Black Rednecks and White Liberals

Attorney General Eric Holder’s remarks at a Justice Department ceremony Feb. 18, 2009,  commemorating Black History Month:

“Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial, we have always been, and we, I believe, continue to be, in too many ways, a nation of cowards. Though race-related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about things racial.”

Cowards come in all colors.  Cowards usually are incapable of facing the truth about themselves.  The blame for their problems are foisted on any but the obvious.   Case in point: the dysfunctional social patterns leading to the tragic dissolution of black families.  In itself it’s sad, but what makes it even sadder are the black leaders perpetuating and defending this behavior as part of the Black Culture. That to me is cowardly and for the black family it is disasterous, ending in them being victimized for political points.

In Thomas Sowell’s book:     Black Rednecks and White Liberals missing pieces of the Black mystique are researched, revealed, and make for some riveting reading.  This is the history you never read when dealing with slavery and it’s aftermath in this country.

Thomas Sowell is a Black man who has faced the struggles himself.  He makes no excuses and holds no one responsible for his destiny but himself. Town Hall.com includes in Sowell’s bio:

Thomas Sowell was born in North Carolina and grew up in Harlem. As with many others in his neighborhood, he left home early and did not finish high school. The next few years were difficult ones, but eventually he joined the Marine Corps and became a photographer in the Korean War.

After leaving the service, Sowell entered Harvard University, worked a part-time job as a photographer and studied the science that would become his passion and profession: economics.After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard University (1958), he went on to receive his master’s in economics from Columbia University (1959) and a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago (1968).

In the early ’60s, Sowell held jobs as an economist with the Department of Labor and AT&T. But his real interest was in teaching and scholarship. In 1965, at Cornell University, he began the first of many professorships. His other teaching assignments include Rutgers University, Amherst University, Brandeis University and the University of California at Los Angeles, where he taught in the early ’70s and also from 1984 to 1989.

Attorney General Holder might do well to note that Black History is best served by scholars and honest men without agendas.


“Moral Corrosions”

The Anchoress writes:    “America is scared, like I’ve never seen America scared before. After 9/11, we were frightened but together as a nation. Now, we’re frightened, and torn apart, as well.”

Thomas Sowell says it like so:  A Fatal Trajectory

“..looming ahead of us– and our children and their children– are dangers that can utterly destroy American society. Worse yet, there are moral corrosions within ourselves that weaken our ability to face the challenges ahead.

One of the many symptoms of this decay from within is that we are preoccupied with the pay of corporate executives while the leading terrorist-sponsoring nation on earth is moving steadily toward creating nuclear bombs.”

Does anyone imagine that we will care what anyone’s paycheck is when we see an American city in radioactive ruins?

Yet the only serious obstacle to that happening is that the Israelis may disregard the lofty blather coming out of the White House and destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities before the Iranian fanatics can destroy Israel.”

When clear thinkers worry, I worry!

Krauthammer’s Hammer

Excerpts from the pen and wisdom of Charles Krauthammer writting for the Washington Post with my emphasis:

The Fierce Urgency of Pork

“A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe.”
— President Obama, Feb. 4.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared “we have chosen hope over fear.” Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

And yet more damaging to Obama’s image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama’s name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

It’s the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus — and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress’s own budget office says won’t be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.

When Is Security Not?

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee spilt the beans. Predator strikes on Taliban and al-Qaeda targets are launched from where, Class?  The answer, as the world now knows,  is Pakistan.  The trouble with keeping our senators informed on national security issues is they talk too much.  The media isn’t supposed to be in the classified loop,  but senators do want to appear in the media as well informed.  Oops!

What Arrogance!

“Little tiny yes (yet?) porky amendments.  The American people really don’t care!”         WELL ….DO YA?

Tom Elia cares!   Here’s his response.

Who Has Bewitched You?

Early this morning,  I read these words in the Office of  Readings:

But the time came when He who had set me apart before I was born and called me by His favor chose to reveal His Son to me, that I might spread among the Gentiles the good tidings concerning Him.”  Galatians 1:15-16

My thoughts flew to the issue of Life; God creating each one of us purposefully; knowing us as we are, with all our faults and failings and even our misguided “good” intentions.   Paul had just finished describing to the Galatians his background,  including what had been his well meaning ambitions previous to his conversion:

You know that I went to extremes in persecuting the Church of God and tried to destroy it; I made progress in Jewish observance far beyond most of my contemporaries, in my excess of zeal to live out all the traditions of my ancestors.” Galatians 1:13-15

As I thought about this, it wasn’t much of a leap from there to recalling the arguments and dismissals of those in the pro-abortion camp,  declaring an unborn child as:  no child, no purpose, a blob of tissue, an inconvenience, a mistake (recall President Obama’s words), an economical burden (Nancy Pelosi’s words.)  In addressing the Galatians for their having strayed from the Truth,  Paul says, “O stupid Galatians!  Who has bewitched you?” Galations 3:1.  How much more can these words be spoken to our generation so steeped in secular relativism and materialism.

If God not only had Paul’s personhood in mind before he was conceived,  but also had a plan for Paul, which included His Church, and had a moment in Time set,  in which He would enable Paul to see clearly and become the man He called him to be, then how can we continue to throw away precious life as though God isn’t watching, isn’t caring, and isn’t remembering?  Is Paul’s term, “Stupid,” strong enough to characterize so many so zealous in their war against life in our  present culture of Death?