Archive for July 29th, 2007
Iraq Wins Asian Cup Soccer Championship
July 29th, 2007
Remember not too many years ago when Uday Hussein would kill members of national Iraqi teams who didn’t win? He was in charge of the Olympics but I’m sure he was in charge of other things too.
Well, today the Iraqi soccer team defeated the Saudi team to win the Asian Cup for soccer, and instead of killing people there was a sense of national pride.
Iraq erupted in joy and celebratory gunfire on Sunday when the country’s national football squad won the Asian Cup and united its bitterly divided communities in a rare moment of celebration.
Thousands of Iraqis, including members of the security forces, defied a strict government ceasefire order to welcome the team’s 1-0 victory over local rivals Saudi Arabia with an intense barrage of gunfire.Soldiers, police and civilian gunmen loosed off long volleys of automatic fire skywards and into the waters of the Tigris within seconds of the final whistle in Jakarta, beamed live to cafes and homes across the country.
The Iraqi victory against the three-time Asian Cup champions was a precious moment of shared national joy in a country beset by civil strife.
“Now it is our right to enjoy this victory that our heroic team has brought to us. They have brought us joy that we never experienced in the past, when we suffered greatly,” said Haidar Mustafa, a Baghdad student.
Around him in a downtown coffee shop, dozens of fans leapt and sang with joy after seeing skipper Younis Mahmoud’s powerful header seal a first Asian Cup victory for his mixed team of Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs and Kurds.
From the southern Shiite port city of Basra, to executed Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein’s northern hometown of Tikrit and even to Arbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region, flag-waving crowds celebrated.
What a difference the deaths of those thugs has meant, and for the first time, we are seeing national unity and not just sectarian unity.
Maybe there’s some hope for the Iraqi people after all.
Posted in 
Hating Christ
July 29th, 2007
From Friday’s Omega Letter:
I was reading the comments posted by readers of the Huffington Post in response to a column posted by Max Blumenthal about the “Christians United For Israel Tour” Washington summit meeting, hosted by San Antonio pastor John Hagee.
The column was entitled, “Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christians United For Israel Tour.”
Blumenthal’s column fairly dripped with hate for Christians in particular, but reserving some for Jews who collaborate with them.
“CUFI has added the grassroots muscle of the Christian right to the already potent Israel lobby. Hagee and his minions have forged close ties with the Bush White House and members of Congress from Sen. Joseph Lieberman to Sen. John McCain.
In its call for a unilateral military attack on Iran and the expansion of Israeli territory, CUFI has found unwavering encouragement from traditional pro-Israel groups like AIPAC and elements of the Israeli government.”
Let’s digest that before moving on, ok. The warmongering Christians are in a conspiracy with other pro-Israel groups and elements of the expansionist Israeli government to destroy Iran.
Now that we know who the players are; warmongering Christians and expansionist Israel, Blumenthal warns that the Christians are not just warmongers, they are duplicitous, as well.
“But CUFI has an ulterior agenda: its support for Israel derives from the belief of Hagee and his flock that Jesus will return to Jerusalem after the battle of Armageddon and cleanse the earth of evil. In the end, all the non-believers – Jews, Muslims, Hindus, mainline Christians, etc. – must convert or suffer the torture of eternal damnation. Over a dozen CUFI members eagerly revealed to me their excitement at the prospect of Armageddon occurring tomorrow.”
The real motive behind Christians United For Israel, according to Blumenthal, is suspect, because what Christians really want to do is convert Jews to Christianity.
There are two ways to look at that motive. The first is positive.
The Bible says that Jesus is the only way to heaven and my greatest earthly obligation is to do everything I can to keep people from going to hell. I have nothing to gain in this lifetime by seeing someone converted to Christianity. Read the rest of this entry »
“Social baggage” of hate toward interracial love.
July 29th, 2007
Some things just never go away.
BOISE, Idaho — News of racist threats dogging a college football star and his fiancée may surprise most residents of one of the nation’s whitest states.
But Idaho blacks have seen trouble coming ever since Boise State tailback Ian Johnson, who is black, got down on one knee Jan. 1 to propose to cheerleader Chrissy Popadics, who is white, on national TV after scoring the winning points at the 2007 Fiesta Bowl.
The couple will marry today. Johnson has reported receiving more than 30 threatening letters and phone calls from inside and outside Idaho.
“When Ian did that on television, every black person I know said, ‘He’s a fool. That boy just asked for trouble,’ ” said Keith Anderson, a former Boise State football player who has been married to a white woman for 14 years and has two sons.
“I thought, ‘Uh-oh, this is gonna bite him,’ ” said Mamie Oliver, a leader in Idaho’s African-American community since she came to teach social work at Boise State in 1972.
The threats have been widely publicized this week on national sports-talk radio, with some speculating the incident will add to Idaho’s reputation as a racist haven and hurt Boise State’s recruiting efforts.
But what’s happened to the couple has nothing to do with Idaho’s rank as the seventh-whitest state in the nation, Oliver said.
Instead, she said, it’s about human nature.
“There’s some people that have the attitude that people don’t have the right to be in love with who they’re in love with. It became the black young man proposing to the white girl. People have baggage, and it just caused that stuff to come out.”
Oliver now teaches at Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa and is pastor at Mountain View Community Fellowship. She said that what’s happened to Johnson and Popadics is more complex than racism alone.
“Social baggage”
“It’s social baggage. We do it with color, class, age, gender, power. All those categories give people excuses to be negative toward other human beings.”
Keep Your Eyes on Israel
July 29th, 2007
This Omega Letter report I got yesterday seems to tie in well with the headline I read this morning:
Hezbollah: We Are Ready to Strike Israel Again
First, the first four paragraphs from the AP story today:
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Hezbollah’s leader said Saturday that the militant Islamic group’s war last summer with Israel has left the U.S. vision of a “new Middle East” in shambles and claimed the guerrilla group was ready to strike Israel again at any time.
During the 34-day war in southern Lebanon, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called for a new era of democracy and peace in the region, “a new Middle East.”
But Hezbollah, backed by Syria and Iran, said the U.S. vision aimed at reinforcing Israel.
“There is no new Middle East,” Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah told a mass rally in the southern town of Bint Jbeil, one of the towns hardest hit by the war. “It’s gone with the wind.”
Keep your eyes on Israel.
Special Report: Iran’s War Plan Emerging
This past week, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad paid a state visit to Syria to meet with Bashar al Assad, president of Syria, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, and with the senior Hamas leadership headquartered in Damascus.
During their meeting, the Syrian president promised his Iranian counterpart to refrain from opening peace negotiations with Israel in exchange for massive Iranian military aid and Tehran’s support of Syrian interests in Lebanon.
This was reported Saturday by the Saudi newspaper Asharq al-Awsat, which is published in London.
Following their lengthy meeting in Damascus, President Bashar Assad said, “I am calm today, more than ever.” After their meeting, the Iranian president also met privately with Hezbollah Secretary-General Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah and Hamas political bureau director Khaled Mashaal.
According to the report, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad agreed to help Syria with nuclear research and chemical weapons and to equip its navy with surface-to-sea missiles of the type that Hezbollah used to attack the Israel Navy Hanit warship in the course of the Second Lebanon War.
It also promised to build in Syria a factory for the manufacture of medium-range missiles and to allot $1 billion to the purchase of advanced tanks and combat planes from Russia. Read the rest of this entry »
Sex Suit Could Be Problem for Bloomberg.
July 29th, 2007
OH NO!
Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaks his mind and that is a big part of his cachet in anything-goes New York. But a sexual harassment lawsuit he settled in 2000 and other racy comments over the years show how his blunt style could prove a liability if he runs for president as an independent.
Before his election as mayor in 2001, Bloomberg was the target of a sexual harassment suit by a female executive who accused him of making repeated raunchy sexual comments while he was chief executive of his financial company, Bloomberg LP.
Bloomberg denied the accusations. Both sides were barred from commenting because of confidentiality agreements. Stu Loeser, the mayor’s spokesman, said Friday he had no comment for this story.
The suit was a minor annoyance for Bloomberg during the mayoral race in 2001 and was not an issue in his 2005 re-election.
But the suit and other potential embarrassments resulting from Bloomberg’s tendency to speak his mind are largely unknown to the rest of the country and are certain to be re-examined if the billionaire media mogul undertakes a third-party, self-financed presidential campaign for 2008.
Future of Stem Cell Tests May Hang on Defining Embryo Harm.
July 29th, 2007
Will someone please explain this one to me? Do we now Consider an embryo a child? Aren’t we getting just a little carried away on this one?
With the active encouragement of the Bush administration, U.S. scientists in the past year have developed several methods for creating embryonic stem cells without having to destroy human embryos.
But some who now wish to test their alternatively derived cells have found themselves stymied by an unexpected barrier: President Bush’s stem cell policy.
The 2001 policy says that federal funds may not be used to study embryonic stem cells created after Aug. 9 of that year. It is based on the assumption that the only way to make the cells is by destroying human embryos — a truism in 2001 but not any longer.
As a result, the National Institutes of Health recently refused to consider a grant application for what would have been the first federal study to compare several of the new, less politically contentious stem cell lines.
“This is not the way to make good health policy,” said Robert Lanza, the frustrated vice president for research and scientific development at Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) in Worcester, Mass. Lanza submitted the study proposal with stem cell experts from several major research labs.
Upcoming changes in the NIH’s stem cell funding rules may eventually help resolve that problem. But agency officials and others say the policy tangle is more complicated than that. Although Lanza’s technique and other new approaches do not destroy embryos, they may run afoul of a long-standing congressional ban on studies that “harm” human embryos.
That vague language raises the perplexing question of how one would know whether an embryo had been harmed.
At the center of the debate is a new technique, pioneered by ACT, that obtains stem cells from human embryos while leaving the embryos functionally intact. A single cell, called a blastomere, is removed from an eight-cell human embryo, then coaxed to multiply into a colony of stem cells in a dish.
Fertility doctors have been performing these blastomere biopsies for years to identify embryos that harbor genetic defects. Since a single cell is representative of the entire embryo, doctors transfer to a mother-to-be’s womb only those embryos whose plucked cells pass genetic muster. The loss of a single cell — or even two — at that stage is not known to cause developmental problems in children born by this procedure, doctors say.
Fred Thompson visits Federalism
July 29th, 2007
One of the things I admire most about Fred Thompson is that he is a clear and precise speaker/writer.
This article entitled “On Federalism” is yet another example of those attributes.
The Framers drew their design for our Constitution from a basic understanding of human nature. From the wisdom of the ages and from fresh experience, they understood the better angels of our nature, and the less admirable qualities of human beings entrusted with power.
The Framers believed in free markets, rights of property and the rule of law, and they set these principles firmly in the Constitution. Above all, the Framers enshrined in our founding documents, and left to our care, the principle that rights come from our Creator and not from our government.
We developed institutions that allowed these principles to take root and flourish: a government of limited powers derived from, and assigned to, first the people, then the states, and finally the national government. A government strong enough to protect us and do its job competently, but modest and humane enough to let the people govern themselves. Centralized government is not the solution to all of our problems and – with too much power – such centralization has a way of compounding our problems. This was among the great insights of 1787, and it is just as vital in 2007.
What a powerful statement from beginning to end and well worth taking the time to read.
HT: Instapundit
Liberals Trying To Get Advertisers to Leave Fox News
July 29th, 2007
It’s time to show Moveon.org and DailyKos they are not the only players in politics.
I’ll be contacting advertisers and encouraging them to stay with Fox News.
This is censorship pure and simple. They are taking us down the road of Hugo Chavez, trying to shut down the media they don’t like.
As the guy in the movie said, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”
Who’s with me?
NEW YORK (AP) – Liberal activists are stepping up their campaign against Fox News Channel by pressuring advertisers not to patronize the network.
MoveOn.org, the Campaign for America’s Future and liberal blogs like DailyKos.com are asking thousands of supporters to monitor who is advertising on the network. Once a database is gathered, an organized phone-calling campaign will begin, said Jim Gilliam, vice president of media strategy for Brave New Films, a company that has made anti-Fox videos.The groups have successfully pressured Democratic presidential candidates not to appear at any debate sponsored by Fox, and are also trying to get Home Depot Inc. to stop advertising there.
At least 5,000 people nationwide have signed up to compile logs on who is running commercials on Fox, Gilliam said. The groups want to first concentrate on businesses running local ads, as opposed to national commercials.
“It’s a lot more effective for Sam’s Diner to get calls from 10 people in his town than going to the consumer complaint department of some pharmaceutical company,” Gilliam said.
Some of videos produced by Gilliam’s company compile statements made by Fox anchors and guests that the activists consider misleading, such as those that question global warming.
