Doing anything special for the 4th? I might slide by a “Tea Party” protest…what are you up to?

Discuss this and anything else you’ve a mind to.

Is the left merely attacking religion to exalt reason? Hardly – it is an attack upon both, because faith and reason are bound up together:

…the Faith and the use of the intelligence are inextricably bound up. The use of reason is a main part – or rather the foundation – of all inquiry into the highest things. It was precisely because reason was given this divine authority that the Church proclaimed mystery – that is, admitted reason to have its limits. It had to be so, lest the absolute powers ascribed to reason should lead to the exclusion of truths which the reason might accept but could not demonstrate. Reason was limited by mystery only more to enhance the sovereignty of reason in its own sphere.

When reason is dethroned, not only is Faith dethroned (the two subversions go together) but every moral and legitimate activity of the human soul is dethroned at the same time. There is no God. So the words “God is Truth” which the mind of Christian Europe used as a postulate in all it did, cease to have meaning. None can analyse the rightful authority of government nor set bounds to it. In the absence of reason, political authority reposing on mere force is boundless. And reason is thus made a victim because Humanity itself is what the Modern Attack is destroying in its false religion of humanity. Reason being the crown of man and at the same time his distinguishing mark, the Anarchs march against reason as their principle enemy. – Hilaire Belloc, The Great Heresies

Hoping that they can cook to books to the point where they can avoid the full amount of absolutely necessary spending cuts:

California’s top accountant said the state would begin issuing IOUs to hundreds of thousands of creditors after lawmakers failed to meet its deadline this week to close a massive budget deficit.

California Controller John Chiang said Wednesday he planned to send out $3.4 billion of IOUs in July to state contractors and local governments, as well as to residents expecting income-tax refunds, welfare grants and college scholarships…

…Mr. Chiang said without IOUs, the state would run out of cash by the end of July. “It’s our last official step prior to defaulting,” he said. Mr. Chiang delayed similar payments in February because of another cash-flow emergency, but didn’t issue IOUs at that time.

Legislators have been deadlocked for more than a month on ways to close what is now a $26 billion deficit in a $92 billion general-fund budget. Late-night sessions failed to produce a compromise.

Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed deep cuts and some so-called revenue accelerations, which would include larger income-tax withholding. Democrats, who control the Legislature, countered with a $21 billion proposal that includes $11 billion of cuts and relies more heavily on accounting gimmicks and one-time fixes. Republican lawmakers on Tuesday rejected the latest Democratic plan, which Mr. Schwarzenegger said he would veto anyway. (emphasis added)

Gimmicks! The California economy is collapsing under an avalanche of tax and spend liberalism, and the liberals want to use sleight of hand to get out of it…knowing that it will only put off the day of reckoning to next July. Perhaps they hope the economy will recover, or Santa ‘Bama will come down the chimney with a hundred billion dollars of taxpayer goodies…more likely, they are just afraid and simply want to get to the next day without having to expose themselves to an unpopular vote.

This is what you want for us, liberals? This is your State – GOPers have only slight influence, and have had only slight influence for the past decade in California…and conservatism has had no influence at all (except at the ballot boxes when referenda come up for a vote, and even then, sometimes, it doesn’t come through). This should be a paradise – a place of education and health care for all, no more crime, no more pollution, steady “sustainable” growth, racial harmony…where is it, liberals? To use an old phrase, “where’s the beef”? If you can’t do it with 30 million people, why should we believe you that you can do it with 300 million?

The hits keep coming:

A Puerto Rican civil rights organization advised by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor campaigned against seating conservative Robert Bork on the high court in the late 1980s, according to new documents that shed light on the group that’s become a key focus of Republicans questioning Sotomayor’s fitness to be a justice.

The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund officially opposed GOP nominee Bork in 1987, “because of the threat he poses to the civil rights of the Latino community,” its president reported in one of several documents from the group that the Senate Judiciary Committee released Wednesday. The 350-plus pages of material offer little evidence about Sotomayor’s role in the cases and causes the organization, now known as LatinoJustice PRLDEF, took up while she served on its board from 1980 until 1992.

So, she’s part of a group which slandered Judge Bork over his views, and now she wants to be on the Supreme Court? I don’t think so.

Of course, she’ll get confirmed – the questions are rising and its clear that Sotomayor is unfit to be a Justice, but Democrats will not want to hand Obama a defeat like this early on and the GOP can’t even slow things down, even if we wanted to “do a Democrat” and try for a filibuster…we simply lack the votes.

But we can hang this vote on vulnerable Democrats – she’s someone who has un-American views about justice and who thinks race more important than truth…for some moderate Democrats, this vote will be hard to explain to the folks back home.

Which fact amazes me.

Uh, governor – Pound sand. Get lost. Hit the road – the sooner you’re out of politics, the better.

Wouldn’t surprise me:

On the campaign trail, Barack Obama promised that he would “reboot America’s image” around the world. Indeed, many Americans who voted for Obama believed that his global popularity would somehow reverse the tide of anti-Americanism that so vexed his predecessor. Echoing this sentiment of Obama as savior of America’s image abroad, presidential advisor David Axelrod recently asserted that “anti-Americanism isn’t cool anymore.”

In Europe, where anti-Americanism was elevated to the status of a religion during the presidency of George W. Bush, the “chattering classes” have, by and large, toned down their criticism of the United States since Obama was elected. In general, European media coverage of Obama has been quite favorable and the vehemence of the anti-American rhetoric has been notably more muted than in recent years. But now, five months into the age of Obama, the highly vaunted transatlantic honeymoon may be coming to an end. During the past several weeks, European media have started publishing stories that criticize Obama and once again cast the United States in a negative light. Could this be a harbinger of things to come?

The linked article goes on to note the increasing stream of anti-Obama and/or anti-American articles pouring out of the European MSM – some of these articles I’ve seen, and what I catch from them is a sense of betrayal: the EU-niks were hoping, I guess, that Obama would immediately make us just like them and, perhaps, haul President Bush before a war crimes tribunal. Of course, we here at home view Obama increasingly as an Euro-weenie trying to out yellow-belly the most cowardly people in the world – but for the Europeans, its always been a choice: deal with Europe’s glaring failures, or condemn the United States for errors real and imagined. Almost invariably, the choice has come down to condemning the United States.

And, once again, it is because of what we are, not what we do. Obama is doing plenty to please even the most kooky Euro-leftist, and its not enough….because America is still America: still more powerful than any other nation, still richer than any other nation, still more dynamic than any other nation, still more free than any other nation. Deep in their heart of hearts, I think, they realize that we’ll transcend Obamunism in the by and by and we’ll once more be surging ahead while Europe tries to balance the need for workers with the worry about eventual Islamist beheadings. They really, really want to be on top of the world, and they can’t stand the fact that they’re not, and never will be. This resentment is now being turned on Obama.

All of this just illustrates that America can never set its policy based upon concern for what people think of us. It really doesn’t matter what we do – those who are enslaved to lies will hate us, come what may. Much better, than, to just do the right thing and realize that in the long run, these chatterers will be forgotten while the man who did the right thing will live on in memory for ages to come.

• Twitter Updates for 2009-06-30 http://tinyurl.com/n3q3l2 #
• Twitter Updates for 2009-06-30 http://tinyurl.com/loy4k8 #
• What Media Bias? Part 152 http://tinyurl.com/kp727h #
• Israeli Navy Battles Kookery on the High Seas http://tinyurl.com/lbscmg #
• Free Speech is Unfair? http://tinyurl.com/nvdqop #
• Bono’s Ode to Mary http://tinyurl.com/mk9fcw #
• Phrase of the Day http://tinyurl.com/ma3zyo #
• A Question to Ponder http://tinyurl.com/lj7czy #
• Planned Parenthood Breaks the Law, Again http://tinyurl.com/ncvquk #
• If You Wish to Study History… http://tinyurl.com/ma8puf #
• Representative Waxman (D-CA) Hospitalized http://tinyurl.com/lj63m7 #
• Obama to Hide From the American People http://tinyurl.com/mtg73y #

But I thought he was so brilliant and so with it and so in tune with us – what is he worried about?

With Congress away on recess, President Barack Obama is stepping up his sales pitch for health care reform, tapping online social media in a new end run around the traditional news filter.

At a town hall today in Annandale, Obama will answer questions from a live audience, and also from users of popular online communities including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

“The president wanted to continue the conversation that we started last week with town halls,” said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. It’s “a continuing conversation about how to move health care reform forward.”

Although the format opens up the opportunity for questioning Obama to a potentially limitless online audience, the White House controls which questions are asked.

The White House in April staged its first such “virtual” town hall on the economy and invited Internet users to post questions and vote on which ones the president should answer.

One of the leading topics chosen by participants was whether the United States should legalize marijuana as a way to curb drug violence in Mexico.

Obama laughed it off at the time, but the online voting feature is not part of the setup for Annandale. “This online town hall will be a little different than the last one,” the administration told users on its WhiteHouse.gov Web site post announcing the forum.

The probable worry here is the people will vote “how are we going to pay for this?” as a question to be asked. They also might decide to go off-topic a bit and ask why he wants to reach out to the newly bloodstained hands of the Iranian mullahs. In other words, as Obama’s Administration advances, there come ever larger numbers of questions Obama and Co would rather not be asked…so, the filters are on. By 2012, I’ll bet that only Obama’s immediate family and political donors are allowed to ask questions…

The story:

Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman remained in the hospital in his home state of California on Wednesday, a day after fainting in his office.

Waxman, 69, was not feeling well Tuesday and was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles for “routine testing,” spokeswoman Karen Lightfoot said.

In a brief update late in the day, Waxman’s staff disclosed that the congressman had fainted in his district office in California.

The obligatory joke: he fainted when he added up his grand-children’s share of the “Cap and Trade” bill…

That aside, we pray for Mr. Waxman’s speedy recovery.

…which three books would you consider vital?

For me, I’d have to plunk down for The Fall of the House of Hapsburg by Edward Crankshaw, Caesar and Christ by Will and Ariel Durant and War Through the Ages by Lynn Montross.

The Fall because it takes us through European History from 1848 to 1914 through the prism of the Hapsburg Monarchy and exposes the various stresses which led to the collapse of European civilization in the cataclysm of the First World War and, also, it cuts through a lot of the fog surrounding that time and shows that for all its errors, there was much merit in a supra-national government as a counter-balance to rampant nationalism.

Caesar and Christ because it covers that pivotal time of human history – more important than any other – which contained within it the life of Christ, the rise of Christianity and the rise and fall of the Roman empire. Understanding our world is not possible without an understanding of that period from approximately 200 BC to 400 AD.

War because an understanding of the military is vital for anyone who wishes to understand the mechanism by which the most startling changes have taken place in our society and how that mechanism reflects the strengths and weaknesses of the societies.

What are your picks, and why?