Liberal Grace

"At its root, the very idea of Guantánamo Bay runs headfirst into what it means to be an American."

The San Diego-Tijuana border fence was initially estimated to cost about $1 million/mile, but has thus far cost $42 million, and it's not done yet. The last 3.5 miles to be completed are expected cost an additional $35 million due to the rough terrain that the fence cuts through. Thus the average cost of the San Diego-Tijuana fence for its total 14 mile length is about $5.3 million/mile.

ATLANTA - Despite promises that rising medical malpractice insurance rates would be suppressed under new state laws, many of Georgia's insurers have increased their premiums since the sweeping reforms took effect last year, according to an Associated Press analysis of state insurance records.

ATLANTA Many of Georgia's medical malpractice insurers have hiked their premiums since sweeping reforms took effect last year -- despite claims that the legislation would reduce rates for doctors.
According to an Associated Press analysis of state insurance records, six of the state's top insurers of doctors and dentists have increased their liability rates. In some cases, the rates have gone up by a third.

Nearly $650 million to increase scrutiny of containers shipping into Seattle and every other U.S. port was stripped out of a national security funding package moving through Congress this week in a move critics say makes the country more vulnerable to terrorist attacks...

"We are not going to have the money we need for screening machines, customs inspectors, Coast Guard inspectors, radiation monitors, gates, fences and more," [Patty] Murray, [D-Wash] said. "The administration keeps talking a good game, but words do not provide security."

Just after the lightning takeover of Baghdad by U.S. forces three years ago, an unusual two-page document spewed out of a fax machine at the Near East bureau of the State Department. It was a proposal from Iran for a broad dialogue with the United States, and the fax suggested everything was on the table -- including full cooperation on nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant groups...

But top Bush administration officials, convinced the Iranian government was on the verge of collapse, belittled the initiative.

Riyadh: With the beginning of the summer holidays, a large number of Arabs, especially from the Gulf states, are travelling to tourist destinations in various parts of the world, especially in the Far East, looking to enjoy themselves and relax.

Most of them want to enjoy their holidays in picturesque places, visiting historical monuments and taking in the culture.

Some of them, however, will want to take advantage of the opportunity to try out temporary marriages...

Organised gangs have also grown up who prey on Arab tourists and try to lure them with promises of low-cost marriages and then cheating them....

They were lured by the false promises of the gang members of "marriages to beautiful young women under 18 at cheap rates."

In most cases, their brides abandoned them and ran away within few days of the marriage.

The report described special operations troops, at a temporary holding facility in April 2004, keeping detainees in a room on a 3- or 4-foot (0.9-1.2 meter) chain, with a diet chiefly of bread and water, for up to 17 days.

The report cited a case in which detainees were kept at a special operations team's temporary holding facility in small cells -- measuring 20 inches by 4 feet by four feet -- for up to seven days, with at least one detainee kept naked

A blueprint for trying to start a war between the United States and Iran was among a "huge treasure" of documents found in the hideout of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Iraqi officials said Thursday....

"We mean specifically attempting to escalate the tension between America and Iran, and American and the Shiite in Iraq," [the documents were quoted as saying]

Documents: Al-Qaida Sought U.S.-Iran War

We can't accept that they have committed suicide," a purported spokesperson for the Islamist Taliban movement in Afghanistan, Mohammad Hanif, said.

"No Muslim, no mujahid (holy warrior), can commit suicide. It's banned under Islamic Sharia law," said Hanif, who is often in contact with the media from a secret location. Taliban accuses US jailors of 'suicides'

Military officials said the suicides were co-ordinated and Harris described them as an act of war. "They have no regard for human life," he said. "Neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetric warfare against us."

Liberals love to boast that they are not "religious," which is what one would expect to hear from the state-sanctioned religion. Of course liberalism is a religion. It has its own cosmology, its own miracles, its own beliefs in the supernatural, its own churches, ...

Liberals hate science and react badly to it. They will literally run from the room, lightheaded and nauseated, when told of data that might suggest that the sexes have different abilities in math and science.

Environmentalists want mass infanticide, zero population growth, reduced standards of living, and vegetarianism. The core of environmentalism is that they hate mankind.

Liberals want us to live like Swedes, with their genial, mediocre lives, ratcheting back our expectations, practicing fuel austerity, and sitting by the fire in a cardigan sweater like Jimmy Carter.

They believe in the coarse physical appropriation of women by men--hookups, trophy wives, strip clubs. Through movies, magazines, and TV, liberals promote a cult of idealized beauty that is so extreme as to be unimaginable.

Sex must be dissociated from the idea of raising children, liberated from the transmission of humanity. It’s a natural function that should carry no more moral consequence than drinking a glass of water,

Instead of seeking wisdom, liberals desire to be seen as clever by being counterintuitive, crazy, and outré.

They have an irreducible fascination with barbarism and will defend anything hateful... If Hitler hadn’t turned against their beloved Stalin, liberals would have stuck by him, too.

But liberals have the entire taxpayer-funded "education" apparatus to support them. Public schools are what columnist Joe Sobran calls "liberalism’s reproductive system."

Public schools are forbidden from mentioning religion not because of the Constitution, but because public schools are the Left’s madrassas.

Liberals used to tell us they were teaching fisting to fourth-graders because "kids are going to have sex anyway!" (Yes, "fisting" is exactly what it sounds like; have a nice day!) Now they’ve dispensed with that and openly concede that they believe virtue is just one of many equally valid points of view that must be counterbalanced with the argument for promiscuity, group sex, fisting, and other lifestyle choices.

Al-Zarqawi died inside the house, said U.S. officials, along with at least five other people, including Rahman, a woman and a child of unspecified age.Source

Many have offered to pray for Nick and my family. I appreciate their thoughts, but I ask them to include in their prayers a prayer for peace. And I ask them to do more than pray. I ask them to demand peace now.

"You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.
....
"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. ^{Matt 5}

The question is based on the incorrect premise that there can ever be one simple way for people uninformed about another to understand their faith and history.

The very fact that people like Osama bin Laden are estimated to have no more than a few thousand followers amidst a global Muslim population of 1.4 billion is sufficient to confirm that groups like Al-Qaeda are far removed from the mainstream of Islam. The advantage of extremists is that their acts of violence are front-page news while the day-to-day religious practices of hundreds of millions --believing in one God, praying 5 times a day, giving part of your income to charity, fasting from sunrise to sunset during Ramadan and once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to the Holy city of Mecca -- are not.

In some ways, extremist groups like Al-Qaeda are to Islam what Branch Dravidians were to the faithful in America. The only difference is that Muslim extremists have a political message that has significance in international relations and their actions are global and, therefore, of concern to the international community.

Islam, like all other major religions, has considerable variation among its followers. Indeed, the understanding of faith of 1.4 billion people simply cannot be limited to one interpretation.

The United States has many Christian denominations, some of whom consider others as mere cults. Sectarian warfare among Christians in Europe led to many wars and, for some, still did not settle the issue of who are the best Christians truly following the teachings of Christ. As a Muslim growing up in Pakistan, how was I to know "who are the real Christians, honoring the true teachings of Christianity?" I simply recognized the diversity and pluralism of the Christian community and understood the distinction between the teachings of a religion and the actions of its various followers.

It is unfortunate that extremists in the Muslim world perpetuate violence in the name of Islam. Muslims need to confront them, isolate them and hopefully eliminate them. Terrorism poses a threat to American, and indeed global, security and moderate Muslims are America's allies in combating it. Until moderate Muslims prevail within the Muslim world, it is important that Americans do not identify all of the world's 1.4 billion Muslims with the actions of extremists.

While an estimated 100,000 Islamist militants are said to have received instruction in al-Qaeda camps since its inception, the group is believed to retain only a small number of militants under direct orders. Estimates seldom peg its manpower higher than 20,000 world wide.
Wikipedia

A man shouting that God would keep him safe was mauled to death by a lion in a Kiev, Ukraine, zoo after he crept into the animal's enclosure, a zoo official said Monday.


""The man shouted,
'God will save me, if he exists,' "


"The man shouted, 'God will save me, if he exists,' lowered himself by a rope into the enclosure, took his shoes off and went up to the lions," the official said. "A lioness went straight for him, knocked him down and severed his carotid artery."

The attack happened Sunday when the zoo had many visitors.

The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Conventions that explicitly bans "humiliating and degrading treatment," according to knowledgeable military officials, a step that would mark a further shift away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.

For decades, it had been the official policy of the U.S. military to follow the minimum standards for treating all detainees as laid out in the Geneva Conventions. But in 2002 President Bush suspended portions of the Geneva Conventions for captured al-Qaida and Taliban fighters. Bush's order superseded military policy at the time, touching off a wide debate over U.S. obligations under the Geneva accord, a debate that intensified after reports of detainee abuses at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

Retired Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who led the 1st Infantry Division in northern Iraq in 2004-2005, on Sunday also called for "a secretary of defense whose instinct and judgment we all trust."

Batiste told CNN's "Late Edition" he sees "a direct link between Haditha, the national embarrassment of Abu Ghraib, going on four years now of uncontrollable chaos in Iraq, with the bad judgment, poor decisions of our secretary of defense back in late 2003 and 2004."

"We went in under-resourced, overcommitted. And the strain on the force is unbelievable," Batiste said. CNN article

But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery. ^{Matthew 5:32}

This is what worries me. We're fighting a war about America's ideals and democracy's ideas and something like this happens, they try to cover it up," Pennsylvania Representative John Murtha told CNN television.