Has This Ever Happened To You?

Hey, guys...I would like for you fellow bloggers to tell me what you think about this:

Last night, I posted something from another blog, which I thought had a lot of good information, with the permission of the blogger. The title of that post was "Obama's Second Coming." That was the last thing I posted, however, when I signed on this evening, there was not one, but two posts, of the same thing, which was a YouTube video of Obama making his Texas Primary speech. Now, how do you suppose that happened? I deleted them, but someone saw it before I deleted it, and thanked me for it! It is really upsetting me to think that, somehow, someone was able to post something on my blog, that I didn't want posted.

I would like for you to tell me whether or not this has ever happened to you, and if so, what did you do about it?

Obama's Second Coming

My wife's been getting Rolling Stone delivered to our home.
I'm not sure why, since she's not some tattoed alternative rocker or some wild-eyed antiwar counter-culture provocateur. Actually, she's gets a lot of mags like Ladies Home Journal and Redbook, and maybe some subscription renewal incentive had a side deal for the left-wing music magazine.
No matter, I've been reading some of the articles.
It turns out Rolling Stone endorsed Barack Obama with this week's edition.
Why now? That's the first thought that comes to mind. If the mag's got any pull in the rockin' electorate, you'd think they might have laid down an endorsement, say, around the time of the New Hampshire primary. For all of their political reporting, maybe the editors really don't understand the imperatives of frontloading.
But what was really on my mind is the meat in the endorsement itself. Rolling Stone's apparently an alternative media tribune for the idealistic, if not the radical set. Their piece is a classic example of messiah-building on the left (more on that here and here). I mean, take a look at this yourself:

Throughout the primaries, and during a visit he paid to our offices, we have come to know Barack Obama, his toughness and his grace. He would not be intimidated, and he declined to back down, when Senator Clinton called him "frankly, naive" for his willingness to meet leaders of hostile nations. When one of her top campaign officials tried to smear him for his earlier drug use, he did not equivocate or backtrack. On the matter of experience and capability, he has run an impressive, nearly flawless campaign — one that whupped America's most hard-boiled political infighters. Indeed, Obama was far more prepared to run a presidential campaign — from Day One — than Senator Clinton. And at no point did he go negative with personal attacks or character assassination; as much as they might have been justified, they didn't even seem tempting to him.
Obama has emerged by displaying precisely the kind of character and judgment we need in a president: renouncing the politics of fear, speaking frankly on the most pressing issues facing the country and sticking to his principles. He recognizes that running for president is an opportunity to inspire an entire nation.

Obama was far more prepared for "Day One"?
Does that include things like feeding the multitude? Let's give Hillary Clinton some credit here for raising the issue.
Certainly, all this hard-left Obama-worship is exceptionally light on analysis. If Obama's divine, you'd think he'd a least hold his own during press conferences, as Michael Barone points out in comparison to John McCain:

McCain takes questions until the last reporter runs out of things to ask. Obama terminated a probing press conference last week after eight questions with the lame excuse that he was running late. Obama's oratory has been compared to John Kennedy's. But he doesn't have Kennedy's gift for gracefully parrying hostile questions.

Not so miraculous after all, it seems. At least Christ attended to the questions from the high priests.
But not only that. The Rolling Stone endorsement goes further, to rehash all the left-wing demonized talking-points against the last seven years. Speaking of Obama:

Obama ... [has] denounced the Republican campaign of fear. Early in the campaign, John Edwards took the lead, calling the War on Terror a campaign slogan, not a policy. Obama rejected the subtle imagery of false patriotism by not wearing a flag pin in his lapel, and he dismissed the broader notion that the Democratic Party had to find a way to buy into this entire load of fear-mongering War on Terror bullshit — to out-Republican the Republicans — and thus become, in his description of Hillary Clinton's macho posturing on foreign policy, little more than "Bush-Cheney lite."
We have a deeply divided nation, driven apart by economic policies that have deliberately created the largest income disparities in our history, with stunning tax breaks for the wealthiest and subsidies for giant industries. The income of the average citizen is stagnant, and his quality of life continues to slowly erode from inflation.
We are embittered and hobbled by the unnecessary and failed war in Iraq. We have been worn down by long years of fear- and hate-filled political strategies, assaults on constitutional freedoms, and levels of greed and cynicism, that — once seen for what they are — no people of moral values or ethics can tolerate.
A new president must heal these divides, must at long last face the hypocrisy and inequity of unprecedented government handouts to oil giants, hedge-fund barons, agriculture combines and drug companies. At the same time, the new president must transform our lethal energy economy — replacing oil and coal and the ethanol fraud with green alternatives and strict rain-forest preservation and tough international standards — before the planet becomes inhospitable for most human life....
We need to recover the spiritual and moral direction that should describe our country and ourselves. We see this in Obama, and we see the promise he represents to bring factions together, to achieve again the unity that drives great change and faces difficult, and inconvenient, truths and peril.

Whoa!
That's a lot, apocalyptic even. No wonder Obama's nomination is seen as no less than the second coming - he's our savior!

http://americanpowerblog.blogspot.com/

Thanks, Donald!

United We Stand

My Aunt Polly has been on my mind, today. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you may recall that she is my mom's sister-in-law, who was married to her youngest brother, Uncle Bo. In another post, I talked about her old neighborhood, which is now mostly a Hispanic community, and how much she misses her old home.

When I last wrote about her, she had been diagnosed with Hodgekins disease, a serious form of cancer, and was facing a series of chemo treatments, with not a very good prognosis. I am happy to tell you, that she came through those treatments quite well, and is now free of cancer. I am sure that her resiliency, and her faith, had much to do with that, which is, maybe, the reason that she was on my mind today.

Over the years, she has lost three sons, tragically--an eleven year old killed when the horse he was riding was struck by a speeding car. A twenty year old, shot with a shotgun while trying to defend someone else, and a son in his forties, to suicide. Last year, only a few days after being diagnosed with cancer, she lost a granddaughter, whose life was tragic in itself, to a drug overdose. Through that newsest grief, she was still resilient enough to bounce back. And that's why she came to mind today, as I watched, and listened to the telling of all the tragic events going on in this country, and other countries, as well.

I was thinking that the tragedies that my Aunt Polly endured, touched my life, yes, but any tragedy that touches another should touch us, in some way, and I wondered about the resiliency of the people of our country. How much longer will we be able to endure such senseless acts of cruelty and violence, which are rampant? I am grieved when I hear about how those two young coeds died, at the hands of young Black men, their lives ended almost as soon as they were begun, imagining the sorrow inflicted upon their families and friends.

I cried with the Black couple whose promising young son was shot and killed a few days ago in California. He was only two or three doors down from his home, while his mother was across the world in Iraq, serving her military duty. I wept with the young man's father, who told with tears streaming down his face, how they had impressed upon him to stay away from gangs, to work hard in school, to do his best, and to make something of himself. Yet, maybe it was because he was not in a gang that he was killed, because when he was asked if he belonged to a gang, he said nothing, and was shot.

I cried as I listened to his mother wail, as only a heartbroken mother can, at the senselessness of his death. He was doing all the things he was supposed to do, all the things that his parents were teaching him, and was killed by some thugs with no regard for human life, nor anything, other than establishing their own personal reign of terror, and dominion over "their territory."

I know that I have written much of this before, but I am genuinely concerned for us, as a nation. Here, where I live, there is a constant stream of street violence, gang activity, shootings, robberies, and just about anything else one could think of in terms of abberant, and abhorrent, behavior. Along with that, there is the constant report of some official, or employee, embezzling large sums of money from organizations which are supposed to be helping those in need, which is not only a local problem, but nationwide.

There is corruption everywhere in the country, and now, today we hear about the governor of New York being involved in a prostitution ring. And right now, as I write, Reverend Al Sharpton is talking about suing the DNC over the delegates situation, and disenfranchised voters. Our government, on all levels, is filled with scandal, greed, and corruption, exposed and hidden.

Where will it all end?

Maybe, we could just get back to taking responsiblity for ourselves, living life in the best way that we are capable of doing, with common courtesy and respect for others and their rights. Maybe, we could get back to honesty, and integrity, and the kind of pride that we once had in the knowledge that we were citizens of the best country in the world, despite its imperfections.

I know that the hue and cry now, is "Change" but I just don't think that change will come through any political system, or any charismatic politician, but change must start within each of us. Maybe, then we would stop trying to drag our country through the mud, and allowing others to make us feel ashamed to be Americans.

Change will come when all of us have equal rights in every sense of the word, and when we stop feeling a sense of entitlement just because we are of a certain ethnicity, or a particular sexual orientation. Change will come when we stop being denied our rights because we are not of those certain select groups. Change will come when the elected officials of this country all start using their positions of power, and their offices, to do what is right, and not for personal power and greed.

It doesn't matter whether we are black, white, brown, yellow, red, or any color in between, we are all human beings, with a responsibility toward our fellow man. I think that it is time that we started acting like it.

Am I proud of my country? You bet I am. The thing that I am not proud of, is the way that we have allowed our rights to be stripped away, layer by layer, until we stand naked and exposed and vulnerable. We do need change, but we have to be sure that it is for the better, and not more of the same, in a different diguise. Perhaps if we do it right this time, we can properly diagnose the cancer that is eating away, insidiously, at this country, treat it, and bounce back from it, as resiliently as my Aunt Polly has from hers.

United, we will stand, proudly.