I wanted to take this time to talk about something I’m seeing as a disturbing trend.

We have had some great discussions with Andrew and John about Christianity. I have told them what I believe and have tried my best to answer the questions they have of me. They have both been very polite in their questions and responses.

What is disturbing to me is finding people who do not accept God with the faith I accept Him trying to dissuade me from my belief.

It’s almost as though they (and I use a generic ‘they’ because I don’t know if Andrew is a believer or not) are evangelicals of the opposite kind I am. They are trying to convert me and any other born-again Christian into forsaking our faith.

Jesus told us this time would come, but I guess I never thought I would have to deal with it and in such a public forum.

He also told us some would try to deceive the very elect into not believing in Him. There are some who proclaim their Christian faith who can be persuaded otherwise if shown enough to make them doubt. In these cases I question whether they were saved to begin with or they wouldn’t reject the message of the Gospel.

I have no doubt in my faith, and in fact, feel my discussions with Andrew and John have made it stronger.

How can I explain the remission of my daughter-in-law’s cancer without any treatment, when 15 tumors were found on her body in February and when she went for a scan a few weeks ago before going for treatment they had disappeared except for two which are too small to treat, if not by the Grace and intervention of the Great Physician Himself? No treatment was done in the meantime, but prayers were going up every day by hundreds of people.

How can I explain a lifetime search for my biological father that, when God was ready and my father was no longer drinking, happened to just drop in my lap one day the Tuesday before I was taking a trip to Florida, a destination that was but 3 hours from where my father lived?

How can I explain the bond of love my father and I had for each other from the time we first met, when we embraced each other as though we were long-lost friends?

How do I explain how his wife, who was so hostile to me my father and I had to meet at a Waffle House, suddenly came around and now, even three years after his death we stay in touch and she tells me she loves me and means it?

I had prayed to meet my father when I was a teen, but since it didn’t happen I had forgotten about it and forty years later contact information for him just dropped in my lap.

I can only explain these things as answers to prayers to the Only God. There is no other and He is a jealous God. He is the only God and there never was nor never will be another.

How else do I explain the miracle of my salvation and the peace I have in my heart that if I were to drop dead at this very moment all would be fine, and I just know there is a literal Heaven and a literal hell?

I have the faith of a child and I have never tried to be too cerebral about my faith. I can remember as a child I would try to imagine what things were like before God spoke “let there be light” and it was so.

I don’t care if someone is another Einstein, he or she can never reason out God; it has to be done by simple faith.

I’m not stupid but I’m no genius either, and for that I see I am blessed in that my questions were resolved long ago or I have decided what questions I still have can wait until I see Him face to face and can ask if I still think it’s important and He’ll explain it and I’ll understand it.

So, to the Andrews and Johns out there, I am more than happy to share my faith with you and read anything reasonable you have to offer, but I am resolute in my faith and I will be praying even harder for God’s protection from any attempts to ‘convert’ me to not believing in Him.

According to Politico, Fred Thompson intends to announce his candidacy for President of the United States during the July 4 holiday.

Fred Dalton Thompson is planning to enter the presidential race over the Fourth of July holiday, announcing that week that he has already raised several million dollars and is being backed by insiders from the past three Republican administrations, Thompson advisers told The Politico.

But the advisers said Thompson dropped all pretenses on Tuesday afternoon during a conference call with more than 100 potential donors, each of whom was urged to raise about $50,000.

Thompson’s formal announcement is planned for Nashville. Organizers say the red pickup truck that was a hallmark of Thompson’s first Senate race will begin showing up in Iowa and New Hampshire as an emblem of what they consider his folksy, populist appeal.

A testing-the-waters committee is to be formed June 4 so Thompson can start raising money, and staffers will go on the payroll in early June, the organizers said. A policy team has been formed, but remains under wraps.

The supporters on Tuesday’s call make up a group the campaign is calling “First Day Founders.” When launched, the campaign will have offices in Nashville and Northern Virginia, the advisers say.

Campaign officials said they have every indication Thompson will declare his candidacy, but cautioned that he could still decide not to run or to postpone the announcement. Mark Corallo, the campaign spokesman, said: “He is seriously considering getting in and doing everything he has to do to come to a final decision.”

I put the question mark in the heading because it’s not a sure thing until he actually announces.

The Weekly Standard is writing about the Tuesday phone call and about the testing the waters committee.

FRED THOMPSON IS RUNNING for the Republican presidential nomination. In a conference call Monday, Thompson addressed a group of more than 100 supporters and fundraisers whom the campaign has dubbed First Day Founders. He told them that he would be setting up an organization that will allow him to begin raising money and recruiting staff.

In official campaign finance parlance, the move represents a shift from “giving serious consideration” to a presidential bid, as Thompson said he would do back in March, as a non-candidate, to a “testing the waters” period where one is, in effect, a candidate-in-waiting with a campaign-in-preparation. Thompson advisers point out that the new testing-the-waters entity is not quite a campaign committee, though it will officially begin accepting contributions on June 4. On that day–the First Day, as it were–the campaign will take in donations that it can then tout as an impressive one-day haul. A corollary benefit will be that news reports about Thompson’s non-entry entry will run on June 5, when the declared candidates will meet in New Hampshire for their third debate. (Thompson won’t be required to disclose his donors and the amounts they give to the Federal Election Commission until September.)

No one thinks Thompson would have set up this entity if he had not decided to run, and there were apparently no serious qualifications or hesitations expressed on the conference call yesterday. The testing-the-waters committee allows Thompson to recruit and hire staff, which he intends to do. And he now has an entity
that can collect campaign cash. For nearly four months, would-be Thompson supporters have been frozen in place, unable to contribute to Thompson even as they have been hounded by other campaigns.

Good news for conservatives if it comes about. We’ve been searching for the candidate who isn’t changing positions all the time to satisfy polls, but who sticks by his principles. Let’s hope we’ve found him and he does decide to run.

MSNBC is reporting Valerie Plame really was covert when Robert Novak published her name.

We now know that because Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has an attachment to his memorandum to the court supporting his recommendation that I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s former top aide, spend 2-1/2 to 3 years in prison for obstructing the CIA leak investigation.

The nature of Plame’s CIA employment never came up in Libby’s perjury and obstruction of justice trial.

Why didn’t it, since that was the basis of the investigation conducted by Fitzgerald anyway?

Why was the so-called lie more important to Fitzgerald than the actual crime of outing a covert CIA agent?

We know now it was Richard Armitage who leaked the information to Robert Novak, by Armitage’s own admission and by Novak’s.

Armitage claims he didn’t know she was covert, but ignorance of the law is no excuse. At least that’s what I was taught in school.

The unclassified summary of Plame’s employment with the CIA at the time that syndicated columnist Robert Novak published her name on July 14, 2003 says, “Ms. Wilson was a covert CIA employee for who the CIA was taking affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States.”

[...]

The employment history indicates that while she was assigned to CPD, Plame, “engaged in temporary duty travel overseas on official business.” The report says, “she traveled at least seven times to more than ten times.” When overseas Plame traveled undercover, “sometimes in true name and sometimes in alias — but always using cover — whether official or non-official (NOC) — with no ostensible relationship to the CIA.”

From an editorial in Investors Business Daily we read this item in the next to last paragraph:

The Washington Times’ Bill Gertz has reported that U.S. officials said her identity was first disclosed to Russia by a Moscow spy in the mid-1990s. She returned to the U.S. in 1994 because the CIA suspected her cover was blown by turncoat Aldrich Ames.

Interesting. So, that leads me to this Washington Times Gertz piece dated 7/22/04, according to the archives date in the URL.

The identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame was compromised twice before her name appeared in a news column that triggered a federal illegal-disclosure investigation, U.S. officials say.

Mrs. Plame’s identity as an undercover CIA officer was first disclosed to Russia in the mid-1990s by a Moscow spy, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

In a second compromise, officials said a more recent inadvertent disclosure resulted in references to Mrs. Plame in confidential documents sent by the CIA to the U.S. Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy in Havana.

The documents were supposed to be sealed from the Cuban government, but intelligence officials said the Cubans read the classified material and learned the secrets contained in them, the officials said.

So, in the 90s it is suspected Aldrich Ames outed her to the Russians and somebody in the CIA itself later outed her to the U.S. Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy in Havana, as in Cuba, as in Castro rules there, and the Cubans got their hands on the information somehow and read it!

Gertz’s article goes on to say:

However, officials said the disclosure that Mrs. Plame’s cover was blown before the news column undermines the prosecution of the government official who might have revealed the name, officials said.

“The law says that to be covered by the act the intelligence community has to take steps to affirmatively protect someone’s cover,” one official said. “In this case, the CIA failed to do that.”

A second official, however, said the compromises before the news column were not publicized and thus should not affect the investigation of the Plame matter.

So, the justification by at least one official is since she wasn’t outed in the US where she should be safe anyway, it should be irrelevant that Russia and Cuba knew her status because they didn’t announce it. Clear?

To summarize, we now supposedly have a real crime committed by Richard Armitage, who wasn’t charged, and Scooter Libby is going to the big house for not remembering which reporter he talked to when.

In the meantime, since the 90s her identity has most likely been known to the Russians and at some point the CIA itself put her name to paper and sent it to Cuba where the Cubans got their grubby little paws on it and knew too.

So, was she outed by Armitage? She wasn’t by Libby. Was she outed by Ames? It appears so. Was she outed by the CIA to Cuba? It looks like it.

I admit to not being the most intelligent person in the blogosphere, but even I can’t buy this story. Somebody please help me.

Others blogging this story: Captains Quarters who says:

So now we have confirmation that Plame did get her cover blown. I suppose the only reason that Fitzgerald didn’t bother to indict Richard Armitage for the crime was that it would have meant explaining how the CIA tried to hide its NOC asset in plain sight.

Macsmind, who isn’t buying the story she was covert at all.

Follow the links and read what others are saying on this topic.

Many people who consider themselves Pro-Life automatically assume that their natural political alignment is with the Republicans. Many Republicans candidates apply the Pro-Life tag to themselves, and hope voters don’t look too close. Conservative Pro-Lifers also automatically assume that Democrats are the pro-abortion party. But as recent history tells us, it’s all part of The Republican Big Lie.

Christian Democrats are not pro-abortion

First of all, it would be rare indeed to find anyone who is actually pro-abortion. Virtually everyone in American society has been sensitized to the moral trauma that is abortion. As a birth control solution, it cannot be morally supported.

But Americans, by and large, also oppose allowing the government the power to decide such personal issues as how many children they should have. It was in this context of coming up with a solution to a difficult issue that the US Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973. It is safe to say that Roe v. Wade decided nothing, and instead provoked a violent outcry among many Christians that continues to this day. This is the quandary that many Christian Democrats find themselves in. Christian Democrats want to see a solution to the abortion issue.

Read

Now this is something to worry about. The Al Qaeda are a bunch of idiots compared to these people.

Russia tested new missiles Tuesday that a Kremlin official boasted could penetrate any defense system, and President Vladimir Putin warned that U.S. plans for an anti-missile shield in Europe would turn the region into a “powder keg.”

First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said Russia tested an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying multiple independent warheads, and it also successfully conducted a “preliminary” test of a tactical cruise missile that he said could fly farther than existing, similar weapons.

“As of today, Russia has new tactical and strategic complexes that are capable of overcoming any existing or future missile defense systems,” Ivanov said, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency. “So in terms of defense and security, Russians can look calmly to the country’s future.”

Not Good

Is it true? I don’t know. Does it have any importance? I don’t know that either.
It’s just an interesting story I found in the New Yorker.

The West Wing of the White House tends to have a funereal stillness, even in the best of times, which these are not. The President’s aides walk the narrow corridors with pensive expressions and vigilantly modulated voices. By contrast, Karl Rove’s office has an almost party atmosphere. Rove, the President’s chief political adviser—the “architect,” Bush has called him, of his 2004 victory over John Kerry—has been a man of constant troubles: Valerie Plame troubles, U.S. Attorney-firing troubles, and, most of all, collapse-of-the-Republican Party troubles. Yet his voice is suffused with bonhomie, his jokes are bad and frequent, his enthusiasm is communicable; he resembles an oversized leprechaun, although one with unconcealed resentments and a receding hairline.“Hey, what’s Snow doing here?” Rove said one recent afternoon. “Must be important, if he’s visiting us.” Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, stood in Rove’s outer office, bent over in conversation with one of several assistants. “Uh-oh, here’s the big gun,” Rove said as Peter Wehner, the White House director of strategic initiatives, came into the office. Wehner, an evangelical Christian, is known in Washington for a relentless stream of e-mails that praise George W. Bush’s allies (“The Remarkable Anthony Charles Lynton Blair,” “The Remarkable Joseph Lieberman”); that glean from the Internet any cheerful news from Iraq; and that provide links to articles by writers like the Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami and the untiring neoconservative Norman Podhoretz.As we talked, Rove would bounce up from his chair, twice making a show of going to the dictionary to look up words. (One was “sanguinity,” as in “I’m very sanguine” about the Republican Party’s future.) He is a bookish man who plays the part of the anti-intellectual, which fits an Administration whose culture discourages displays of esoteric knowledge and, its critics say, of useful knowledge as well.

When Rove came to Washington, after the 2000 election, he envisioned creating an enduring Republican majority—the permanent mobilization of the Party’s broad, socially conservative base. Part of his strategy was to cast as threats, in alarming terms, same-sex marriage, abortion rights, and other bogeymen of the right. It is Rove’s cleverness, combined with his joie de combat, that made him insufferable to Democrats.

Now, though, the Democrats are gloating—and happy to point out that little more than thirty per cent of the public approves of Bush’s job performance. Andrew Sullivan, a disaffected conservative, has joked on his blog that Rove seems to be getting his permanent majority—except that it’s a Democratic one. The Republican reversal has certainly come with great speed—as fortunes in Washington have tended to do since the Vietnam era. In the midterm election, Republicans lost control of Congress, and the House G.O.P. caucus is beleaguered by scandals and by accusations that its members have benefitted from crude pork-barrel politics. The tenets of neoconservatism that have animated Bush’s foreign policy—that America has a responsibility to spread the ideals of democracy, and that force can justifiably be used to aid this secular missionary work—are held in low esteem. The call to change the world which infused Bush’s second Inaugural speech has faded.

Whole story