliant. Here’s a sample:
The law with the rules that they hurriedly drafted,
so brilliantly worded and carefully crafted,Would certainly solve this great problem they had —
Who would complain? How could it be bad?“Out with the bathwater, baby and all”
was the rallying cry from the town’s city hall
Head over to Idoni’s EasyFunSchool and read the whole thing.
from CitizenLink:
from an MSNBC website story on large families:
Rob Shearer, a father of 11 children ranging in age from 10 to 28, says he and his wife didn’t plan on having a large family. But he says things were going well, so they kept expanding.
“We never sat down and said, ‘Let’s have 11 children!’ We had two and enjoyed them, so we had a third,” says Shearer, of Lebanon, Tenn. “We enjoyed three, so we had a fourth.” Two girls were adopted from China.
He says that, like any parent, he feels inadequate and overwhelmed at times, but adds that it’s all worth it.
According to an article in today’s Wall Street Journal:
An obscure Commerce Department office with a $19 million budget and fewer than 20 grant officers could end up in charge of $7 billion in grants to expand Internet access in rural areas. A Congressional Budget Office report said it could take eight years for those grants to be issued because the amount of money would “far exceed” the agency’s traditional budget and require the deployment of technology that is “not widely available today.”
The $7 billion dollars to expand the internet in rural America is ONE percent of the total appropriation in the Stimulus Bill. And it will take that agency eight years to disburse the money.
The potential for waste, fraud, & abuse is astronomical.
Prediction: We will be reading horror stories about how the funds were mispent starting in about two years and continuing for about ten. And we and our children, and our grand-children will spend the rest of our lives paying for it. See this chart, from the Strategas Group (h/t to Powerline):
Note that NO deficit in the last forty years has exceeded 7.5% of GDP. For the past sixteen years, deficits have been kept to less than 5.0% of GDP. President Obama’s first year deficit is now projected at 15.0%.
Still to come: National healthcare, and imposing accountability and diversity on talk radio.
Rose Publishing continues to provide excellent resources for church & home. Thousands of homeschool families have found their publications to be extremely helpful for their study of the Bible and church history.
Ten years ago they published a wonderful set of maps called Then and Now Bible Maps. That resource continues to be in print, but they’ve now released a Deluxe version of the Atlas with double the number of pages, and a CD-ROM with each of the maps in .jpg and .pdf format. There on five maps on the period from Beginnings to the Exodus; four maps on the Conquest & the Judges; five maps on the Divided Kingdom; five maps on the Life of Jesus; and seven maps on Paul’s Journeys and the Spread of Christianity.
Along with each map in this spiral bound reference book is a clear overlay with modern-day boundaries and place names. It is extremely helpful for students (and teachers) to see the modern nations and cities that correspond with biblical places.
Deluxe Then and Now Bible Maps is a hardback (with spiral binding inside), 40 pages, and sells for $29.99 direct from Greenleaf Press.
Rose is also the publisher of an excellent series of 12-panel reference pamphlets on a wide variety of biblical reference and church history topics. I particularly like their compact timelines and their apologetics topics like Denominations, Translations, Worldviews, and Eastern Religions. Greenleaf stocks all of these pamphlets. They’re well organized, well-researched, balanced, and designed to fit neatly inside a Bible as a reference tool. They’re very affordable, at $3.99 each.
