The Land of Ozz

I had my eye on Fred Thompson at first, but my wife and I ended up giving our votes to Huckabee in the SC primary due to what appeared to be a lack of motivation on Thompson’s part. Duncan Hunter was the first choice for me based solely on my answers to an online survey. If supporters of Thompson and Hunter were following them for their core conservative values, then those supporters should easily shun the remaining republicats and follow Huckabee now that he is the only real conservative in the race. Here are my two cents on each of the remaining GOP candidates:

Huckabee - The only true conservative left. Mike Huckabee is most likely of the remaining candidates to stand up for core family values and nominate conservative judges who will uphold the constitution. Nominating judges is one of the most important and longest lasting reason to choose a person for president in my opinion. The only real negative things he has going against him are the cheesy campaign ads with Chuck Norris and the notion that Mexicans don’t know how to climb fences.

And now for the Republicrats:

McCain - He is one of the most likely REP senators to side with Ted Kennedy on anything and that is more than a little scary. What he has going for him is war hero status and name recognition due to past presidential race experience. I could stomach voting for him in the general election if he could get on the right side of gun control and tax cuts. I actually like him better than any of the rest when it comes to immigration even though I think that immigration should not even be an issue in the race.

Romney - Not far enough removed from pro choice stance prior to entering this race. Seems a little convenient of a switch if you ask me. How is it anyway that his religious convictions will cause him to abstain from alcohol and smoking but leave him to support abortion? (source) And another thing, how exactly did he single handedly turn around dozens (the numbers were stated as high as 100s) of companies in one lifetime? He didn’t. He was CEO of a venture capital / consulting firm that did the work. Never mind that this is a race for president and not CFO of the USA.

Giuliani - Gun control, LIFE of unborn children, marriage protection. Need I say more?

Pon Raul - Who? Anti-war stance sounds like it came right out of the last DEM debate.

Below are the comments I left over at BigDaddyGib on this subject. I felt it was worth blogging about after finding other bloggers with similar concerns.

“I got an email on this at work last week. It is a great campaign, BUT it has raised some concern in the deaf and speech impaired community.

We use ASL (American Sign Language) in our home. Our three year old son Caden hears fine, but has serious problems with speech that are linked to a genetic defect. Due to my exposure to ASL over the past three years, I was puzzled when I saw the way “Thank You from the bottom of my heart” was signed in this campaign. Come to find out, the creator of the campaign did not do his homework. Due to some questions of those in the ASL community, the creator of the campaign has placed a message on “The Sign” link within his web site.

Don’t get me wrong. I think this campaign is great. I just wish the guy had done his homework BEFORE getting so well publicized.”

It appears that my gut feeling about this gesture seeming odd was right on the money. Some members of the deaf and speech impaired community have been all over Scott Truitt “The Gratitude Campaign” site owner like white on rice. There were some strong criticisms misleading verbiage on his web site that could make people believe that this gesture was linked to ASL (American Sign language). One of the more polite critics of how this gesture was presented is from Raychelle over at Rays of Raychelle. Raychelle has posted some detailed email exchanges with Scott Truitt.

Scott admitted in his responses to Raychelle that not everyone had been as nice on this subject:

“That is very helpful, Raychelle. I have been getting a lot of e-mails on this, and they are negative. I appreciate you telling me about the blog – I’m hoping that I can log on and clarify this a bit. The last thing we want to do is be disrespectful of the Deaf community – and I absolutely understand your concerns.” Source

Raychelle is not the only blogger following this story with concern over the impact it may have on the signing community. You can read more from lolypup, Kokonut Pundit.

The change made to his web site as a result of the concerns go like this:

“Please note that there has been some debate as to whether this sign is a recognized sign from American Sign Language. With the utmost respect to those who know and use ASL, we are currently consulting several authorities on ASL to come to a resolution on that issue. We will update this page with our findings. In the mean time we would suggest that you use this sign only to thank those who serve, and do not assume that who use ASL will recognize this sign.”

The campaign is certainly getting some press from the big fish bloggers and many others. Michelle Malkin, Black Five, WizBang, and Ace of Spades.

Deborah Feldman reported back in September from over at King5.com that Truitt “got the Seattle Seahawks to play it [The Gratitude Campaign video] on their jumbotron before the Seahawks-Bengals game. His hope is for the gesture to become so common, no one even remembers it took a “campaign” to get it started. Do you think it’ll catch on?”

Well Deborah, it looks like it did catch on. Now there are a few big questions:

Will this campaign prove to be damaging to the ASL community?

and

How do you tell difference between a troop returning from war and one that just left high school 12 weeks ago and has just graduated basic training?

and most importantly

Who is going to train the returning troops on what this gesture actually means?

Given the bad press on the war effort by main stream media and some bleeding heart liberal congress members, the troops could easily mistake this gesture as getting flipped off or something equivalent if it does not come with a smile or some other form of positive gesture.

Why don’t people just go up and say “thank you” with the God given communication skills they normally use everyday? It is the least we can do for a person who voluntarily signed their name to a contract with the US government to die for our freedom if necessary.

It was really more like Sticky Fingers had Fred Thompson. Presidential candidate Fred Thompson made his rounds in the low country of South Carolina today with stops at a gun show and then a brief visit with supporters at Sticky Fingers in Summerville. I attended the rally at Sticky Fingers and got to hear Senator Thompson speak in person for the first time.

There were no ground breaking surprises in what Senator Thompson had to say today in Summerville, SC, but that is exactly the way he plans to keep things. Senator Thompson is grounded in strong conservative values unlike many of his republican opponents who could have easily switched parties and run on a democratic ticket due to their liberal views. Senator Thompson spoke of his strong support for the idea of appointing federal judges that will uphold the Constitution of the United States above their personal beliefs and prejudices. He ranked the presidential duties of appointing judges right up next to national security in terms of importance.

While appointing judges and national security rank high on Senator Thompson’s list of important presidential duties, it was the immigration issue that seemed to get the most attention today. This grates on my nerves a little since the immigration issues in this country have only been a big concern since September 11, 2001. A large portion of the general population of this country seems to have been put under some sort of hypnosis that makes them think that unsecured borders and illegal immigrants are closely tied to the events of 9/11. I will concede that immigration and border security are valid issues that a president should be concerned about, but in my opinion, these should not be the main issues that determine how people vote in 2008.  The root of the immigration issues did not crop up since 9/11 and will not be solved by the president alone. Unfortunately these issues seemed to be much more of a crowd pleaser than any other issues on the stump today.

I would like to have asked the Senator a few questions, but time and opportunity was not available for more than a few questions. I would like to have heard some specifics on the following:

• Given his experience in Hollywood and in Washington, elaborate on his publicly stated views on how he as president could help strengthen family values.
• What is the first thing he would do as president to help put money back into the hands of the American people the way SC did with the recent sales tax changes that netted my family of five almost enough tax savings to buy a month’s worth of groceries per year.

I have yet to see the heat get turned up on Senator Thompson’s lack of specifics regarding his Christian faith. Many of the front runners claim to be Christians and that may factor into the results here in the deep south when the primary day rolls around. Some big name players in the Christian community have questioned Thompson’s Christianity. I would certainly prefer that our president be a committed Christian. At the same time, I know plenty of self proclaiming Christians who are not qualified to be president of the United States of America. It is entirely possible that many of the presidential candidates are not true believers when they get out from in front of the camera. Regardless of how outspoken Senator Thompson is or not regard his faith, the fruits of his public service support his claims to uphold values that all of my Christian friends hold dear.

Senator Thompson has as good chance of winning SC in the up coming South Carolina Republican primary according to the most recent Rassmussen Poll. I hope my friends will follow my lead and vote for Senator Fred Thompson when the polls open in 2008.

It seems that there is a new tax law in South Carolina. The picture on the right shows a portion of the receipt my wife brought home from Wal-Mart this weekend. I was so shocked by the tax amount, or rather lack of tax, that I called the Wal-Mart store to ask if their registers were malfunctioning. The lady from the customer service center at the Goose Creek Wal-Mart enlightened me on a new tax law that removes the sales tax from our grocery bill.

This new tax code supposedly went into effect on November 1, 2007. Did it get buried on page 23 of section Q of the local paper? While I do not watch much TV, I would have expected to hear about this on the radio or maybe at work among the idle chatter. Is it possible that this tax cut came in so low under the local radar that no one even knows about it?

For a family that spends about $600 per month on groceries, this will help us to the tune of approximately $40 per month*. That is sweet. That is another date with my sweetie each month. If we share a “Tour of Italy” at Olive Garden and only drink water, we might even be able to squeeze out the sitter’s wages for a couple of hours. This tax savings will be put right back into the economy as far I our house is concerned. Thank you SC State Government!

*Note: Not all of our grocery budget is spent on unprepared food so the tax cut will only affect approximately 95% of our grocery budget. This sale tax change only applies to unprepared grocery items “that are eligible for purchase with US Department of Agriculture food coupons.” Source

Today marks three years of blogging for me.  I began blogging on Caden’s Page on the day of Caden’s birth.  I did not know I was blogging at the time, but figured it out in rapid fashion.

“Any user can change any entry and if enough other users agree with them then it becomes true.”

This is a quote that was pulled from a Comedy Central snippet that appeared in a Fox News story that ran this past Thursday evening. While the quote above did come from a comedy act, it is unfortunately a part of reality on the Internet.

“Anyone can post information as if it were fact…without any editorial review before the information is posted.”

This was a comment offered by a legal expert who was interviewed during the Fox News story. The story talks about how lives and reputations can get ruined by the activities of people who go to Wikipedia with an ax to grind.

I recently found an entry posted to Wikipedia about a very popular book written by a friend of mine. The sales numbers on this one book run in the millions. The book has nearly 1000 customer reviews on Amazon with 50% of the reviews giving the book a 5 out of 5 rating. Yet, there are a select few Internet users vandals (as described in the Fox News story) who have taken it upon themselves to try to sabotage the success of this book and ruin the reputation of the authors. These people have built web sites dedicated to discrediting the authors going as far as to use the author’s name in their site’s domain name. Some bloggers that I have questioned have openly admitted to never having read the book even though they proudly repeat the lies written by these vandals as if it were fact.

So you are wondering what the title of the book is, who are the authors, and who are these Internet vandals? Man I like the term vandal, especially as the term is defined in the Unabridged Dictonary.com entry.

“Vandal - (2) a person who willfully or ignorantly destroys or mars something beautiful or valuable.”

Vandal was the term used in the Fox News story to describe the folks who participate in activities of spreading lies that can damage the lives and reputations of others. As for who I am talking about, well I am not going to give any more details right now. Some of you will be smart enough to figure it out. Some of you reading this may have even participated in creating and editing the Wikipedia entry in question. I have not touched the entry nor have I ever posted a review on Amazon for the book. I felt that my inexperience with Wikipedia in particular was reason enough to leave the editing to the experts for now. As for the Amazon reviews, I have not wanted there to be any potential for anyone to say that the deck is stacked in terms of customer reviews.

Fortunately some seasoned Wikipedia editors have warned these vandals that they must comply with Neutral Point of View (NPOV) rules. The wiki editors have removed much of the opinionated content, but there’s still way too many links to the lies for me to point you to the article. The entry is simply not reliable and contains way more opinion than fact. The current ratio of negative (criticism) links is 3-to-1 over the number of links to official web sites representing the author and the book that the wiki entry was written about. The vandals have not paid very much attention to the wiki editors. The contributions of the vandals have been far from neutral from the start. In fact, according to the editing history, it took nearly five months before a single positive (supporting) link was added to this Wikipedia entry. There were plenty of external links to the critic’s sites, but not a single link to an official web site representing the author or the book.

Why am I being so mysterious? My goal is not to embarrass these vandals like they so enjoy trying to do with my friend. I certainly have the ammunition to embarrass at least one of them if that were my motive. At least one of the (uhm?) anonymous contributors appearing in the edit history of the wiki entry about my friend’s book has made visits to this site and even left comments. On at least one occasion the IP address shown in a comment on one of my blogs matched exactly what appeared in the Wikipedia editing history for this book’s entry on the same night. I do not find this IP address match up to be a coincidence since several of the comments on my blog from this visitor show them coming from the same IP address consistently for over two months. The IP addresses this visitor has been sourcing from for over two years has changed slightly from time to time. This tells me that their ISP is issuing addresses from a DHCP pool the same way many ISPs do business. However, a majority of the edits in the history of the Wikipedia entry I have been referring to came from the same ISP’s address pool that this visitor has been sourcing from for over two years when visiting this blog. This leads me to believe that this visitor of my site has been one of the primary contributors to this one Wikipedia topic. The majority of contributions to this particular Wikipedia entry were made by people who have no interest in publishing facts. Their message is full of slander and lies.  Why am I making a big deal out of this? Because it can happen to anyone. It can happen to you or someone you love.

In closing I want to make it clear that this is not a critique of Wikipedia but a critique of the people who vandalize Wikipedia and the Internet in general. I find Wikipedia to be a great resource on many subjects. Unfortunately there are a few “Internet Vandals” who try to misuse Wikipedia as a place to vent their frustrations over the success of others.

Blackwater USA is out of business in Iraq according to the BBC News.  This is the same company supplying security forces in Afghanistan.  A friend’s husband who is an Air Force officer serving in Afghanistan was involved in a road side standoff with a Blackwater employee about a year ago.  That case was fill with suspicions of tampered evidence and false testimony on the Blackwater side of that case.   Back in April my friend’s husband was cleared of all charges that could have sent him to jail.

The recent incident involving Blackwater in Iraq has spawned investigations by the Iraqi and US governments.  There are estimates that reports as many 25,000 civilian security employees in Iraq with about 1000 of them working for Blackwater.  All of the Blackwater security forces have been ordered to leave Iraq expect those involved in the recent roadside shooting incident.  It will be interesting to see how Iraqi security forces and the US military respond to this void of such a large number of armed private security forces in the coming weeks. One report says that the US has suspended land travel of US diplomats in Iraq.

Most of the emphasis is given to the US military presence in Iraq that has peaked at nearly 160,000.  The much overlooked number is an estimated 100,000 plus civilians who are working in Iraq.  After subtracting the security forces, the remaining 75,000 US civilians work in variety of jobs ranging from cooks to translators to pilots to engineers to doctors to laborers.

It seems that homeschoolers are outperforming public school kids on the ACT college entrance exam. I heard some of these statistics at a homescchool conference here in Charleston a few months ago while talking to an HSLDA representative, but I did not realize that the homeschoolers had been out performing the public school kids for as long as the home schoolers have been being tracked. You can read the full story on WorldNet Daily.  You can also read about why we plan to homeschool.

It seems that lines are being drawn within Christian circles with regards to immigration reform. At least one Catholic Church as well as one Lutheran Church in California are offering sanctuary to illegal immigrants. The story also mentions Adalberto United Methodist Church in Chicago as making news for sheltering Elvira Arellano and her son Saul Arellano.

The Orthodox Presbyterian Church is following a different line of thinking in regards to immigration. The final sentence in a report titled REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE ORTHODOX PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH TO STUDY THE PROPRIETY OF THE RECEPTION OF ILLEGAL ALIENS INTO CHURCH MEMBERSHIP pretty much sums up this denomination’s kid-glove approach to illegal immigrants.

“It seems wise that presbyteries and sessions ought to delay ordination and installation until matters relating to being an illegal alien have been satisfactorily addressed.” Source - http://www.opc.org/GA/aliens.pdf

I found the OPC document by way of La Shawn Barber’s Corner in a post titled Christians and Illegal ‘Immigration’. La Shawn has been very outspoken in favor of dropping the hammer on “lawbreaking illegals”. I don’t see the issue as cut and dry as she does and that leaves us two Christian bloggers on different sides of a very complex issue. La Shawn left a comment on a previous post here on this blog titled Amnesty for Illegals.

“Disagreement isn’t a bad thing…What I’m waiting to hear, although I think I’ll be waiting in vain, are more Christians speaking out against illegal aliens who profess Christ. How does their defying government authority and making DEMANDS on their “host” country square with their profession?”

La Shawn went own to ask a very similar quesiton on her own blog this week.

“I asked those same critics, sometimes in the post itself, sometimes in the comment section, if they’ve ever admonished illegal aliens who say they’re Christians, and if not, what they’d say to them about crossing our borders in violation of our laws and showing little compassion themselves.”

I want to offer a response to La Shawn’s questions. First, there seems to be an assumption by La Shawn as well as a host of other Americans that illegals in this country had prior knowledge of the US immigration law before entering this country. Let’s make a different and probably more accurate assumption by putting ourselves in their shoes prior to entering the US. To do this, take a moment to write down on a piece of paper some notes from your knowledge of the immigration policy of any other country on this planet. The average American will likely not leave a single mark on the paper during this exercise.

Is it the fault of the illegals that our borders were not protected? Is it the fault of the illegals that the system allows for them to drain tax dollars without contributing in all the ways the rest of us contribute? Is it fair that many illegals have taken more than they have contributed. Ask your average native American Indian if they feel like their ancestors were given a fair deal during the forming of this country. Ask them if they think the settlers gave much attention or even had knowledge of tribal laws of immigration during the settling of the Americas. No one wants to talk much about how the settlers busted in on the native American Indians for some reason.

Let’s consider another question. How many Christians complain about aliens families taking their tax money yet wouldn’t think twice about filling the offering plate to help the same families if they were still suffering in their own country?

As Christians, how should we be responding to illegals in this country? The answer is simple. We should be displaying the character of God as seen in his son Christ Jesus. How? By rejecting the prideful, selfish, judgmental, condemning and unforgiving attitudes that are dominating the fight against illegals.

Do my suggestions mean that I believe we should continue to allow illegals to pile into this country? Absolutely not! We have learned in recent years how bad border security really is and we need to fix it. We also need to work on streamlining a process to make legal all those who want to become legal. I have used the word amnesty and that may be a little strong. As Christians trying to operate in a Christ-like manner, we need to exercise forgiveness ahead of admonishment.

I suggest that many illegals immigrants may not understand that the average American tax payer is bearing the burden for the services that they are receiving mostly for free. I say “mostly for free” because even illegals have to pay some taxes (i.e., sales taxes) that do end up funding some of the services they are using. Even if they do understand now that the average American is footing the bill, it is entirely possible that they had no idea how our government was structured and funded prior to their arrival into this country.

The bottom line on this whole issue is that many Americans, Christians included, are making a boat load of assumptions about who knew what and when. What we as Christians can do is demonstrate a face of forgiveness and comfort to these illegals and let God worry about who sinned when and how bad. For those Christians who disregard any notion of forgiveness in this immigration issue and are dead set on punishing these illegal alien lawbreakers, I repeat the words of Jesus in John 8:7 (NLT), “All right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!”