Sarah Palin for President? How about Senate?

Who knows who our next president in 2016 will be but, more than any other person, Sarah Palin embodies the spirit needed to bring America from the brink of totalitarianism whose steady growth, for almost a century, has been gaining strength through the auspices of the Democratic Party.  

The Tea Party is working to convince Sarah to run as a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Alaska in 2014.  We needed to take the Senate with good, strong Conservatives in 2012; having fallen short then, we need the Senate in Strong Conservative hands even more-so in 2014.   Visit  TheTeaPartyLeadershipFund.com

What follows below is an interesting take on the strength of Sarah Palin's qualities as a leader in terms a series of nine photos in a slide presentation with comments on the side interpreting the qualities of style communicated by each photo shot:
Take a look at Sarah's Style:  The fashion plate

In a speech given at CPAC last month Sarah seemed to have no problem in grabbing a needed drink during her speech when she was receiving applause by sipping from a Bloomberg-banned soda in a fashion that brought more applause.  Leadership qualities certainly include a mastering of good humor:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/03/16/palin-attacks-bloomberg-soda-ban-during-cpac-speech/

Here is a good video with Hannity just 2 days before the 2012 election wherein Sarah makes the point that every State should be in play in a presidential election and not just a few chosen by media polsters − a lesson not learned by the Romney Campaign; in her 2008 run for the presidency Sarah had criticized the campaign for abandoning a state thought to be a sure loss, bringing derision upon her from elite campaign Republicans:

http://video.foxnews.com/v/1947588631001/sarah-palin-on-revenge-as-motivation-to-vote/

Sarah respects and honors all people and all voters and writes no-one off which makes her a strong candidate for the Senate from Alaska.  Will she do it?  I hope so.

Why did they become Terrorists

Having followed the tragedy of the terrorism in Boston at the Boston Marathon a few days ago, finally, starting yesterday and last evening law enforcement personnel had been finding clues to the whereabouts of two suspected Chechnya terrorists. Just last night the older of two brothers shot and killed a police officer in his car on the MIT campus; in the ensuing gun battle the older of the two was killed but the younger slipped away and the manhunt was on. He was quickly found in a small pleasure boat atop a trailer parked in the back of the boat owner’s home. The owner spotted blood from the wounded man hiding in his boat and immediately notified police.  After a short gun and bomb battle police captured him alive but seriously injured.  Everyone was elated; the people around the Boston area were able to breathe a sigh of relief.  They joyfully demonstrated their happiness about not having to fear this young man anymore.

In following the events leading up to the death of the older brother and the capture of the younger, many facts were being revealed about what drove these two young people to randomly kill as many innocent people as they could. The family of these young men had come to America when the brothers were fairly young. The boys engaged in various physical activities and became well-liked by the young people and instructors they met in their schooling. Many of the people who knew the boys and their family couldn't understand why they would do such terrible things. They saw these 2 young men as good and decent people who seem to have been leading their lives in the American way. No one suspected any kind of terrorist leanings.

However, the FBI has been probing the backgrounds of these 2 young men. In 2011 they had received information from the Russian equivalent of our FBI that the background of the older brother was sinister. The FBI however, due to restrictions on how far they could probe the background of legal immigrants to America led them to give up their attempt to look too far into the background of the older brother and he was cleared of any wrongful activity. Had they investigated further they would’ve found on the internet statements from each of the men that should have led the FBI to conclude both brothers had terrorist feelings and should have been put on a watch list.

It is interesting to note that the younger brother had written a tweet saying that he had no friends in America and he wanted out. This was actually a revealing comment. He said that he did not understand Americans and yet he seemed to be well liked by many Americans that he associated with. He is 19 and his brother was 26. Both had high school and college learning. The older brother was interested in boxing and wanted to be part of America’s team for the Olympics. They seemed to like their life in America. But the younger had said he didn’t understand Americans and wanted out!  What did he mean?

Then it came to my mind that several years ago I had read a book entitled The Looming Tower written by Lawrence Wright with the subtitle Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Early in the book Wright describes a reasonably well-to-do Egyptian writer and journalist who in 1948 had to leave Egypt and emigrate to America because his writings against the British occupation of Egypt and the autocratic rule of King Farouk had provoked his being arrested.  Wright points out that in this journalist’s mind, even though he was not necessarily a very religious man, he saw that he was leaving a culture of Eastern Islam and going to a culture of Western Christianity.

While in America for several years, this journalist found that the American culture was slowly becoming a culture devoid of moral and religious values and did not characterize a Christian Civilization.  This moved him through the years to become more interested in his Islamic faith; but more than becoming closer to his Islamic faith, he looked upon American society as so evil that it needed to be destroyed. He became radicalized and joined forces back in Egypt which wanted to destroy America, the Satan, causing all the problems in his Eastern Islamic Culture.

This I believe is what happened to the two brothers from Chechnya. They saw in American culture a substantial lack of any kind of religious faith, with its love of pleasure, money and power as its gods; it moved them towards those terroristic elements which had been fighting against Russian imperialism back in Chechnya.   The older brother went back to Russia for 6 months, probably having joined with terroristic groups; returning to America he was probably instrumental in influencing his younger brother to embrace terroristic plans for the destruction of America..

If there is any fault to be found it is not so much with the FBI or government weakness but with the American educational system which for decades in 

elementary, high school and college institutions, students have been taught by teachers and professors who do not believe in God and are actively destroying any measure of religious belief and faith in our young people.

It is not enough to simply fault the government for being too restrictive in searching for terroristic backgrounds of people who are here in America when America, in its educational fiasco, by its abandoning any faith in God, is responsible for those who have come to America with Islamic ideals to see America as an evil empire which must be destroyed.  

What if America should have a revival and restore belief in a loving God who would be our protecter if only we would restore our Trust in God, and our belief in Liberty reflecting our love for and trust in the Creator.  Would not our diversity in faith, ethnicity, immigrants bring us back to the American ideal of “from many one” − Unity; American.  Would not immigrants from an Eastern Islamic Culture then find an America not something to hate and want to destroy but to embrace?

Don't give up Hope

For the most part I try to write posts that are positive, with the intention of perhaps making my readers feel a little bit better about their lives. But there is so much wrong and so much evil in our country and in the world that it is difficult not to become discouraged. 

Thinking that our president Barack Obama might've made some encouraging comments to the people in Texas who yesterday lost their homes and everything they possess because of an explosion in a nearby fertilizer plant near Waco, Texas, I searched the Web.  

Up to this morning I found no such comments. Certainly Obama has made many comments about the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut and the present Boston massacre during the Boston Marathon. There were children killed in Texas and many more deaths overall with the injured exceeding 100 people. Maybe the Texas tragedy is just not political enough.

In searching for such remarks I came across an article written by a fellow conservative who encourages everyone thinking about these dreaded tragedies in Newtown, Boston and Texas not to lose hope. He describes the many hardships he and his wife had to go through: his wife having surgery to avoid a prospect of cancer. His losing his job. His weeping uncontrollably in the rain holding his one year old child because he had to go to the hospital where his wife was very ill and tell her the doctors said she was going to die. 

Then in a series of rapid seeming miracles, the spots on his wife's lungs were not cancerous as thought. His wife made a full recovery. He was offered a job with an increase in salary allowing his wife to stay at home with their daughter. It occurred to him that these events were simply not just luck but that the man upstairs, the Creator, was simply exercising his plan. 

He reasoned that believing in God having a plan for each of us and trusting in that plan had brought about not only these recent miracles, but as he thought back in his life, many other miracles. He then realized that having trust in the man upstairs and his plan for himself and his family was the way that God wanted him to see things with hope and not yield to despair with so many things wrong in the world.

This was what I had recently come to in reading Scripture and in particular reading the epistles of the apostle of the Gentiles, St. Paul. Paul writes of placing our trust in God and not worrying about the catastrophes happening in the world. But for a moment earlier today I had forgotten this and really, does it make any difference whether the president or anyone else says good or bad things about the chaotic mess we see in the world? To me it doesn't matter; what matters is that we trust in the Lord and His plan for each of us which will bring us through all troubles and anxieties to a joyful place in accordance with His plan.

Based on article:  Boston, West, Texas, America, don't give up hope  By Erick Erickson Published April 18, 2013 FoxNews.com

God's Mercy

I am always bemused when I hear or see a comment made about a woman who, having had an abortion, is guilty of murder. In a recent comment relating to one of my posts on the forgotten child, apparently made by a woman, the comment reads in part: a woman who has, or even allows, an abortion is guilty of murder.

We live in a perverted, promiscuous society in which a young woman, dating a man, is expected to have sex otherwise the man will just drop her as a date. Many young women find it difficult to find a man who will date her unless she has sex with him and should she become pregnant, the man disappears. Many such women do not seek an abortion but become single moms. Some young women who are still under the guidance of their parents are forced by them to have an abortion; or the boy who impregnates her forces her to have an abortion.  Is she guilty of murder? I think not. 

In my pro-life work over several decades I have met many women who have had abortions but have come about, through God's grace, to realize what they did was wrong. However, many of them bought into the concept promoted by pro-abortion advocates that early in the pregnancy there is no baby, there is only a mass of tissue, and have had an abortion based on this false concept. Are they guilty of murder? I think not. I wonder how many women (or really how few), knowing that her pregnancy involves a live human being have nonetheless, with malice, killed that child in an abortion. Perhaps in such a case we might ask if she is guilty of murder.

More to the point, if we are God loving people, what does Scripture say? The Gospels abound in instances in which Jesus, the son of God, shows His Mercy and love for women in times in which women were really considered second-class citizens.  

The woman caught in adultery; the Pharisees and others bring her to Jesus, ready to stone her, but first ask Jesus what He thinks since Moses had said that such a woman should be stoned to death. Jesus does not answer, but seemingly ignoring them, makes writing in the ground.  Apparently put to shame, the woman's accusers drift away one by one leaving Jesus alone with the woman.  Jesus asks her whether there is anyone left to condemn her and she, responding no, is told that neither He will condemn her but that she should go her way and not sin again.

The Samaritan woman at Jacob's well; Jesus asks her for a drink because he is thirsty after a long trip. The woman first responds by asking Jesus, a Jew, why he would ask a Samaritan woman for a drink, when Samaritans are hated by the Jews.  During the following conversation Jesus asks her to bring her husband to the well.  She responds she has no husband, whereupon Jesus responds that she speaks the truth because she has lived with previous men who were not her husbands either. Surprised, she responds that he is certainly a prophet and there will be a time when the Messiah comes and tells them all things. Jesus then reveals to her that he himself is the Messiah in one of only two cases in Scripture in which Jesus makes such a revelation. Through her conversion many Samaritans in her town come to believe that Jesus is indeed the Messiah.  One can only imagine the love Jesus has poured out to her and how privileged she is, a woman, and a Samaritan.

Mary Magdalene, from whom seven demons were expelled, is loved and privileged  by the risen Christ by being the first person to whom Jesus appears after His resurrection.

Jesus, in so many ways, cautions and warns us through Scripture not to judge others and condemn them to punishment because none of us know the extent to which God has shown His Mercy. While he was on earth Jesus associated with sinners and when asked by Pharisees and the teachers of the law why He did so, responded that sinners are in need of healing; and indeed His Mercy.

Nobody is Better than Anybody

NEW YORK (AP) — Joe Biden doesn't kiss up to anyone — whether a queen or a pope.

The vice president told a gathering of Irish-Americans in New York City on Thursday that as a young U.S. senator he was to meet the queen of England.

He remembers getting a call from his mother, who told him not to kiss the queen's ring.

Years later, when he was to meet Pope John Paul II, Biden says his mother told him not to kiss the pope's ring.

Biden, a Roman Catholic descended from struggling Irish immigrants, says his dad said it was "all about dignity."

Biden says his mother told him that no one is "better" than him. And while Biden should treat everyone with respect, his mother said her son should also "demand respect.'"

Is this an issue about kissing someone's ring? Now, truthfully, as a Catholic myself I always worried about having to kiss a bishop's ring not because I thought I was better than he but I thought of receiving germs from someone else who had previously kissed the bishop's ring.

To me, whether or not I like the idea of kissing a person's ring because of germs, the real purpose of kissing a bishop's or a Queen's or a Pope's ring is not a matter of, by so doing, recognizing the ring holder as a person better than the one kissing the ring; the kissing of the ring is really like many other ways in which one human being recognizes the station of a person.

What are some other ways people recognize the position or stature or status of a person rather than the person him or herself?

In the old days, prior perhaps to the two great world wars, it was common practice in Europe for a man to show respect for a woman because she was a woman by kissing her hand. To some extent this was probably done in American society as well.

When I was stationed in Germany back in the 50's it was quite common for a woman to extend her hand, not to be kissed, but to be grasped in a handshake. Back in the States at the same time an American woman would never extend her hand to be grasped in a handshake; well, almost never. I shall always remember the time I extended my hand to the wife of a person to whom I was talking in Honolulu only to receive from this woman a glare that extended from my feet up to my head and back down again. Having recently returned from Europe where a man extending his hand to a woman for a handshake of friendship was almost universally accepted, I felt as though I was measured by this woman to be less than a worthwhile person.

Holding a door for a woman, paying for a lady's lunch bill, all manner of ways to express the honor to be given a woman not because she is "better" but because God has created woman as the one whose actions are intended to make the world a better place, these customs have unfortunately been largely done away with by our "everybody's equal" society.

All the ways of showing respect for others are ways of honoring God who has given to some people authority in our society, to some leadership, to others great gifts and honor.  It is not a matter of who's "better" that we honor others through acts of humility like kissing rings, kissing hands, holding doors, saluting higher ranks, etc;  It is rather a way of acknowledging and honoring God's presence and action in our lives.