Good News . . . Mostly

Our Troops need our support. Please consider sending a free online card which will be printed out and sent to one of them. They deserve our support.

I am cranky. Best economy in years and years but let's gang up on Prez. Bush even though almost all of us were for the war when it was "fun."

Now Google has me cranky. They almost refuse to help the Justice Department in the War on Terror but they'll sell their soul to China for a fast buck. So much for their convictions of protecting people's rights.



Good news ...not too much today!

Hope you can hear me out...

Every time I watch the news I remember why I rarely watch the news. The 2nd guessing about the Iraq war while our soldiers fight and some die for our country. Some senators and activists have called our troops terms that I will not describe here.

The same politicians who agreed for the Prez. to do whatever it took to oust Saddam are now saying we shouldn't of gone there. Pres. Bush almost never calls out his critics by name while they lamblast his nightly. They try to hurt the Prez and if our soldiers are hurt by their words with this "unjust" war and if our enemies are helped by these same words, oh well. At least they took a cheap shot at the President!

Email me if you want me to research what I'm about to say in greater detail, but from my past research, college classes, etc. I know it to be true:

1942 - WW2 - FDR and his military leaders commited many mistakes costing 1,000's of American lives. It took time to learn how to fight in the hedgerows of Normandy and the jungles in the Pacific. We got beat many of these first big battles in the land and sea by the Japanese and Germans.

What would a majority-liberal media do to the President if that happened today? Let's not forget that America were solid isolationists until Pearl Harbor and the public was more gullible to this new media age. Thank God for propaganda!!

1952 - Korean War - What would the media say today if we got involved in a civil war to fight communism half the world away? What would they say if the military leader Patton angered the Chinese by his words and actions that instead of almost helping the South Koreans win that war that over a million Chinese stormed down and caused our armed forces into the greatest retreats in US history? Yes, we counter attacked and won a "tie" but I can hear the media now...

1963 - Some won't believe me, but a Democratic president got us started in Vietnam with advisors and some combat troops. I don't think the media were too upset at him for this. After he was killed, his VP Johnson, started the rapid troop build up as part of the Truman Doctrine against Communism.

2002 - Bin Laden goes on international TV and speaks about how weak Americans are and points to us leaving Somolia, Beruit, and other hot spots before we get the job done.
_____________________________

Now we're fighting in Iraq. It's gone amazingly well. 3 elections in a year by a population forced to live in a brutal dictatorship for years and years. Yes, our Humvees should of been better protected. Yes, we should of found WMD's. (But Bush was going on info. used by ALL foreign governments. Even Arab countries knew he had WMD's, had USED WMD's in the Iran war and against the Kurds.)

But after looking at history... we're doing pretty good in lessoning our mistakes. I don't hear too much about UN's mistakes in letting Saddam slide for years and years while acting so quickly in Yugoslovia...) I think Saddam had plenty of time to hide or move his WMD's.

Lastly, all this goes to show that while the UN, Democrats, and the media are ready to keep making the errors of the past in politicing a WAR, Prez. Bush knows that a leader presses on to do what is right to get our troops home as quick as possible, no matter the costs to his presidency.

Arg!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I've been away for awhile. (Actually, I've been on the computer busy
doing other things, so I guess I haven't been "away," but I complicate
matters by saying this.) Anyway, this blog might make a comeback
soon so stay tuned!

Much has happened lately in the world and let's remember the
"good news" like yet another successful election in Iraq, troops
will now slowly be cut back there, our economy is growing and all
these interest rate increases are trying to hold off inflation, Prez.
Bush is doing a good job those he won't get credit for any of the
above but get's blamed for all the bad, etc.

But the best Good News of all is that Jesus loves all of us so much
that he was willing to be seperated from the Father, God, for ALL
of our sins. Consider some of my links for more information or
email me at the addy above.

Merry Christmas!

These are perfect verses but to our small heads and wounded hearts, sometimes it's hard to grasp. This version by an unknown author helped me to know even more how awesome HE is! I changed it up some so in my mind it's even better now, hehe.


John 3:16

God (the greatest and only Love)
so loved (the greatest Degree)
the world (the greatest Number)
that he gave (the greatest Act)
His only begotten Son (the greatest Gift)
that whosoever (the greatest Invitation)
believeth (the greatest Simplicity)
in Him (the greatest and Only Sinless Person)
should not perish (the greatest Deliverance from Sin),
but (the greatest Difference)
have (the greatest Certainty)
everlasting life (the greatest Possesion).

I found some things not listed here in support of Prez. Bush but here's some things he's done or doing so far from 2001-2004 I don't support all of this but let's give the man some credit during these though times and fighting the Party of "NO":

Abortion & Traditional Values

1. Banned Partial Birth Abortion — by far the most significant roll-back of abortion on demand since Roe v. Wade.
2. Reversed Clinton's move to strike Reagan's anti-abortion Mexico Policy.
3. By Executive Order (EO), reversed Clinton's policy of not requiring parental consent for abortions under the Medical Privacy Act.
4. By EO, prohibited federal funds for international family planning groups that provide abortions and related services.
5. Upheld the ban on abortions at military hospitals.
6. Made $33 million available for abstinence education programs in 2004.
7. Supports the Defense of Marriage Act — and a Constitutional amendment saying marriage is between one man and one woman.
8. Requires states to conduct criminal background checks on prospective foster and adoptive parents.
9. Requires districts to let students transfer out of dangerous schools.
10. Requires schools to have a zero-tolerance policy for classroom disruption (reintroducing discipline into classrooms).
11. Signed the Teacher Protection Act, which protects teachers from lawsuits related to student discipline.
12. Expanded the role of faith-based and community organizations in after-school programs.


Budget, Taxes & Economy

1. Signed two income tax cuts, one of which was the largest dollar-value tax cut in world history.
2. Supports permanent elimination of the death tax.
3. Turned around an inherited economy that was in recession, and deeply shocked as a result of the 9/11 attacks.
4. Is seeking legislation to amend the Constitution to give the president line-item veto authority.
5. In process of permanently eliminating IRS marriage penalty.
6. Increased small business incentives to expand and to hire new people.
7. Initiated discussion on privatizing Social Security and individual investment accounts.
8. Killed Clinton's "ergonomic" rules that OSHA was about to implement; rules would have shut down every home business in America.
9. Passed tough new laws to hold corporate criminals to account as a result of corporate scandals.
10. Reduced taxes on dividends and capital gains.
11. Signed trade promotion authority.
12. Reduced and is working to ultimately eliminate the estate tax for family farms and ranches.
13. Fight Europe's ban on importing biotech crops from the United States.
14. Exempt food from unilateral trade sanctions and embargoes.
15. Provided $20 million to states to help people with disabilities work from home.
16. Created a fund to encourage technologies that help the disabled.
17. Increased the annual contribution limit on Education IRA's from $500 to $2,000 per child.
18. Make permanent the $5,000 adoption tax credit and provide $1 billion over five years to increase the credit to $10,000.
19. Grant a complete tax exemption for prepaid or college tuition savings plans.
20. Reduced H1B visas from a high of 195,000 per year to 66,000 per year.


Character & Conduct as President

1. Changed the tone in the White House, restoring HONOR and DIGNITY to the presidency.
2. Has reintroduced the mention of God and faith into public discourse.
3. Handled himself with enormous courage, dignity, grace, determination, and leadership in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 hijackings and anthrax attacks.


Education & Employment Training

1. Signed the No Child Left Behind Act, delivering the most dramatic education reforms in a generation (challenging the soft bigotry of low expectations). The very liberal California Teachers union is currently running radio ads against the accountability provisions of this Act.
2. Announced "Jobs for the 21st Century," a comprehensive plan to better prepare workers for jobs in the new millennium by strengthening post-secondary education and job training, and by improving high school education.
3. Is working to provide vouchers to low-income students in persistently failing schools to help with costs of attending private schools. (Blocked in the Senate.)
4. Requires annual reading and math tests in grades three through eight.
5. Requires states to participate in the National Assessment of Education Progress, or an equivalent program, to establish a national benchmark for academic performance.
6. Requires school-by-school accountability report cards.
7. Established a $2.4 billion fund to help states implement teacher accountability systems.
8. Increased funding for the Troops-to-Teachers program, which recruits former military personnel to become teachers.

Environment & Energy

1. Killed the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty. (Not proven and doesn't take into account countries like Mexico and other major offenders.)
2. Submitted a comprehensive Energy Plan (awaits Congressional action). The plan works to develop cleaner technology, produce more natural gas here at home, make America less dependent on foreign sources of energy, improve national grid, etc.
3. Established a $10 million grant program to promote private conservation initiatives.
4. Significantly eased field-testing controls of genetically engineered crops.
5. Changed parts of the Forestry Management Act to allow necessary cleanup of the national forests in order to reduce fire danger.
6. Part of national forests cleanup: Restricted judicial challenges (based on the Endangered Species Act and other challenges), and removed the need for an Environmental Impact Statement before removing fuels/logging to reduce fire danger.
7. Killed Clinton's CO2 rules that were choking off all of the electricity surplus to California.
8. Provided matching grants for state programs that help private landowners protect rare species.


Defense & Foreign Policy

1. Successfully executed two wars in the aftermath of 9/11/01: Afghanistan and Iraq. 50 million people who had lived under tyrannical regimes now live in freedom.
2. Saddam Hussein is now in prison. His two murderous sons are dead. All but a handful of the regime's senior members were killed or captured.
3. Leader by leader and member by member, al Maida is being hunted down in dozens of countries around the world. Of the senior al Qaeda leaders, operational managers, and key facilitators the U.S. Government has been tracking, nearly two-thirds have been taken into custody or killed. The detentions or deaths of senior al Qaeda leaders, including Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, the mastermind of 9/11, and Muhammad Atef, Osama bin Laden's second-in-command until his death in late 2001, have been important in the War on Terror.
4. Disarmed Libya of its chemical, nuclear and biological WMD's without bribes or bloodshed.
5. Continues to execute the War On Terror, getting worldwide cooperation to track funds/terrorists. Has cut off much of the terrorists' funding, and captured or killed many key leaders of the al Qaeda network.
6. Initiated a comprehensive review of our military, which was completed just prior to 9/11/01, and which accurately reported that ASYMMETRICAL WARFARE capabilities were critical in the 21st Century.
7. Killed the old US/Soviet Union ABM Treaty that was preventing the U.S. from deploying our ABM defenses.
8. Has been one of the strongest, if not THE strongest friend Israel has ever hand in the U.S. presidency.
9. Part of the coalition for an Israeli/Palestinian "Roadmap to Peace," along with Great Britain, Russia and the EU.
10. Pushed through THREE raises for our military. Increased military pay by more than $1 billion a year.
11. Signed the LARGEST nuclear arms reduction in world history with Russia.
12. Started withdrawing our troops from Bosnia, and has announced withdrawal of our troops from Germany and the Korean DMZ.
13. Prohibited putting U.S. troops under U.N. command.
14. Paid back UN dues only in return for reforms and reduction of U.S. share of the costs.
15. Earmarked at least 20 percent of the Defense procurement budget for next-generation weaponry.
16. Increased defense research and development spending by at least $20 billion from fiscal 2002 to 2006.
17. Ordered a comprehensive review of military weapons and strategy.
18. Ordered a review of overseas deployments.
19. Ordered renovation of military housing. The military has already upgraded about 10 percent of its inventory and expects to modernize 76,000 additional homes this year.
20. Is working to tighten restrictions on military-technology exports.
21. Brought back our EP-3 intel plane and crew from China without any bribes or bloodshed.


Globalization & Internationalism

1. Challenged the United Nations to live up to their responsibilities and not become another League of Nations (in other words, showed the UN to be completely irrelevant).
2. Killed U.S. involvement in the International Criminal Court.
3. Told the United Nations we weren't interested in their plans for gun control (i.e., the International Ban on Small Arms Trafficking Treaty).*
4. The only President since the founding of the UN to essentially tell that organization it is irrelevant. He said: "The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations, and a threat to peace. Iraq has answered a decade of UN demands with a decade of defiance. All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?" We all know the outcome and the answer.
5. Told the Congress and the world, "America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country."


Government Reform

1. Improved government efficiency by putting hundreds of thousands of jobs put up for bid. This weakens public-sector unions and cuts undeserved pay raises.
2. Initiated review of all federal agencies with the goal of eliminating federal jobs (completed September 2003) in an effort to reduce the size of the federal government while increasing private sector jobs.
3. Led the most extensive reorganization the Federal bureaucracy in over 50 years: After 9/11, condensed 20+ overlapping agencies and their intelligence sectors into one agency, the Department of Homeland Security.*
4. Ordered each agency to draft a five-year plan to restructure itself, with fewer managers.
5. Converted federal service contracts to performance-based contracts wherever possible so that the contractor has measurable performance goals.


Health

1. Strengthen the National Health Service Corps to put more physicians in the neediest areas, and make its scholarship funds tax-free.
2. Double the research budget of the National Institutes of Health.
3. Signed Medicare Reform, which includes:

A 10-year privatization option.


Prescription drug benefits: Prior to this reform, Medicare paid for extended hospital stays for ulcer surgery, for example, at a cost of about $28,000 per patient. Yet Medicare would not pay for the drugs that eliminate the cause of most ulcers, drugs that cost about $500 a year. Now, drug coverage under Medicare will allow seniors to replace more expensive surgeries and hospitalizations with less expensive prescription medicine.

Homeland Security, Border Enforcement & Immigration

1. *See Government Reform above. Under President Bush's leadership, America has made an unprecedented commitment to homeland security.
2. Has CONSTRUCTION in process on the first 10 ABM silos in Alaska so that America will have a defense against North Korean nukes. Has ordered national and theater ballistic missile defenses to be deployed by 2004.
3. Announced a 9.7% increase in government-wide homeland security funding in his FY 2005 budget, nearly tripling the FY 2001 levels (excluding the Department of Defense and Project BioShield).
4. Before DHS was created, there were inspectors from three different agencies of the Federal Government and Border Patrol officers protecting our borders. Through DHS, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) now consolidates all border activities into a single agency to create "one face at the border." This not only better secures the borders of the United States, but it also eliminates many of the inefficiencies that occurred under the old system. With over 18,000 CBP inspectors and 11,000 Border Patrol agents, CBP has 29,000 uniformed officers on our borders.
5. The Border Patrol is continuing installation of monitoring devices along the borders to detect illegal activity.
6. Launched Operation Tarmac to investigate businesses and workers in the secure areas of domestic airports and ensure immigration law compliance. Since 9/11, DHS has audited 3,640 businesses, examined 259,037 employee records, arrested 1,030 unauthorized workers, and participated in the criminal indictment of 774 individuals.
7. Since September 11, 2001, the Coast Guard has conducted more than 124,000 port security patrols, 13,000 air patrols, boarded more than 92,000 vessels, interdicted over 14,000 individuals attempting to enter the United States illegally, and created and maintained more than 90 Maritime Security Zones.
8. Announced the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), an internet-based system that is improving America's ability to track and monitor foreign students and exchange visitors. Over 870,000 students are registered in SEVIS. Of 285 completed field investigations, 71 aliens were arrested.
9. This week, the US-VISIT program began to digitally collect biometric identifiers to record the entry and exit of aliens who travel into the U.S on a visa. Together with the standard information, this new program will confirm compliance with visa and immigration policies.
10. Eliminated INS bureaucratic redundancies and lack of accountability.
11. Split the Immigration and Naturalization Service into two agencies: one to protect the border and interior, the other to deal with naturalization.
12. Signed the workplace verification bill to prevent hiring of illegal aliens.
13. Established a six-month deadline for processing immigration applications.
14. Information regarding nearly 100% of all containerized cargo is carefully screened by DHS before it arrives in the United States. Higher risk shipments are physically inspected for terrorist weapons and contraband prior to being released from the port of entry. Advanced technologies are being deployed to identify warning signs of chemical, biological, or radiological attacks. Since September 11, 2001, hundreds of thousands of first responders across America have been trained to recognize and respond to the effects of a WMD attack.


Judiciary & Tort Reform

1. Is urging federal liability reform to eliminate frivolous lawsuits.
2. Killed the liberal ABA's unconstitutional role in vetting federal judges. The Senate is supposed to advise and consent, not the ABA.
3. Is nominating strong, conservative judges to the judiciary.
4. Supports class action reform bill which limits lawyer fees so that more settlement money goes to victims.


Politics

1. His leadership resulted in Republican gains in the House and Senate, solidifying Republican control of both houses of Congress and the presidency.
2. Signed an EO enforcing the Supreme Court's Beck decision regarding union dues being used for political campaigns against individual's wishes.


Second Amendment

1. Ordered Attorney General Ashcroft to formally notify the Supreme Court that the OFFICIAL U.S. government position on the 2nd Amendment is that it supports INDIVIDUAL rights to own firearms, and is NOT a Leftist-imagined "collective" right.
2. Signed TWO bills into law that arm our pilots with handguns in the cockpit.
3. Currently pushing for full immunity from lawsuits for our national gun manufacturers.
4. *See Globalization & Internationalism.


Traditional Values, Compassion & Volunteerism

1. Endorses and promotes "The Responsibility Era." President Bush often speaks of the necessity of personal responsibility and civic volunteerism. He said, "In a compassionate society, people respect one another and take responsibility for the decisions they make in life. My hope is to change the culture from one that has said, if it feels good, do it; if you've got a problem, blame somebody else — to one in which every single American understands that he or she is responsible for the decisions that you make; you're responsible for loving your children with all your heart and all your soul; you're responsible for being involved with the quality of the education of your children; you're responsible for making sure the community in which you live is safe; you're responsible for loving your neighbor, just like you would like to be loved yourself."