Merry Christmas!

From our family to yours, a very merry Christmas and sincere hopes for a bright and prosperous 2011.

To center our thoughts this day on Christ, His miraculous advent and glorious plan of salvation, "The Servant King" by Graham Kendrick.

From heaven you came, Helpless Babe,

Entered our world, Your glory veiled;

Not to be served but to serve,

And give Your life that we might live.

This is our God, the Servant King,
He calls us now to follow Him,
To bring our lives as a daily offering
Of worship to the Servant King.

There in the garden of tears,

My heavy load He chose to bear;

His heart with sorrow was torn,

'Yet not My will but Yours,' He said.

Come see His hands and His feet,

The scars that speak of sacrifice;

Hands that flung stars into space

To cruel nails surrendered.

So let us learn how to serve,

And in our lives enthrone Him;

Each other's needs to prefer,

For it is Christ we're serving.

Houston, we have a problem

U.S. Population: 308,745,538. U.S. National Debt: $13,875,380,000,000 and counting.

That's $45,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States.

And for those that advocate big-freedom limited government, like me, a tax lesson.

... growth tends to be stronger where taxes are lower. Seven of the nine states that do not levy an income tax grew faster than the national average. The other two, South Dakota and New Hampshire, had the fastest growth in their regions, the Midwest and New England.

Update: What happens when a state goes after millionaires? They leave. Oregon should have learned from Maryland. But, hey, since when have politicians let common sense stand in the way of a plan to take more money from people who've earned it?

Crying rape

Rape is not something to spoken of lightly, neither is it a charge to be laid haphazardly. It is one of the most serious of crimes, and our laws reflect this by harshness of penalty.

Yet in recent weeks it seems a few women have decided to try and leverage the gravity of this abhorrent type of abuse either for personal gain or to add weight to their arguments or as an act of revenge, to their eternal shame.

WABC/Channel 7 weather babe Heidi Jones was arrested for perpetrating the ultimate snow job -- falsely claiming to cops that a man had tried to rape her while she was jogging in Central Park...

Khloe Kardashian has come under fire from a number of women's advocates after comparing the TSA's new screening procedures to "rape," during an appearance on "Lopez Tonight."

And, more controversially, the rape charges involving Wikileaks' Julian Assange, which may be proven bona fide but presently appear to be flimsy cases of consent withdrawn ipso facto due to bruised female egos, busted condoms and subsequent refusal to get an HIV test.

Playing fast and loose with the charge of rape denigrates its real victims and exposes a monumental ignorance of its severity and impact. What is more, accusations of false rape affect perceptions of future legitimate claims, much like crying wolf. After all, who could blame the New York police officer for thinking about Heidi Jones the next time a woman presents at the local precinct saying she was raped in Central Park?

"The feminist deception"

Caroline Glick hauls the "feminist" movement on the carpet.^* Do read it all.

Since the height of the feminist movement in the late 1960s, non-leftist women in the West and Israel have been hard-pressed to answer the question of whether or not we are feminists. Non-leftist women are opposed to the oppression of women. Certainly, we are no less opposed to the oppression of women than leftist women are.

But at its most basic level, the feminist label has never been solely or even predominantly about preventing and ending oppression or discrimination of women. It has been about advancing the Left’s social and political agenda against Western societies. It has been about castigating societies where women enjoy legal rights and protections as "structurally" discriminatory against women in order to weaken the legal, moral and social foundations of those societies. That is, rather than being about advancing the cause of women, to a large extent, the feminist movement has used the language of women’s rights to advance a social and political agenda that has nothing to do with women. [...]

The deception at the heart of the feminist movement is nowhere more apparent than in the silence with which self-professed feminists and feminist movements ignore the inhumane treatment of women who live under Islamic law. If feminism weren’t a hollow term, then prominent feminists should be the leaders of the anti-jihad movement.

^* I put feminist in quotes for reasons alluded to by Glick. It seems to me the majority of women agree on a limited set of fundamentals, e.g. women's suffrage, educational and career opportunities, to name a couple. Beyond these there is great diversity of opinion about what is real feminism.

Why am I doing this again?

I contribute to a political blog but a lot of the issues or topics that interest me aren't completely political in nature. I'm finding I still want to post from time to time about general goings-on in the world and elicit feedback from people who have an opinion they wish to share on such matters. Even if people don't want to comment, it's a means for me to say something when I get all torqued up.

There was a time when I blogged to gain a wider audience, but I found it took a lot of time and energy, the former which I have in limited supply. With this in mind, I can make no promise about post frequency or regularity. This blog is simply to get topics out there as they torque me up, and I really could care less if I have a following as such.

That said, I hope you enjoy some of the topics, subscribe to the RSS feed, and pop back every now and then when you are all torqued up.