I Could Not Have Said It Better

The following was written by Ben Stein and recited by him on CBS Sunday Morning


Commentary.

My confession:

I am a Jew, and every single one of my ancestors was Jewish. And it does not bother me even a little bit when people call those beautiful lit up, bejeweled trees, Christmas trees.. I don't feel threatened. I don't feel discriminated against. That's what they are: Christmas trees.

It doesn't bother me a bit when people say, 'Merry Christmas' to me. I don't think they are slighting me or getting ready to put me in a ghetto. In fact, I kind of like it It shows that we are all brothers and sisters celebrating this happy time of year. It doesn't bother me at all that there is a manger scene on display at a key intersection near my beach house in Malibu . If people
want a creche, it's just as fine with me as is the Menorah a few hundred yards away.

I don't like getting pushed around for being a Jew, and I don't think Christians like getting pushed around for being Christians. I think people who believe in God are sick and tired of getting pushed around, period. I have no idea where the concept came from that America is an explicitly atheist country. I can't find it in the Constitution and I don't like it being shoved down my throat.

Or maybe I can put it another way: where did the idea come from that we should worship celebrities and we aren't allowed to worship God as we understand Him? I guess that's a sign that I'm getting old, too. But there are a lot of us who are wondering where these celebrities came from and where the America we knew went
to.


In light of the many jokes we send to one another for a laugh, this is a little different: This is not intended to be a joke; it's not funny, it's intended to get you thinking.

Billy Graham's daughter was interviewed on the Early Show and Jane Clayson asked her 'How could God let something like this happen?' (regarding Katrina) Anne Graham gave an extremely profound and insightful response. She said, 'I believe God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for years we've been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives. And being the gentleman He is, I believe He has calmly backed out. How can we expect God to give us His blessing and His
protection if we demand He leave us alone?'

In light of recent events... terrorists attack, school shootings, etc. I think it started when Madeleine Murray O'Hare (she was murdered, her body found a few years ago) complained she didn't want prayer in our schools, and we said OK. Then someone said you better not read the Bible in school. The Bible says thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, and love your neighbor as yourself. And we said OK.

Then Dr. Benjamin Spock said we shouldn't spank our children when they misbehave because their little personalities would be warped and we might damage their self-esteem (Dr Spock's son committed suicide). We said an expert should know what he's talking about. And we said OK.

Now we're asking ourselves why our children
have no conscience, why they don't know right from wrong, and why it doesn't bother them to kill strangers, their classmates, and themselves.

Probably, if we think about it long and hard enough, we can figure it out. I think it has a great deal to do with 'WE REAP WHAT WE SOW.'

Funny how simple it is for people to trash God and then wonder why the world's going to hell Funny how we believe what the newspapers say, but question what the Bible says. Funny how you can send 'jokes' through e-mail and they spread like wildfire but when you start sending messages regarding the Lord, people think twice about sharing. Funny how lewd, crude, vulgar and obscene articles pass freely through cyberspace, but public discussion of God is suppressed in the school and workplace.

The Real Meaning of the 12 Days of Christmas

From 1558 until 1829, Roman Catholics in England were
not permitted to practice their faith openly. Someone
during that era wrote this carol as a catechism song for young Catholics.
It has two levels of meaning: the surface meaning
plus a hidden meaning known only to members of their church. Each
element in the carol has a code word for a religious reality
which the children could remember.


-The partridge in a pear tree was Jesus Christ.


-Two turtle doves were the Old and New Testaments.

-Three French hens stood for faith, hope and love.

-The four calling birds were the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke & John.

-The five golden rings recalled the Torah or Law, the first five books of the Old Testament.

-The six geese a-laying stood for the six days of creation.

-Seven swans a-swimming represented the sevenfold gifts of the Holy Spirit--Prophesy, Serving, Teaching, Exhortation, Contribution, Leadership, and Mercy.

-The eight maids a-milking were the eight beatitudes.

-Nine ladies dancing were the nine fruits of the Holy Spirit--Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness,

Gentleness, and Self Control.

-The ten lords a-leaping were the ten commandments.

-The eleven pipers piping stood for the eleven faithful disciples.

-The twelve drummers drumming symbolized the twelve points of belief in the Apostles' Creed.


Merry (Twelve Days of) Christmas Everyone

This has gone too far

Apparently some nut job of a mother thinks Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is a religious song because it contains the words Christmas and Santa. Someone slap her please.

This happened in North Carolina (I must call my brother and tell him they are nutso in his state) where the Christmas song "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer" was temporarily banned from being sung by children at a Christmas concert. A mother (Jewish) complained that the song contained the words "Christmas" and "Santa," words which she believes carry religious overtones and finds offensive. This is bad as Nobama wanting to change the Star Spangled Banner to I Want to Teach the World to Sing because the Star Spangled Banner is a violent song, ever read the words to the French National Anthem, it gets a XXX rating for the violence. Back to this nut job of a mother, Santa Claus is certainly not a Christian theme. A spokesperson for the school said the mother was afraid her daughter would hear those words which are associated with Christmas and make the connection between Santa Clause and Christmas and the birth of Jesus. Here's a thought - her daughter has probably already made that connection. When I hear Rudolph I dont think of the birth of Christ, I think of Santa trekking across the sky with a reindeer whose nose is so red you can see it anywhere. Perhaps Santa needs a GPS and then we can right a new politically correct song for this "mom."

The complaining mother is Jewish and wanted a Hanukkah song included in the program - since they were singing "Rudolph" she felt that she should have a religious song of her faith included, as well. The school board ruled that "Rudolph" is not a religious song and can be included in the program. As it stands right now, the children are supposed to be going ahead with the program, as planned, with "Rudolph" included.

Way to go School Board for telling the mother to take a hike. Honestly, some people should just be shot and not heard. Hey nutjob mother get a life.

A Poem For The Season

A Poem For the Season
>
>
> *Twas the month before Christmas*
> *When all through our land,*
> *Not a Christian was praying*
> *Nor taking a stand.*
> *The "politically correct police" had taken away,*
> *The reason for Christmas - no one could say.*
>
> *The children were told by their schools not to sing,*
> *About Shepherds and Wise Men and Angels and things.*
> *It might hurt people's feelings, the teachers would say*
> *December 25th is just a "Holiday".*
>
> *Yet the shoppers were ready with cash, checks and credit*
> *Pushing folks down to the floor just to get it!*
> *CDs from Madonna, an X BOX, an I-pod*
> *Something was changing, something quite odd! *
>
> *Retailers promoted Ramadan and Kwanzaa*
> *In hopes to sell books by Franken & Fonda.*
> *As Targets were hanging their trees upside down*
> *At Lowe's the word Christmas - was nowhere to be found.*
> *At K-Mart and Staples and Penny 's and Sears*
> *You won't hear the word Christmas; it won't touch your ears.*
>
> *Inclusive, sensitive, Di-ver-si-ty*
> *Are words that were used to intimidate me.*
> *Now Daschle, Now Darden, Now Sharpton, Wolf Blitzen*
> *On Boxer, on Rather, on Kerry, on Clinton!*
>
> *At the top of the Senate, there arose such a clatter*
> *To eliminate Jesus, in all public matter.*
> *And we spoke not a word, as they took away our faith*
> * Forbidden to speak of salvation and grace*
> *The true Gift of Christmas was exchanged and discarded*
> *The reason for the season, stopped before it started.*
>
> *So as you celebrate "Winter Break" under your "Dream Tree"*
> *Sipping your Starbucks, listen to me.*
> *Choose your words carefully, choose what you say*
> *Shout "MERRY CHRISTMAS" - not Happy Holiday!*

The Night We Waved Goodbye to America

From Peter Hitchens in London:

Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful
replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell - or that at
the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.

The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the
United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and
swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least
Mandela-worship - its nearest equivalent - is focused on a man who actually
did something.
I really don't see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the
Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in
flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up around Princess
Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts. The night America changed:
Barack and Michelle Obama in Chicago

It already has all the signs of such a thing. The newspapers which recorded
Obama's victory have become valuable relics. You may buy Obama picture books
and Obama calendars and if there isn't yet a children's picture version of
his story, there soon will be. Proper books, recording his sordid
associates, his cowardly voting record, his astonishingly militant
commitment to unrestricted abortion and his blundering trip to Africa, are
little-read and hard to find.

If you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally Left-wing
machine politician is a sort of secular saviour, then you can believe
anything. He plainly doesn't believe it himself. His cliche-stuffed, PC
clunker of an acceptance speech suffered badly from nerves. It was what you
would expect from someone who knew he'd promised too much and that from now
on the easy bit was over.
He needn't worry too much. From now on, the rough boys and girls of
America's Democratic Party apparatus, many recycled from Bill Clinton's
stained and crumpled entourage, will crowd round him, to collect the rich
spoils of his victory and also tell him what to do, which is what he is used
to. Just look at his sermon by the shores of Lake Michigan. He really did
talk about a 'new dawn', and a 'timeless creed' (which was 'yes, we can').
He proclaimed that 'change has come'. He revealed that, despite having
edited the Harvard Law Review, he doesn't know what 'enormity' means. He
reached depths of oratorical drivel never even plumbed by our own Mr Blair,
burbling about putting our hands on the arc of history (or was it the ark of
history?) and bending it once more toward the hope of a better day (Don't
try this at home).

I am not making this up. No wonder that awful old hack Jesse Jac
kson sobbed as he watched. How he must wish he, too, could get away with
this sort of stuff. And it was interesting how the President-elect failed
to lift his admiring audience by repeated - but rather hesitant -
invocations of the brainless slogan he was forced by his minders to adopt
against his will - 'Yes, we can'. They were supposed to thunder 'Yes, we
can!' back at him, but they just wouldn't join in. No wonder. Yes we can
what exactly? Go home and keep a close eye on the tax rate, is my advice.
He'd have been better off bursting into 'I'd like to teach the world to sing
in perfect harmony' which contains roughly the same message and might have
attracted some valuable commercial sponsorship.

Perhaps, being a Chicago crowd, they knew some of the things that 52.5 per
cent of America prefers not to know. They know Obama is the obedient servant
of one of the most squalid and unshakeable political machines in America.
They know that one of his alarmingly close associates, a state-subsidised
slum landlord called Tony Rezko, has been convicted on fraud and corruption
charges.
They also know the US is just as segregated as it was before Martin Luther
King - in schools, streets, neighbourhoods, holidays, even in its
TV-watching habits and its choice of fast-food joint. The difference is that
it is now done by unspoken agreement rather than by law.

If Mr Obama's election had threatened any of that, his feel-good white
supporters would have scuttled off and voted for John McCain, or practically
anyone. But it doesn't. Mr Obama, thanks mainly to the now-departed
grandmother he alternately praised as a saint and denounced as a racial
bigot, has the huge advantages of an expensive private education. He did not
have to grow up in the badlands of useless schools, shattered families and
gangs which are the lot of so many young black men of his generation.

If the nonsensical claims made for this election were true, then every
positive discrimination programme aimed at helping black people into jobs
they otherwise wouldn't get should be abandoned forthwith. Nothing of the
kind will happen. On the contrary, there will probably be more of them.
And if those who voted for Obama were all proving their anti-racist
nobility, that presumably means that those many millions who didn't vote for
him were proving themselves to be hopeless bigots. This is obviously untrue.
Yes we can what?: Barack Obama ran on the ticket of change

I was in Washington DC the night of the election. America's beautiful
capital has a sad secret. It is perhaps the most racially divided city in
the world, with 15th Street - which runs due north from the White House -
the unofficial frontier between black and white. But, like so much of
America, it also now has a new division, and one which is in many ways much
more important. I had attended an election-night party in a smart and
liberal white area, but was staying the night less than a mile away on the
edge of a suburb where Spanish is spoken as much as English, plus a
smattering of tongues from such places as Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan.


As I walked, I crossed another of Washington's secret frontiers. There had
been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as the result became
clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World
nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.

They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that
America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the Cold
War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part a
deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many
of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.

Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally
committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian
in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global
Warming panic, it was unique.

These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly
controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They
had also been weakened by the failure of America's conservative party - the
Republicans - to fight on the cultural and moral fronts.

They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting
Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order
soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US,
like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third
World. How sad.

Where now is our last best hope on Earth?
In God and God alone!!!!!

Find this story at
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1084111/PETER-HITCHENS-The-night-waved-good
bye-America--best-hope-Earth.html

12 Days of Christmas

So this year if you can't decide on what kind of gift to get someone there is always the gifts from the song: 12 Days of Christmas. This year the cost for all 12 days is $86,609 compared to $78,100 last year. What do you get for your money? Glad you asked.

The partridge costs $20 but what do you do with a partridge, where do you keep it? So the bird is cheap the supplies aren't. Can you eat a partridge.

The pear tree is $200, but you can't plant a pear tree just any part of the country and if you keep your partridge in the pear tree, what keeps the bird from flying away? I dont think either of these are very practical gifts.

Two turtledoves are $55, you can get them free from my deck, I must have a dozen or so, maybe I can make some money out of my backyard selling turtle doves. Again more birds and what do you do with them, I do know people eat doves.

French hens are $30, again with the birds, what do you do with them. Who wrote this song and thought they were great gifts, did this guy do drugs?

Calling birds are $600, they are canaries, do they really cost that much and what do they call out? Stop with the birds already, who asks for birds for a Christmas gift.

Five Gold Rings $350, finally maybe something someone can use but 5? Do you wear them on one hand but not the other or do you start and count every other finger including thumbs? I would want a little stone or something like tanzanite or black coral to go with those plain gold rings.

Geese a laying $240, omg stop already with the birds, was this guy a real birdbrain? Someone have a passion for birds? So how come the big birds cost less than the little birds?

Swans a swimming $5600 Wow these babies are expensive and where do you keep them, how many people have a pond to keep the geese and swan in. what do all these birds eat?

Maids a milking $52. These ladies dont even make minimum wage and what are they milking, what do you with the milk and do you have to pay their FICA, etc.

Ladies dancing $4,759. Perhaps the maids a milking should take dance lessons, that is where the money is and what kind of dance do these ladies do?

Lords a leaping $4414, apparently the skills here are not as great as the ladies dancing. What would you do with a leaping lord?

Pipers Piping $2285. I have no idea what good they would be unless you had some plumbing to do.

Drummers drumming $2475. It would appear the ladies dancing make the most. All that drumming would drive me nuts.

You know, I have sang this song I don't know how many times but never really paid attention to it until the article in the paper talking about the costs. A really weird song if you ask me.

December 1

Just months ago it was the 4th of July and here it is 30 days from the end of the year. Where has the year gone. They say as you get older, boy are they right. Black Friday was not as bad as I thought it might be but then mom and I did not get up at o dark early, we got a lot of bargains.

Saturday we had snow showers all day to turn into this by Sunday morning. Officially our first snow and for me winter is over, Spring Please! I hate winter more and more every year.

I finally also took pictures of the two knitting magazines I bought in Florence, I figure babelfish and i are going to become real close soon, there are quite a few projects I would love to make from them and my yarn purchases. There was an outlet store that I wish I had brought the gray/white yarn for a sweater, would have been about $15 for the yarn but limited suitcase space will keep you on that yarn diet. The one yarn store I went to and met Beatrice she GAVE me this beautiful needlepoint canvas of the Ponte Vecchio where the jewelry stores fold up into jewelry boxes at night. I don't know why but I recently got all my thread and plan on starting it over the holidays.