I just got this in an email and thought I'd pass it along.  Anyone hear of it before?

http://groups.yahoo.com/gro...

Yeah I know..I should be on Jacobys payroll.. :-)

NO ORDINARY CANDIDATE

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

http://www.boston.com/bosto...

     When he ran for president eight years ago, John McCain was asked by an interviewer what he thought of the Confederate flag -- a touchy topic in South Carolina, where at the time a debate was raging over whether the banner

should continue to fly above the state capitol.

      McCain answered from the heart: “As we all know, it's a symbol of racism and slavery.” But his reply infuriated many South Carolina voters, and after the interview McCain's aides pushed him to undo the damage. So he let them draft a statement “clarifying” his position, and when reporters asked him about the flag in the days that followed, he made a show of pulling the paper from his pocket and reading his revised remarks. “As to how I view the flag,” it began, “I understand both sides.” It went on to acknowledge that some people may deem the flag “a symbol of slavery” -- McCain's original, authentic opinion -- but that “personally, I see the battle flag as a symbol of heritage.”

     By the fourth or fifth time the question came up, McCain later wrote in his 2002 memoir, *Worth the Fighting For* (coauthored with Mark Salter), he could have delivered the new response from memory.

     “But I persisted with the theatrics of unfolding the paper and reading it as if I were making a hostage statement. I wanted to telegraph reporters that I really didn't mean to suggest I supported flying the flag, but political imperatives required a little evasiveness on my part. I wanted them to think me still an honest man, who simply had to cut a corner a little here and there so that I could go on to be an honest president. I think that made the offense worse. Acknowledging my dishonesty with a wink didn't make it less a lie. It compounded the offense by revealing how willful it had been. You either have the guts to tell the truth or you don’t. . . .

     “I had not just been dishonest. I had been a coward, and I had severed my own interests from my country's. That was what made the lie unforgivable. All my heroes, fictional and real, would have been ashamed of me.”

     Try, if you can, to imagine Hillary Clinton writing those words. Or Mitt Romney. Or Mike Huckabee. Is it conceivable that John Edwards, who fiercely indicts the moral shortcomings of others, would ever speak so bluntly and harshly about his own? Would Ron Paul? Would Barack Obama? Among America's leading politicians, I cannot think of any who is so forthright about his own failings, or so willing to let the world see him struggle with his conscience.

     I didn’t vote for McCain in the 2000 primary. I didn’t vote for George W. Bush either. As I wrote at the time, I skipped the GOP primary altogether because I was repelled by the candidates’ cheap shots and mudslinging. (McCain would later characterize it pretty much the same way. "George and I exchanged so many insults and charges," he wrote in his memoir. "[T]he primary became a foul brew of resentment, hatred, and sleaze.")

     Today McCain's second presidential campaign is in the midst of a remarkable revival. A few months ago, he was down and nearly out, his poll numbers plummeting and his bank account depleted. Today he is closing in on the New Hampshire lead, just 3 percentage points behind front-runner Mitt Romney, according to the latest Boston Globe poll.

     An impressive collection of odd journalistic bedfellows -- the liberal Globe and the Des Moines Register, the conservative Boston Herald and the Manchester Union-Leader, even the University of Iowa's Daily Iowan -- have all endorsed the Arizona senator. So have four quite dissimilar former secretaries of state -- Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, Lawrence Eagleburger, and George Shultz. McCain even has the blessing of Senator Joe Lieberman, the Democratic Party's vice presidential nominee in 2000. Highly opinionated and controversial politicians do not normally win support from such disparate regions of the philosophical map. If the slogan weren't so tarnished, McCain could rightly claim to be running for the White House as a uniter, not a divider.

     In the Globe's new poll, one finding caught my eye. When asked which candidate they thought “most trustworthy,” 30 percent of likely Republican voters chose McCain -- the highest tally of any candidate, Republican or Democrat. Obama, with 29 percent, is almost as highly trusted. Among Republicans, Romney’s 23 percent puts him in second place, not too far behind McCain's rating on trustworthiness. But the two men's numbers have been moving in opposite directions. The more voters get to know the candidates, the less they trust Romney -- and the more they trust McCain.

     I'm not surprised. Not because I imagine that McCain walks on water. He is plainly a flawed human being with a skeleton or two in his closet. But he strives to heed the better angels of his nature -- and he lets us see the striving. Ironically, a politician who can publicly berate himself for being “dishonest” and “a coward” is a politician voters have more reason to trust. A once and future presidential hopeful who can own up to his own moral lapses and write, with sincerity, “All my heroes . . . would have been ashamed of me,” is no ordinary candidate.

     And if there is one thing American politics badly needs these days, it is no ordinary candidate.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

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To subscribe to (or unsubscribe from) Jeff Jacoby's mailing list, please visit http://www.JeffJacoby.com. To see a month's worth of his recent columns, go to http://www.boston.com/bosto....

Jeff Jacoby welcomes comments and reads all his mail. Unfortunately, he receives so many letters that he cannot answer each one personally.

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THE ISLAMIST WAR ON WOMEN

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Sunday, December 23, 2007

http://www.boston.com/bosto...

     The “girl from Qatif” won a reprieve last week. On Dec. 17, Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah pardoned the young woman, who was sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in prison after she pressed charges against seven men who had raped her and a male acquaintance in 2006. Two weeks earlier, Sudan's president extended a similar reprieve to Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher convicted of insulting Islam because her 7-year-old students named a teddy bear Muhammad. Gibbons had been sentenced to prison, but government-organized street demonstrators were loudly demanding her execution.

     In January, Nazanin Fatehi was released from an Iranian jail after a death sentence against her was revoked. She had originally been convicted of murder for fatally stabbing a man when he and two others attempted to rape her and her niece in a park. (Had she yielded to the rapists, she could have been flogged or stoned for engaging in nonmarital sex.)

     The sparing of these women was very welcome news, of course, and it was not coincidental that each case had triggered an international furor. But for every "girl from Qatif" or Nazanin who is saved, there are far too many other Muslim girls and women for whom deliverance never comes.

     No international furor saved Aqsa Parvez, a Toronto teenager, whose father was charged on Dec. 11 with strangling her to death because she refused to wear a hijab. "She just wanted to look like everyone else," one of Aqsa's friends told the National Post, "and I guess her dad had a problem with that."

     No reprieve came for Banaz Mahmod, either. She was 20, a Kurdish immigrant to Britain, whose father and uncle had her killed last year after she left an abusive arranged marriage and fell in love with a man not from the family's village in Kurdistan. Banaz was choked to death with a bootlace, stuffed into a suitcase, and buried in a garden 70 miles away. More than 25 such "honor killings" have been confirmed in Britain's Muslim community in recent years. Many more are suspected.

     There has been no storm of outrage about the intimidation and murder in Basra, Iraq, of women who wear Western-style clothing. Iraqi police say that more than 40 women have been killed so far this year by Islamists; the bodies are often left in garbage dumps with notes accusing the victims of "un-Islamic behavior."

     By Western standards, the subjugation of women by Muslim fanatics, and the sometimes pathological Islamist obsession with female sexuality, are unthinkable. Time and again they lead to shocking acts of violence and depravity:

• In Pakistan, a tribal council ordered a woman to be gang-raped as punishment for her brother's supposed liaison with a woman from another tribe.
   
• In San Francisco, a young Muslim woman was shot dead after she uncovered her hair and put on makeup in order to be a maid of honor at a friend's wedding.
   
• In Tehran, a father beheaded his 7-year-old daughter because he suspected that she had been raped; he said he acted "to defend my honor, fame, and dignity."
   
• In Saudi Arabia, the Islamic police prevented schoolgirls from leaving a burning building because they were not wearing headscarves and abayas; 15 of the girls died in the inferno.
   
• The president of Cairo's Al-Azhar University, a renowned center of Islamic learning, described the proper method of wife-beating in a television interview: "It's not really beating," Sheikh Ahmad Al-Tayyeb explained on Egyptian television. "It's more like punching."

     When the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in 1996, the repression of women was among their first priorities. They issued a decree forbidding women to leave their homes, with the result that work and schooling for women came to a halt, destroying the country's healthcare system, civil service, and elementary education.

     "Forty percent of the doctors, half of the government workers, and seven out of 10 teachers were women," Lawrence Wright observed in *The Looming Tower,* his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of Al Qaeda. "Under the Taliban, many of them would become beggars."

     Women are not the only victims of this rampant misogyny. Mohammed Halim, a 46-year-old Afghan schoolteacher, was dragged from his family and horribly murdered last year -- disemboweled and then dismembered -- for defying orders to stop educating girls.

     All these are only examples -- the tip of a dreadful iceberg that will never be demolished until Muslims by the millions rise up against it. As for the rest of us, we too have an obligation to raise our voices. It took a worldwide outcry to spare the "girl from Qatif" and Nazanin. But there are countless others like them, and our silence may seal their fate.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

Enjoy....

http://www.andiesisle.com/t...

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 Author unknown.  Edited for content and acceptablility even tho it's not as funny.

I know this is old news as far as Romneys speech goes but found other interesting things in the article and thought I'd share.  Out of curiosity..how do you folks think Romney will do in the primaries?  The election?  Not what do you think of HIM..but how he'll do.

WHERE POLITICIANS 'DO GOD' -- AND WHERE THEY DON'T

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

http://www.boston.com/bosto...

     During Mitt Romney's four years as governor of Massachusetts, his religious beliefs never once became an issue. For anyone who fears that a Mormon elected to high office would somehow misuse his position for theological reasons, Romney's gubernatorial record offers strong evidence that such concerns are groundless.

     But prejudice about other people's religions doesn't yield easily to empirical proof, and Romney's campaign for president has had to contend from the outset with a handicap faced by no other candidate: More than 25 percent of Americans say they would not vote for a Mormon.

     "I'm amazed by how many people I know who won't vote for Mitt Romney because of his Mormonism," e-mails a friend of mine, a conservative Southern Christian. "My wife, for instance. She says, 'Anybody willing to believe things as crazy as the things Mormons believe, I can't trust his judgment.' I pointed out to her that we believe that a man was raised from the dead, that he comes to us every week under the guise of bread and wine, and that we eat him up. 'That's different,' she said."

     It remains to be seen whether Romney's much-anticipated speech in Texas tomorrow on religion and politics can allay the qualms of voters like my friend's wife. It seems clear that Romney will not follow the example of John F. Kennedy, who dealt with the "Catholic issue" in 1960 by saying in essence that if elected president, he would leave his religious views outside the Oval Office. Not only is Romney is too devoted to his faith to minimize it in that fashion, he is concerned, as he noted in New Hampshire on Monday, "that faith has disappeared in many respects from the public square."

     But the former governor might want to quote JFK's warning about the risk of imposing an unofficial religious test on office-seekers. "While this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed," Kennedy said, "in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew -- or a Quaker -- or a Unitarian -- or a Baptist. . . . Today I may be the victim -- but tomorrow it may be you."

     It was on Sunday that the Romney campaign announced the forthcoming speech, saying the candidate would discuss how his "own faith would inform his presidency if he were elected." On the same day in Britain, as it happened, the BBC broadcast an interview with former prime minister Tony Blair, who said that his Christian faith had been "hugely important" to him during his 10 years in power -- but that he had felt constrained to keep it a secret for fear of being thought a crackpot.

     "It's difficult to talk about religious faith in our political system," Blair said. "If you are in the American political system . . . you can talk about religious faith and people say, 'Yes, that's fair enough,' and it is something they respond to quite naturally. You talk about it in our system and, frankly, people do think you're a nutter."

     Apparently that was more than Blair was willing to risk. The fear of being thought ridiculous was why his press secretary had snapped, "We don't do God," when an American reporter asked the prime minister about his religious views in 2003. It was why Blair's advisers vehemently protested when he wanted to end a televised speech on the eve of the Iraq war with the words "God bless you." American presidents routinely invoke God's blessing on the nation, but Blair's spinmasters warned him against offending "people who don't want chaplains pushing stuff down their throats." (Blair told his flacks they were "the most ungodly lot," but bowed to their demand and ended the speech with a limp "thank you.")

     By American standards, it is astonishing that a British prime minister should be unable to acknowledge taking Christianity seriously without causing himself political damage. Astonishing, and terribly sad. More than an ocean separates the United States from its mother country and much of Western Europe. Here, where any establishment of religion is barred by the Constitution, religious faiths flourish, and every presidential candidate is a self-identified believer. Across the pond, where a form of Christianity has been the established religion for centuries, the church has become a hollow shell, and a politician cannot "do God" without being scorned for his irrationality.

     Mitt Romney knows that his speech isn't going to win over every voter who is uneasy at the prospect of a Mormon in the White House. Some anti-Mormon prejudice may be too entrenched to be dislodged by reason. But the very fact that Romney can give such a speech and have it draw such close and respectful attention is an indication of America's exceptional nature.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

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BY THE LIGHT OF THE WHITE HOUSE MENORAH

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Sunday, December 16, 2007

http://www.boston.com/bosto...

     On the seventh night of Hanukkah in 1944, my father was in Auschwitz. He had been deported with his parents and four of his five siblings to the Nazi extermination camp eight months earlier; by Hanukkah, only my father was still alive. That year, he kindled no Hanukkah lights. In Auschwitz, where anything and everything was punishable by death, any Jew caught practicing his religion could expect to be sent to the gas chambers, or shot on the spot.

     Like other Jewish holidays, Hanukkah was often chosen deliberately by the Nazis as an occasion for murdering Jews. In *Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust,* the historian Yaffa Eliach recounts one such slaughter:

     "The men selected were marched outside. SS men with rubber truncheons and iron prods awaited them. They kicked, beat, and tortured the innocent victims. When the tortured body no longer responded, the revolver was used. . . . The brutal massacre continued outside of the barracks until sundown. When the [Nazis] departed, they left behind heaps of hundreds of tortured and twisted bodies."

*  *  *

     On the seventh night of Hanukkah in 2007, I was in the White House. President and Mrs. Bush have made it an annual tradition to host a Hanukkah celebration in addition to the customary White House Christmas parties, and my wife and I were honored to receive an invitation to this year's reception.

     It was in every way a beautiful and festive event. It was also an unmistakably Jewish one, from the lavish buffet dinner prepared in a meticulously "koshered" White House kitchen, to the Hebrew songs performed by the Zamir Chorale, to the several hundred guests drawn from every segment of the American Jewish community. There was even a spontaneous worship service in the Green Room, where at one point about two dozen guests assembled for Ma'ariv, the Jewish evening prayers. All this in a White House richly decorated for Christmas and occupied by a president who is devoutly Christian. It is hard to imagine a more compelling illustration of the American culture of religious tolerance and freedom.

     Earlier in the evening there had been a menorah lighting in the Grand Foyer of the White House. Hanukkah commemorates the victory of Jews who fought long ago to preserve their religious identity in the face of an oppressive government determined to erase it, and President Bush spoke of the ongoing struggle for religious liberty today. "As we light the Hanukkah candles this year," he said, "we pray for those who still live under the shadow of tyranny."

     He described his private meeting earlier in the day with a small group of Jewish immigrants to the United States.

     "Many of these men and women fled from religious oppression in countries like Iran and Syria and the Soviet Union," Bush said. Among those in attendance was Baghdad-born Ruth Pearl, who was 15 when her family -- like so many other Jewish families in the Arab world -- was forced to flee from Iraq.

     She and her husband Judea, the parents of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, had come to the White House with their family menorah, which Daniel's great-grandfather Chayim had taken with him when he escaped Poland for Palestine in 1924.  Daniel was murdered in 2002 by Islamist terrorists in Pakistan; his only crime, observed Bush, "was being a Jewish American -- something Daniel Pearl would never deny."

     Auschwitz, Baghdad, Poland, Pakistan: In so many places, across so many generations, to be Jewish has meant to be oppressed, excluded, terrorized. More than most people, Jews know what it means to be a hated and persecuted minority.

     And more than most, therefore, they have reason to be profoundly grateful for the United States and its blessings. America is what the Jewish sages called "malchut shel chesed" -- a benevolent and generous nation. In the long history of the Jews, America has been a safe harbor virtually without parallel. Nowhere in all their wanderings have the Jews known such freedom, peace, and prosperity.

     So I strolled about the White House last week, gazing at the portraits of past presidents and first ladies and listening to the Marine Band play "I Have A Little Dreidel." By the light of the White House menorah, I thought about my father, and about the unimaginable distance from the hell he knew in 1944 to this place of joy and warmth where I found myself in 2007. I was overcome with a feeling of gratitude so intense that for a moment I was too choked up to speak. To be an American and a Jew is truly to be doubly blessed.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

http://www.jibjab.com/view/...

I got the pictures in an email and checked them out with snopes.  They are verified but an odd thing.  Apparently the kidnapper lived through the "negotiations."

You've GOT to try this one...it's too much fun to let pass.

http://www.elfyourself.com/...

As usual, Maxine is totally politically incorrect.

_________________________________________________ ________________

Subject: Maxine on Border Problems Everyone concentrates on the problems we're having in this country lately; illegal immigration, hurricane recovery, alligators attacking people in Florida . . Not me. I concentrate on solutions for the problems. It's a win-win situation. + Dig a moat the length of the Mexican border. + Send the dirt to New Orleans to raise the level of the levies. + Put the Florida alligators in the moat along the Mexican border. Any other problems you would like for me to solve today ?

My favorite Christmas song.  Someone sent me the link to John Berry singing this and along side on youtube was the remarkable young man doing an awesome job.  I did a little research and found he must have been about 12-13 when he did this then retired while his voice changed.  He's back on the scene according to his website.

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Received in email, verified by snopes.com

A holy man was having a conversation with the Lord one day and said, "Lord, I would like to know what Heaven and Hell are like."
 
 
The Lord led the holy man to two doors.
 
 
He opened one of the doors and the holy man looked in.  In the middle of the room was a large round table.  In the middle of the table was a large
pot of stew, which smelled delicious and made the holy man's mouth water.
 
The people sitting around the table were thin and sickly.  They appeared to be famished.  They were holding spoons with very long handles that were strapped to their arms and each found it possible to reach into the pot of stew and take a spoonful.  But because the handle was longer than their arms, they could not get the spoons back into their mouths.
 
 
The holy man shuddered at the sight of their misery and suffering.
 
 
The Lord said, "You have seen Hell."
 
 
They went to the next room and opened the door.  It was exactly the same as the first one.  There was the large round table with the large pot of
stew which made the holy man's mouth water.  The people were equipped with the same long-handled spoons, but here the people were well nourished and plump, laughing and talking.  The holy man said, "I don't understand."
 
 
It is simple," said the Lord.  "It requires but one skill.  You see they have learned to feed each other, while the greedy think only of themselves."