'If the President and my brethren feel to sustain a poor worm of the dust like me to be Architect of the Church, let me . . . serve them and not disgrace myself. . . . May the Lord help me so to do'Boyd K. Packer, "The Temple, the Priesthood," Ensign, May 1993, 19
(Truman O. Angell Journal, 1857-8 Apr. 1868, 28 May 1867, Church Archives)."
EDITOR'S NOTE: The following editorial, among the most famous ever written, appeared in The New York Sun in 1897 and remains appropriate for this holiday season 111 years later.Follow the above link to read the rest. It really is great.
IS THERE A SANTA CLAUS?
We take pleasure in answering at once and thus prominently the communication below, expressing at the same time our great gratification that its faithful author is numbered among the friends of The Sun:
Dear Editor! I am 8 years old.
Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
Papa says, "If you see it in The Sun it's so.'' Please tell me the truth: Is there a Santa Claus?
Virginia O'Hanlon.
115 West Ninety-Fifth Street.
Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except (what) they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, National Christmas Tree Association (NCTA) and your local Christmas Tree professional.
Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother,O Holy Night quickly became a favorite in the US.
And in His name all oppression shall cease.
"The clearest result from decades of education research is the importance of teacher quality. My colleague Tom Kane finds that students who are lucky enough to get a teacher in the top quarter of the teacher-quality distribution jump 10 percentile points in the student achievement distribution relative to children who end up with less able teachers. Improving teacher quality has about twice the impact on student outcomes as radically reducing class size."
"Since the war on terror began in 2001, Washington has sounded an intermittent drumbeat for the wealthy to make a greater "sacrifice" in the form of higher taxes. The dubious charge is that these taxpayers have been shirking a duty performed in other conflicts.
The accusation bears reviewing, and its inaccuracy needs to be refuted...
America is not undertaxed. Washington is overspent — but not as a result of the current conflict. The sacrifice truly called for is on the spending side. And it would not have to be large.
Last year's federal deficit was $161 billion. As large as it sounds in nominal terms, it was 1.2% of GDP and just 5.9% of total federal spending. Less than a 6% cut in spending would have eliminated the federal deficit.
So the next time the call for "sacrifice" comes from Washington, America's response should be: Lead by example."
Others could cut costs in similar manners, but most people don't look for alternative solutions, because government solutions make sluggards of nearly all of us.That's the rub. This bus line was sold as a "something for nothing" proposition. We'll get $600k in federal money, pay next to nothing in sales tax ourselves, and Poof! we'll have a bus line. No one has to take personal responsibility for change, no one has to find alternative solutions of their own.
"The Fed," she argues, "has gone about as if the problem is a shortage of liquidity. That is not the basic problem. The basic problem for the markets is that [uncertainty] that the balance sheets of financial firms are credible."
So even though the Fed has flooded the credit markets with cash, spreads haven't budged because banks don't know who is still solvent and who is not. This uncertainty, says Ms. Schwartz, is "the basic problem in the credit market. Lending freezes up when lenders are uncertain that would-be borrowers have the resources to repay them. So to assume that the whole problem is inadequate liquidity bypasses the real issue."
Although there are many things to like about the government’s plan, the failure to suspend dividends is not one of them. These dividends, if they are paid at current levels, will redirect more than $25 billion of the $125 billion to shareholders in the next year alone. Taxpayers have been told that their money is required because of an urgent need to rebuild bank capital, yet a significant fraction of this money will wind up in shareholders’ pockets — and thus be unavailable to plug the large capital hole on the banks’ balance sheets.
Moreover, given their own equity stakes, the officers and directors of the nine banks will be among the leading beneficiaries of the dividend payout. We estimate that their personal take of the dividends will amount to approximately $250 million in the first year.
“Your congressman is trying to make mortgages more expensive. Ask him why he opposes the American dream of home ownership.”So said a Fannie Mae sponsored commercial issued in response to some in the federal government calling for increased regulation or competition. Unfortunately, even after a $200 billion bailout and Fannie Mae going into federal conservatorship - along with the ripple effect largely responsible for the $800 billion "rescue" bill - expensive mortgages are the least of our worries.
“Fannie Mae faced the danger that the market would pass us by,”And what was the underlying mission that Fannie felt pressure to fulfill? Artificially facilitate mortgages to ever more and more people. As a result, between 2005 and 2007 Fannie guaranteed three times as many risky loans (loans made without documentation of income or savings) as it had in all earlier years combined. And that doesn't even include subprime loans.
“We were afraid that lenders would be selling products we weren’t buying and Congress would feel like we weren’t fulfilling our mission. The market was changing, and it’s our job to buy loans, so we had to change as well.”
"Enabling these institutions to increase in size...we are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk."And increase in size they did. By July of this year they owned or guaranteed half of the $12 Trillion mortgage industry. Their scope meant just about every mortgage lender in the country, both large and small, relied on Fannie and Freddie to help them continue to make loans. Worse yet, because of the government-backed nature of the GSE's,"
Although banks are typically prohibited from concentrating their money in the stock or bonds of any one company, those regulations create an exemption for debt issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which have long been considered the safest of investments."Not only were banks heavily reliant upon Fannie, but they were allowed to dangerously leverage themselves because Fannie was backed by the government.
Senator Biden was glib and fluent and in command of the facts — if by “in command of the facts” you mean “talks complete blithering balderdash and hogwash.” He flatly declared that Obama never said he would meet Ahmadinejad without preconditions. But, on Debate Night, the official Obama website was still boasting that he would meet Ahmadinejad “without preconditions”. He said America spends more in a month in Iraq than it’s spent in seven years in Afghanistan. Er, America has spent over $700 billion in Afghanistan since 2001. It’s spending about $10 billion a month in Iraq. But no matter. To demonstrate his command of the “facts”, Senator Biden sportingly offered up his own instant replays:
“My friend John McCain voted 422 times against tax cuts for the middle classes. Let me repeat that so the American people are clear on this. My friend John McCain voted 673 times against tax cuts for the middle classes.”
The problem was that it all sounded drearily senatorial. Mention any global crisis — civil war in Bosnia, genocide in Darfur, Russian aggression in Georgia, the lack of five-star restaurants in Wales — and Biden has been there, usually within the last two weeks, and always at public expense. What the American taxpayer gets for the Emir of Delaware’s frequent-flyer miles is harder to discern. Biden was doing his best to turn in a decent karaoke version of Lloyd Bentsen, but, unfortunately, Governor Palin declined to play Dan Quayle. That left Joe sounding like an ancient pol being generically vice-presidential. Sarah, at her best, sounded like the citizen-politician this country’s Founders intended. She hasn’t voted 397 times against this or that in the U.S. Senate, because she’s been running a state, and a town, and a commercial fishing operation. She’s a doer, not a talker, which is why so many of my fellow professional talkers disdain her.
When Regular Joe Six-Pack Bluecollar Biden tried to match her on the Main Street cred, it rang slightly wacky. “Look,” he said, “All you have to do is go down Union Street with me in Wilmington or go to Katie’s Restaurant or walk into Home Depot with me, where I spend a lot of time.” Why? Is he moonlighting as a checkout clerk on the evening shift? Or is he stalking that nice lady in Lighting Fixtures? As for Katie’s Restaurant, ah, I’m sure it was grand but apparently it closed in 1990. In the Diner of the Mind, the refills are endless and Senator Joe is sitting shootin’ the breeze over a cuppa joe with a couple other regular joes on adjoining stools while Betty-Jo, the sassy waitress who’s tough as nails but with a heart of gold, says Ol’ Joe, the short-order cook who’s doing his Sloppy Joes just the way the Senator likes ‘em, really appreciates the way that, despite 78 years in Washington, Joe Biden is still just the same regular Joe Six-Pack he was when he and Norman Rockwell first came in for a sarsaparilla all those years ago. But, alas, while he was jetting off for one-to-one talks with the Deputy Tourism Minister of Waziristan, the old neighborhood changed.
The Chicago Way is a road the Beltway media establishment dare not travel. It must frighten them. It conflicts with their fairy tale about Obama as reformer, and they're much too busy rummaging through garbage cans in Alaska to bother about Chicago's political alleys.
But any child in Illinois knows the Chicago Way leads through the most politically corrupt city in America, in a politically corrupt state, where muscle trumps reason, where Democratic warlords brazenly promote their offspring into public office, where even souls are offered up for sale.
The national media have never wanted to understand, much less expose, political corruption here, or examine how Obama prospered under the Daley machine's guidance. A trip down the Chicago Way would force them to re-examine their ridiculous narrative that sets Obama as a political reformer riding a white horse, or is that a winged unicorn?
For months, Mark Myers nursed the pumpkin patch in the empty lot next to his Saratoga Springs house.I found out today that the pumpkin sale was only one day - last Saturday. But the reporter of the story told me that there is a fund set up at Mountain America Credit Union. You can go to any branch and ask to contribute to the Jameson Jones fund.
It's been a tradition in the neighborhood for years now; when the pumpkins are plump and orange, kids come running to pick their favorite ones to take home. Back when it all started, next-door neighbor Cindy Jones helped plant the first seeds.
"This is something I just do for fun, just for a hobby," Myers said.
But this year, Myers tended to his pumpkins with a specific purpose. In February, he and the rest of the tight-knit neighborhood reeled from news that the Joneses' youngest child, a 3-year-old boy with Down syndrome named Jameson, was diagnosed with leukemia.
Myers and others around the block hatched a plan: The pumpkin sale this year would be a fundraiser to help the family. The neighbors sought donations for the sale and eventually secured some extra pumpkins, corn stalks and straw bales. The last step was telling the Joneses the sale was for them.
"From the moment they decided to plant the seeds, they knew they'd be donating this money to Jameson," neighbor Heather Anderson said. "Everybody in the community pitched in on this, and they had no idea the whole time."
Myers said he'll never forget the day he asked Jameson's father, Troy, to meet him in his driveway.
"He said, 'There's probably other people who could use it,'" he said. "I said, 'No, not as much as you guys could use it. You guys have been through hell and back.'"
Consistent rain didn't stop people from coming out for the sale Saturday afternoon. As friends and new faces alike paced the rows of pumpkins looking for the perfect one, Jameson got a wheelbarrow ride down the street from Myers.
I think Biden Rocked!
He came in with low expectations. Especially after the Couric interview where he had a huge gaffe of explaining that when the Stock Market crashed, FDR got on TV. I was fully expecting a gaffe-fest from him but he was able to overcome this with clearly rehearsed lines from his advisors.
But he was able to sidestep many direct questions by Ifill choosing instead to offer rebuttals to Palin’s arguments or further explain his ticket’s position.
I wasn’t that impressed how he kept using the same words over and over again like “fundamental” and how he kept having to repeat things. He did do a good job relating to the middle class by mentioning Scranton repeatedly, which we all know is a blue-collar, middle-class town.
He was only incoherent one time, trying to explain the McCain tax plan, and he made one big gaffe when he said the U.S. and France kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon . But I wouldn’t hold all of his Foreign Relations experience against him.
"I am very concerned about the mormon church and their treatment of non-momorns in utah. I mean I have heard dozens of horror stories of non-mormons being cheated, lied to an falsly imprisoned (on trumped up charges)simply for not being a mormon. I mean the fact is mormonism is a cult and there needs to be laws passed to protect non-mormons in utah. I hate mormons who try to force themselves on us. I wish to God that jospeh smith had never been born or at least had castrated himself. Anyone who think that God is on their side is dangerous as hell."I'm guessing this guy didn't vote for Mitt Romney. Wait till he actually visits Utah and finds out we all have horns. That'll be fun.
"A LOT of payrolls get paid at the end of the month. The next for many companies is September 30. Three different people with hugely relevant knowledge said to me today words to the effect of: "Why don't your economist buddies want [insert fortune 100 company/companies here] to be able to pay their employees on Tuesday. If Washington doesn't do something now, they won't be able to". That just scared the hell out of me. I can go into more details if you like, but all of them involve the four horsemen of the apocalypse."That was written last week, in the midst of the "give me $700 Billion or the economy gets it" rhetoric. Are there payrolls not being met today?
And I think its your responsibility to do so, or else we face the consequence of a woman in the White House who would strive to take away your daughter Alice's right to choose along with every other woman's in this country.Ohhhhh. So that's it. You're a "Single Issue Voter". You're one of those people that gets lambasted by celebrities, bloggers, and news media types for voting for a candidate based largely on a single issue: abortion. Except those lambasters generally save their ridicule for those that vote against abortion. That's the only type of Single Issue Voter that's completely stupid and deserving of ridicule.
"Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God. That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan."Pray that our leaders are sending our soldiers out on a task that is from God. Pray that our nation acts in accordance with God's plan. I've said that prayer myself. Sorry MoveOn, you'll have to do better than that.
"I don't think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn't have to be part of the curriculum,"
Q:What is your take on global warming and how is it affecting our country?Here's what she did as governor,
A: A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made.
"A few months into her term, Palin directed a group of state commissioners to develop a strategy for addressing climate change. State lawmakers had already formed a climate commission, but the administration up until then had nothing.
"'I'm not an Al Gore, doom-and-gloom environmentalist blaming the changes in our climate on human activity,' Palin said Monday, 'but I'm not going to put my head in the sand and pretend there aren't changes.'"
"explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support."But they neglected to report the LA Times story which shows Gov. Palin saying the following,
"I'm pro-contraception, and I think kids who may not hear about it at home should hear about it in other avenues,"
One accusation claims then-Mayor Palin threatened to fire Wasilla’s librarian for refusing to ban books from the town library. Some versions of the rumor come complete with a list of the books that Palin allegedly attempted to ban. Actually, Palin never asked that books be banned; no books were actually banned; and many of the books on the list that Palin supposedly wanted to censor weren't even in print at the time, proving that the list is a fabrication.
"the bullet points here certainly are not "rumor-mongering". All of them can be easily researched and proven accurate in a few moments, from established mainstream sources."Well, that "easily researched" thing turned out to be correct. But the whole "proven accurate" thing, not so much.
A good performer of that speech she reads. Sarah Palin is the goddamn Governor of Alaska. She’s a crack politician who has made her own way. She is not some blow-dried twit on cable news. And of course Obama trots out a woman to spew this garbage. Irony overload: you know how everyone on the left likes to say that Palin is a typical anti-woman conservative, the type of successful woman who’s ready to stick it to other women instead of helping to raise us all up?But it's not just the women staffers saying it.
Sounds to me like a perfect description of the women on Obama’s staff.
