The Anchoress has tagged me to tell you five things I love about Jesus.

1. Because He first loved me a nobody, who was a somebody to Him. Even the hairs on my head are numbered, and when He was on the Cross, I was on His mind.

2. Because He is God and there is no other. None before Him and none after Him.

3. Because in His earthly Incarnation He was also Man, and as such He experienced the things we experience. He wept at the deaths of friends, He felt sorrow and compassion for the sick and healed them as well as raising the dead. He knows how I feel under any circumstance and He cares and helps me through the bad times and rejoices with me in the good times.

4. Because He loves me enough He left all the glory of Heaven and became a man with not even a place to call His home. He slept outside or at friends’ houses, but owned nothing of His own while in His earthly Incarnation.

5. He is the Perfect Son Who obeys His Father, and because He is the Perfect Lamb of God His shed blood, burial and resurrection have made it possible for all mankind to be redeemed and to live with Him and the Father for all eternity in His home with many mansions.

“Come unto me all those who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

“For God so loved the world He gave His only begotten Son, that Whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”

A legendary coach in the world of football passed away today. Fox News Reports:

Bill Walsh, the groundbreaking football coach who won three Super Bowls and perfected the ingenious schemes that became known as the West Coast offense during a Hall of Fame career with the San Francisco 49ers, has died. He was 75.

Walsh died at his Woodside home Monday morning following a long battle with leukemia.
“This is just a tremendous loss for all of us, especially to the Bay Area because of what he meant to the 49ers,” said Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana, the player most closely linked to Walsh’s tenure with the team. “For me personally, outside of my dad he was probably the most influential person in my life. I am going to miss him.”

The sport has lost a legend. Mr. Walsh will be missed not only by those in San Francisco and at Stanford but by those of us who remember the many thrills his 49ers provided fans everywhere.

Our condolences are extended to his family and to those who knew him best through the sport he loved.

Tom Snyder who pioneered late-late night television has died of leukemia at the age of 71.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Tom Snyder, who pioneered the late-late network TV talk show with a personal yet abrasive style and his robust, trademark laugh, has died from complications associated with leukemia. He was 71.
Snyder died Sunday in San Francisco, his longtime producer and friend Mike Horowicz told The Associated Press on Monday.

“Tom was a fighter,” Horowicz said. “I know he had tried many different treatments.”

Prickly and ego-driven, Snyder conducted numerous memorable interviews as host of NBC’s “Tomorrow,” which followed Johnny Carson’s “Tonight” show from 1973 to ‘82. A signature was the constant billowing of cigarette smoke around his head.

Snyder’s style, his show’s set and the show itself marked an abrupt change at 1 a.m. from Carson’s program. Snyder might joke with the crew in the sparsely appointed studio, but he was more likely to joust with guests such as the irascible science fiction writer Harlan Ellison.

Story.

More good news from Afghanistan via The Jawa Report.

A senior Taliban leader, Qari Faiz Mohammad, was killed by Afghan National Security Forces and ISAF security operation July 23 in southern Afghanistan.

“The Taliban leadership has suffered another severe setback,” said Lt. Col. Claudia Foss, ISAF spokesperson. “Each successful operation ensures insurgent disruption that gives way for stability operations to take place.”

The Jawa Report post has links which define in detail the significance of the demise of this “leader.”

Michael E. O’Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, while Kenneth M. Pollack is the director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings. Brookings is a center-left leaning think tank.

These two men have been critical of the war as they state in their op-ed in the New York Times.

VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated — many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work.

Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.

Everywhere, Army and Marine units were focused on securing the Iraqi population, working with Iraqi security units, creating new political and economic arrangements at the local level and providing basic services — electricity, fuel, clean water and sanitation — to the people. Yet in each place, operations had been appropriately tailored to the specific needs of the community. As a result, civilian fatality rates are down roughly a third since the surge began — though they remain very high, underscoring how much more still needs to be done.

Quite a positive quote from two who thought the war was lost.

Kind of what Michael Yon and the milbloggers have been telling us.

The other day I wrote about some groups such as Moveon.org and Daily Kos organizing a boycott of Fox News Advertisers.

Today, I get the news that it goes deeper than at first thought.

Here’s a little bit of the story to show you some of the organizations in charge of this boycott:

Yesterday, I wrote about MoveOn.org, the Daily Kos and the Campaign for America’s Future joining forces to silence the conservative voices on FNC. I’ve now uncovered more information who’s all involved in this unholy alliance. First, I went to CAF’s About Us page. Here’s what it said:

Over 100 Prominent Americans, citizen activists and policy experts concerned about our country and our planet, joined together to launch and build the Campaign for America’s Future. We are challenging the big money corporate agenda by encouraging Americans to speak up, to discuss and debate a new vision of an economy and a future that works for all of us.

America’s Future insists that the question of falling wages and rising insecurity be placed at the center of our national debate. We challenge those who suggest that nothing can be done and expose the conservative agenda that has made things worse. America’s Future works to revitalize a progressive agenda, and fights to make this economy work for working people once again. We engage citizens, activists and political leaders in a renewed debate about the kind of country, and the kind of world, we want to build for the generations yet to come.

When I read the line about CAF being a group of citizen activists and policy experts, red flags galore went off so I went to their advisors page. Here’s some of the people that serve as advisors to CAF:

Ann Beaudry, PFAW; Mary Frances Berry, US Commission on Civil Rights; Julian Bond, NAACP Board Chair; Hodding Carter; Betty Friedan; Tom Hayden, ex-husband of Jane Fonda, fmr. Gore Campaign manager; Denis Hayes, Earth Day founder; Jim Hightower, Hightower Radio; Patricia Ireland, fmr. Pres. NOW; Jesse L. Jackson, Rainbow Coalition; Gerald W. McEntee, AFSCME; Howard Metzenbaum, US Senator (retired); Robert Reich, Brandeis University, Former Secretary of Labor; Mark Ritchie, Inst for Agriculture and Trade Policy; John J. Sweeney, AFL-CIO; Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO.

Does that sound like a list of “citizen activists”? In my opinion, it sounds more like a group of paid lobbyists and Democratic strategists. That’s why I did more digging. In CAF’s FAQ page, someone asked if they could contribute to their organization. The unsurprising response was “Yes!” They then linked to a secure website to contribute online. After that, they listed this address for people wanting to simply send a check via snail mail:

Campaign for America’s Future
1825 K Street, NW, Suite 400
Washington, DC 20006

Please make your check out to “Campaign for America’s Future.”

I didn’t think that citizen activists maintained offices on K Street in Washington, DC. That’s because K Street is known for housing major lobbying firms. That’s why I’ve nicknamed K Street the Lobbyists’ Lair. I’ll stand by that nickname.

Read the rest of the story on Let Freedom Ring Blog. It will open your eyes to the concerted effort to shut down conservative free speech on our nation’s television airwaves.

I try my best not to be a Bush basher but things like this make it hard. Why on Gods great earth would this report not be released? Does this administration have a conscience?

A surgeon general’s report in 2006 that called on Americans to help tackle global health problems has been kept from the public by a Bush political appointee without any background or expertise in medicine or public health, chiefly because the report did not promote the administration’s policy accomplishments, according to current and former public health officials.

The report described the link between poverty and poor health, urged the U.S. government to help combat widespread diseases as a key aim of its foreign policy, and called on corporations to help improve health conditions in the countries where they operate.

Three people directly involved in its preparation said its publication was blocked by William R. Steiger, a specialist in education and a scholar of Latin American history whose family has long ties to President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Since 2001, Steiger has run the Office of Global Health Affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services.

Richard H. Carmona, who commissioned the “Call to Action on Global Health” while serving as surgeon general from 2002 to 2006, recently cited its suppression as an example of the Bush administration’s frequent efforts during his tenure to give scientific documents a political twist. At a July 10 House committee hearing, Carmona did not cite Steiger by name or detail the report’s contents and its implications for American public health.

Carmona told lawmakers that, as he fought to release the document, he was “called in and again admonished . . . via a senior official who said, ‘You don’t get it.’ ” He said a senior official told him that “this will be a political document, or it will not be released.”

Story

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Republicans increasingly are backing a new approach in the Iraq war that could become the party’s mantra come September. It would mean narrowly limited missions for U.S. troops in Iraq but let President Bush decide when troops should leave.

So far, the idea has not attracted the attention of Democratic leaders. They are under substantial pressure by anti-war groups to consider only legislation that orders troops from Iraq.

But the GOP approach quickly is becoming the attractive alternative for Republican lawmakers who want to challenge Bush on the unpopular war without backtracking from their past assertions that it would be disastrous to set deadlines for troop withdrawals.

“This is a necessary adjustment in the national debate to reintroduce bipartisanship, to stop the ‘gotcha’ politics that are going on that seem to be driven by fringes on both sides and change the terms of the discussion,” said Rep. Phil English, R-Pa.

English is among the more than 40 Republicans in the House and Senate who are sponsoring legislation intended to shift the mission of U.S. troops. Several other GOP lawmakers, facing tight elections next year and a strong anti-war sentiment in their districts, say they are considering this approach.

Story

No matter the outcome of the talks between President Bush and the new Prime Minister of England, Gordon Brown, this statement from Englands relatively new leader is encouraging.

“And we should acknowledge the debt the world owes to the United States for its leadership in this fight against international terrorism,” he added.

Mr. Brown appears to desire a close relationship both with the President and the United States and if he is a strong leader he will have just that. He gives the impression that he understands there is no better friend than America and the bond between the two countries must be preserved.

“It is firmly in the British national interest that we have a strong relationship with the US, our single most important bilateral relationship.”

Mr Brown said the shared ideals of two centuries of history “have linked the destinies” of the two countries.

While the President enjoyed a tremendous relationship with Tony Blair, I think it is only fair to see what Prime Minister Brown brings to the table. Based on his remarks, and not those of others within his government, I believe he has laid the foundation for Britain and America to remain not two countries with one foreign policy but allies who recognize the threats the world is facing in this century.

As for the debt the world owes the United States, we have always given generously in money, manpower, technology and shed much blood for those in need. I cannot imagine living in an America where its people would do any the less.

Read More

HT: Lucianne