Spc. Eric D. Salinas made his last trip home to Houston this morning. I, along with around 30 other members of the Southeast Texas Patriot Guard Riders, greeted the plane carrying his body and escorted him to the funeral home. Spc. Salinas was killed in Iraq last week when an IED exploded near his Stryker vehicle.
There are many emotions that run through your mind when you participate in one of these missions. The overwhelming burden of sadness is omnipresent, it’s tentacles gripping every nerve. The frustration at seeing another life cut short. The fear that more will follow.
As I sat in the last row of pews in the small chapel of the funeral home, listening to the grieving cries of Spc. Salinas’ aunt and best friend, I wept for their loss. And I wept for his young son Anthony, faced with a future without a father to teach him the ways of life, a father to correct him when his path strays, a dad to hold him in times of sorrow.
But I have found that those emotions will pass and that hope will replace them all. The hope that comes from the very life lost, that shows me that there is a greater love.
Spc. Salinas gave his life for me. So that I might live in peace, in a country that values the hopes and dreams of a foreign people as much as our own. In a country full of individuals like Spc. Salinas, individuals that want to make a difference in this world.
Spc. Salinas, thank you for your service. Thank you for sacrifice. May our country not waste your example.
Another example of how lucky we are to be living in a democracy:
TRIPOLI, Libya - The son of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi has acknowledged that the Bulgarian medical workers who were jailed on charges of infecting children with HIV were tortured during captivity, Al-Jazeera TV said on its Web site Thursday.
The doctor and five nurses were released last month and have maintained that their confessions were extracted through torture.
“Yes, they were tortured by electricity and they were threatened that their family members would be targeted,” Seif al-Islam Gadhafi was quoted as saying by the Arab broadcaster.
Hmmm, doesn’t that sound a lot like another former dictactor and his jackal offspring?
How did these throwbacks get transported to our time anyway?
The medical workers said they endured torture and rape — abuses under which they made admissions.
One of the nurses, 41-year-old Nasya Nenova, said she tried to commit suicide out of fear of further torture.
Another, Kristiana Valcheva, has said she “was tortured with electric shocks, beaten and submitted to every kind of torture known since the Middle Ages.”
And, can you imagine, no help from the Libyan judicial system?
In 2005, the six medics filed lawsuits against 10 Libyan officers alleging torture, but the charges were rejected by a Libyan court.
Wow, I bet they were shocked by that outcome.
And in the “it would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic” department, just a few years back, in 2003, the United Nations appointed Libya to head its Human Rights Commission. In the uproar that followed, this same Seif Gadhafi offered this classic comment (which could have come straight out of a Mel Brooks movie):
“We have a better human rights record than our neighbours. Sure, we are not Switzerland or Denmark; we are part of the Third World and part of the Middle East. But we are better than our neighbours”.
Maybe I need to stop reading the news. It sometimes makes me think I am in the Twilight Zone.
Perhaps we need a contest for the best, “Sure, we’re a terrorist country/organization/group, but we’re better than ……………”
Please, make me laugh.
Estados Unidos
by The Panda Man · 08/09/2007 1:07 pmGeorge W. Bush and his open-borders cronies must be positively beaming today.
In a powerful sign of the region’s growing diversity, more Hispanics than Anglos now live in Harris County as it led the nation in growth of minority residents, according to Census Bureau estimates to be released today.
This historic demographic shift reflects persistent immigration, high birth rates among Latinos and ongoing migration to outlying suburban counties, experts say. And a dramatic increase in
Harris County ’s black population is partly attributed to an influx of residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
I’m not a big fan of the term “Anglo” but I also find all of this racial labeling and bean-counting distasteful, so I should probably cut the liberals some slack. After all, our politically correct friends at the Chron are hard-pressed to come up with enough euphemisms for non-whites. Thus we have bizarre sentences like this:
The minority population in the county is 2.5 million as of July 2006, or 63 percent of the total 3.9 million residents. In 2005, the county’s population was 3.7 million.
That’s right readers, the minority is the majority, but is still the minority. Isn’t political correctness wonderful? Thanks for that clear reporting, Chron! Elsewhere we find that the open-borders crowd is winning.
”All you have to do is go down to Southwest Houston, which is like our Ellis Island, and see who is standing at the bus stops,” said Joe Rubio, vice president of Community Relations for Catholic Charities. ”You’ll see people in native dress from all over the world.”
”[Harris] county is evolving into a diverse and multi-ethnic place that is making it a forerunner of what the
United States is becoming,” Eschbach said.
Folks, your country is being given away right before your very eyes. Naturally, the knee-jerk reaction from the open-borders crowd is to call anyone making such a statement a racist, but this is a tired, baseless charge from people who know they are wrong. Borders, language, and culture make up a nation, and all of these things are placed in jeopardy by massive, decades-long immigration of both the legal and illegal varieties, which is exactly what we continue to experience. There is no room for debate on this. The truth is simply what it is.
Laughably, the Chron goes on to suggest that
Experts say minority population growth will affect education, health services, the number of minorities elected to political office and have an impact on the city’s economic development.
Wow, did it require a college degree and taxpayer-funded studies to figure that out? With the county becoming “majority minority” more “minorities” will be elected to government. Who would have thought?
”We’re trying to prepare to build the infrastructure that’s necessary” to accommodate growth and improve quality of life, said Harris County Commissioner Sylvia Garcia, citing roads, bridges, parks, health clinics, and hike and bike trails.
Yes, friends, only now does
Do you make $60,000 a year and want to buy a new Mustang? Well, it’s your lucky day:
Low-income drivers in 16 Texas counties will soon be eligible for financial aid to replace old vehicles.
By the end of the year, the state will begin offering up to $3,500 in vouchers to replace pre-1996 vehicles, some of the heaviest polluters on the roads.
And just what counts as “low-income?”
an owner’s annual income cannot exceed $61,000
Lovely. Now let’s hear from the genius behind this legislation:
“By cleaning up some of the old cars and getting them off the road, you could put a real dent in the pollution numbers,” said state Sen. Kip Averitt, R[INO]-Waco, who led the bill through the Legislature.
Kip, buy ‘em a damn bicycle. Let’s hop on over to Kip’s Senate page and see his other illustrious achievements:
During the past two legislative sessions, Averitt was chosen to fulfill leadership roles on major legislative efforts, including school finance reform and design of the state’s $140 billion biennial budget.
Yeah, that went really well.
Averitt’s leadership has also been recognized by the…Texas Municipal League
Oh goody. Averitt has abandoned any pretense of economic conservatism, and he should be replaced by someone who believes that people should pay for their own cars.
Living in a largely Hispanic community for many years I’ve seen evidence that the more educated Hispanics become the more they recognize that the policies of Democrats are not in their, or the country’s, best interest. New studies shows that observation is more than anecdotal:
Democrats hold an edge with Hispanics in national elections, but Latinos’ growing tendency to register as independents and split their vote between parties is buoying Republican prospects for 2008.
Younger and college-educated Hispanics in particular offer fertile ground for Republicans, new data shows. And while no one suggests Republicans have become the party of choice for the United States’ fastest-growing minority, Democrats have been gradually losing ground.
Back in the 1960s similar thing happened in the South. My grandparents were old school Democrats because, well, that’s what you were in the South. It was a bit disturbing to the old-timers when my parents joined the Young Republicans and campaigned for Barry Goldwater in 1964. The evidence suggests a similar event may be happening with Hispanics, particularly after a couple of generations removed from immigration:
Pineda said Hispanic immigrants who become citizens and register to vote become Democrats in nearly 70 percent of the cases, with Republican registration at 18 percent. In the next generation, Democratic registration drops to 56 percent and Republican registration increases to 25 percent. By the third U.S.-born generation, Democratic and Republican registration among Hispanics is nearly equal.
While newer arrivals to the United States feel more strongly about immigration issues, subsequent generations share the concerns of Main Street America — the war, taxes, education, crime, he said.
“We need to … make our case on those issues, otherwise we are going to lose them,” Pineda said.
Republican polling in the California governor’s race last year found that college-educated Hispanics who make more than $60,000 a year are more receptive to Republican ideas than are those with less education and income.
This may explain the Democrats (and many Republicans) obsession with amnesty. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues in the 2008 elections given the rancor over the failed immigration reform bill.
As lots of folks have been saying for some time, this Presidential race started far too early to maintain the voters’ interest:
The AFL-CIO Democratic forum last night on MSNBC, was the lowest rated-yet of the eight primary debates/forums held this election season. Based on live +same day data, Nielsen found the debate had 960,000 total viewers and 340,000 viewers in the 25-54 demo.
This should surprise no one. The political class’ contempt for the voting public compels them to conclude that we must hear them prattle on for a year or more before the messages finally penetrate our neanderthal skulls. Memo to the pols: We’ve been listening for months, and aren’t all that impressed.
Once upon a time, the parties spent several months nominating their candidates. After that, the true presidential campaign started at Labor Day, making it a merciful eight-week season. Can anyone truly say that the longer campaign seasons have somehow improved the quality of our choices? (If you can’t make up your mind between two candidates in a two-month period, perhaps you have bigger problems than the Presidential election.)
Fred Thompson earlier pointed out that candidates used to announce in November or December before the election, sometimes as late as January. And Tuesday, Newt Gingrich said the process was too long and bordered on the “insane,” adding that the endless debates have become “almost unendurable.” (Undoubtedly, Newt will claim to have said it first and that everybody else got the idea from him.)
What if they held a Presidential debate and nobody came?
More importantly, what would LST do with all its extra blog space?
Chron: Quanell X may be “off-putting at times”
by Owen Courrèges · 08/09/2007 8:02 amJames Campbell has posted another reply to concerns raised over the Houston Chronicle quoting Quanell X with extreme frequency. Of course, he completely ignores Mr. X’s radicalism, and then defers to Mike Glenn, a Chronicle reporter who uses Mr. X quite often:
On this particular issue - concerns about police abuse - I believe there is simply nobody in the community who has been more vocal and more active about setting forth his opinion. And if readers think I use too many inflammatory quotes from Quanell in the articles, they should read what gets left behind!
While he certainly has an agenda - and there’s nothing particularly wrong with that - I would oppose exiling Quanell to some sort of journalistic limbo simply because some people think he can be a bit off-putting at times. Of course, maybe it’s just because he returns my phone calls.
BIGGEST. UNDERSTATEMENT. EVER.
My goodness, “some people think he can be a bit off-putting at times?” He suggested to blacks during the Gary Graham execution that “[i]f you feel that you just got to mug somebody because of your hurt and your pain, go to River Oaks and mug you some good white folks.”
That line got him kicked out of an organization, the Nation of Islam, which refers to whites as “devils” and teaches that a black scientist created whites 6,000 years ago. Dejected, Mr. X joined up with the New Black Panther Party, which basically preaches the systematic murder of all whites.
Yup, I’d say this is more than off-putting. It’s a smidge scary.
Seeking to maximize the opportunity present, with bodies still not recovered and fear of crumbling bridges in the U.S. rampant, House Democrats introduced legislation Wednesday that would raise federal gasoline taxes by 21.4% per gallon.
One weary week after the Interstate35W bridge collapse, a senior federal lawmaker from Minnesota proposed sweeping legislation to establish a trust fund dedicated to repairing the nation’s aging, deficient bridges.
The proposal by Rep. Jim Oberstar (D-Minn.), chairman of the House Transportation Committee, would be aimed at repairing 73,784 bridges from coast-to-coast rated “structurally deficient”—with a price tag that could be as much as $188 billion by one estimate. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) pledged to support the plan.
Utterly despicable that the first thing a Democrat politician thinks about during a tragedy is “how much revenue can we bring in from this”.
As the political debate swirled, searchers and federal divers at the site worked nearly round-the clock and in painstaking detail to find at least eight people who remain missing. Authorities have mapped 88 vehicles in the Mississippi River but did not say what was in them. Five people were confirmed dead in the last week and more than 80 injured.
I have a suggestion for Rep. Oberstar (D) and Speaker Pelosi (D): before you worry about raising taxes, could you perhaps spare a dime and buy the searchers and divers a cup of coffee? Truly sick.
‘We do not care about the issue of rights’
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