Chad Groening – OneNewsNow – 4/17/2009 6:00:00 AM

Ann Coulter’s latest article “Olbermann Plastic Ivy” she writes of Olbermann:

It may seem cruel to reveal the true college of someone who already wakes up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat worried that he’s a fraud. But I believe that by pointing out that Olbermann actually is a fraud, I am liberating him.

Other than Ann liberating Mr. Olbermann by revealing him to be a fraud, there is nothing untruthful about the above paragraph.  It is, however, staggeringly hypocritical and astonishingly disingenuous.

What would be more fraudulent, a person giving a false impression of their scholarly credentials or a conservative posing as a true pro-family/pro-life supporter when the opposite is true?

Would it be more devious to be “constantly lying about his nonexistent ‘Ivy League’ education” or to publicly endorse presidential candidate Mitt Romney as a conservative when you have seen irrefutable evidence to the contrary?

Is “incessant lying about having an ‘Ivy League education when he went to the non-Ivy League ag school at Cornell” more abhorrent than lying about Mitt Romney on a conservative Christian radio show not once but twice?  I wonder if Keith Olbermann would hang up on Bob Enyart for calling him a collegial phony as Ann did when Mr. Enyart pushed the Romney issue.

I have no doubt that there is some common ground to be found in Keith Olbermann’s calling “birthers” those patriotic Americans who are still demanding evidence of Barack Obama’s natural born citizenship status as Ann called the same Americans demanding the truth about Mitt Romney “liars and lunatics.”

Oh wait, Ann did both on Steve Deace’s radio show.  Steve talked at length about this on the Gregg Jackson show.

Ann, what has it been like these last few days waking “up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat worried that” people are discovering that you are a fraud?

Ann, will you do like you suggested to Keith and look back on your visits to Bob Enyart’s and Steve Deace’s radio shows and say, “That was the best thing that ever happened to me”?  Will you stop pretending, not “that you went to the hard-to-get-into Cornell”; but that you can browbeat conservatives the way you do to mush-headed liberals?  Will you stop calling patriotic Americans “Birthers” who demand that Article II, Section I of the US Constitution be enforced?

Will you humble yourself and admit you were wrong about Mitt Romney? Will you apologize for calling truth seekers “liars and lunatics”? Will you confess to disparaging a brilliant man such as John Haskins just because his exhaustive research on Romney completely annihilated your justification for endorsing a phony conservative?

If you will do these things Ann, like you told Keith, “you won’t have to quickly change the subject” or hang up the phone for that matter, anytime people bring up Mitt Romney.

Think about it Ann, like Keith you can relax.  Then you too “can let people like you for you.”

http://www.saltandlightblog.com/

“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?”

Here is the link to the entire article

Ignoring one problem will exacerbate the other.

Righting the economy will doubtlessly be President-elect Barack Obama’s first priority. He can make great strides in that effort by addressing one of the fundamental causes of higher health care costs in this country: chronic disease.
In a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll, nearly four in 10 people surveyed reported experiencing a serious financial burden caused by health care costs.

Worries about paying medical bills ranked higher than those for rent, mortgage, debt, food and even losing money in the stock market.

Chronic illness is the No. 1 culprit for the national health care burden. Chronic illness affects 45 percent of the population. And it accounts for 75 percent of overall health care spending.

In Alabama in 2003, according to a study by the Milken Institute, a non-partisan economic think tank, a key set of chronic diseases accounted for $4.7 billion in direct treatment costs and an additional $18.6 billion in lost productivity. That’s a whopping $23 billion in total costs for just one year.

Fortunately, treatments to control and even cure many chronic illnesses are emerging. Such treatments can save money over the long run by mitigating the need for expensive emergency treatments.

For instance, a cholesterol-lowering drug might mean you won’t need quadruple-bypass heart surgery.

According to a study published in the Journal of Medical Care, for every $1 spent on prescription drugs for diabetes and cholesterol, the health care system saves $7.10 and $5.10 on other medical services for each respective disease.

Unfortunately, prescription drugs are one of the most underinsured medical treatments in the country, and account for the largest share of out-of-pocket patient spending nationally.

High co-pays and sparse cover age cause millions of patients to forgo their prescribed drug regime. This is especially true in Alabama, where 14 percent of the population lacks health insurance, as does nearly a fifth of working adults ages 18 to 64.

This contributes to the epidemic of “non-adherence,” where people either don’t take their medicines or take the wrong amount. The Johns Hopkins Center for Adherence Research estimates that this problem increases national health care costs by $100 billion to $300 billion annually.

To address this problem and cut down on health care costs, employers should reduce or eliminate cost-sharing for prescription drugs in their employee insurance plans.

Public insurance programs should expand their contributions to patient drug expenses. And lawmakers and business leaders alike should encourage patients to follow their drug prescriptions in full.

Election night 2008 was a night of great anxiety and anticipation for both self-described conservatives and liberals in America. No political entity felt more tension and the potential for marginization than those of the “religious right”. They had no pure candidate in the race for president and a Democrat who had built his political strength on the rejection of conservative idealism and strong support of secular America. It was no wonder that after enjoying several years of political appeasement of their agenda, the potential for a resurgence of a culture war waged now by the secular left caused extreme angst and despair amongst many of those in the Christian conservative movement.
As a leader in the Christian right, I believe it may be premature to draw immediate conclusions on the potential agenda of the Obama administration. No doubt he has a solid base of support from the secular left and the campaign promise of rolling back restrictions on abortion and creating a new set of civil liberties for homosexuals. However, he has at least in rhetoric begun to strike a much more sober tone rather than create further tensions over these deeply divisive issues. The question remains whether he will seek to find consensus rather than controversy.
Will he, for example, instead of nullifying existing restrictions on abortion or creating a freedom of choice act by executive order, rather look for concrete ways to reduce abortions, increase adoption rates, reduce teen pregnancy, and strengthen traditional marriage and find solutions to the spiralling rate of divorce? Will he help to transform the rate of poverty and single mothers within the black community by example within his own career, modelling a life of personal responsibility and commitment to marriage? Will he choose a colour-blind society over a colour-conscious society, further diminishing the importance of race or ethnicity over that of personal achievement and accomplishment?
Similarly, the conservative movement must readjust its focus and priorities in order to create a dialogue with the new administration. We must affirm the ideal of value and worth of every individual, not just the most wealthy or affluent. We must promote the ideal of a moral and just society that rewards those that are productive, not just investment bankers and other white-collar professionals. We must strengthen our educational system to promote science, maths and engineering in order to compete in the world economy. We must promote health as a moral absolute, similarly to the sanctity of life and marriage, in order to maintain economic viability, by focusing on smoking reduction, alcohol and drug addiction, and obesity.
We must reward healthy behaviour and health maintenance over treatment of chronic disease. We cannot be a part of the problem and not part of the solution. We must work with others across the faith perspective, both progressives and conservatives and secularists in our country to focus on solutions rather than political salvoes.
It is my prayer that we as a nation can come together to make these overarching themes the priorities of this new administration. In the end, we must create a society that everyone contributes in which everyone has the opportunity to succeed and the compassion to care for those that are truly in need.

Yes, it is the end of the College Football regular season and next comes the Bowl Championship Series and the crowning of a national champion. In all the hype of ESPN and sports programs’ television advertisements, college football is regularly linked indelibly with such vice as beer, partying, and seductive co-eds, along with bad behaving street thugs, foul language, and so many off the field incidents that some schools wondered if they would be able to field a team.

But, on Saturday night, we saw a different side to the world of college football, one time when the sports media got it right as they elevated 3 outstanding and humble athletes as the finalists for the Heisman Trophy. Each young man, Sam Bradford of Oklahoma, Tim Tebow of Florida, and Colt McCoy of Texas, not only excelled individually, but also inspired their teammates to believe and exhibit such personal character and self sacrifice that drew their fellow warriors to reach beyond themselves and subjugate their personal glory for the team. The personal integrity that was the basis of each man’s personal testament was the key ingredient in each of their team’s success.

As each man spoke and his own personal narrative was revealed on national television, the common thread that each man possessed was a deep and abiding love for God and their Christian faith. While Tim Tebow’s faith was apparent to most of us that follow SEC football, and his Phillipians 4:13 emblazed on his undereyes each Saturday, both McCoy and Bradford acknowledged that their abilities were came from a divine creator that gave them life and such amazing physical attributes. In fact, it was Tebow’s fascinating Heisman run last year that was such an inspiration for athletes across America to strive for perfection as they use their abilities and success on the field to be a platform to serve others and share Christ to those at home and far away lands such Tim’s has done as a short term missionary in the Philippines.

When finally the name of Sam Bradford was named as the Heisman winner, he immediately turned to his fellow competitors and embraced them, then his parents and his coaches. As he rose to speak at the podium, he

immediately acknowledged and thanked God for his achievement and his dependency on him.
Indeed, for those of us who have witnessed with distain the behavior and image of football, the ability to see such greatness on the field be supplanted by such selfless service off the field gave me an opportunity for pause. Maybe, the examples of these fine men can translate into a new standard of behavior for football players across the country ranging from the Pop Warner leagues to the Professional level. Coaches, players, and fans alike can now look only to those Heisman quarterbacks of 2008, to see that excellence on the field of play and leadership of a team can be coupled if those players seek excellence based on a God given commitment to self sacrifice, not self glory. After all, isn’t that the message of what Christ tells all of us. We are to seek him first, and humbly commit to his leading, if we are to obtain his forgiveness and salvation.

It is my prayer that the body of Christ will lift these young men up in prayer and use their testimony to inspire and transform our next generation of leaders.

Thank you
Dr Randy Brinson

We will be discussing the issues of the day weekly on this site and welcome your responses, whether you agree or disagree with our conclusions. The goal is to have a vigorous dialogue so that we can propose concrete conservative solutions based on principle, rather than political gain or favor.

We are hoping that all of you have a very Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year…

Dr. Randy Brinson

Chairman, Redeem the Vote