With May comes an abundance of flowers — and vegetables, as my garden attests — and the sweet aroma of an active Borg Blog.
But most importantly this year, May brought good news to my extended family, as my brother Jon and his wife Jen welcomed their first child, Bodie Daniel Langborgh.
On the other end of life’s spectrum, we paused to remember the sacrifices of our brave servicemen who have fought and died to protect our freedoms and our homes, so that Bodie and others would be able to enjoy the America we have. See my post and the linked short video: “Arlington: A Salute to the Fallen Brave.”
Also, Jerry Falwell died this past month, and his enemies took no time to spit on his grave. See “Assassinating the Dead.”
May 2007 also brought in the 2008 presidential election sweepstakes in a big way. (And I can’t believe I just wrote that.) Since so much is going to be decided so early, I’ve reluctantly decided to pay attention. So I give you my “Thoughts on the First GOP Presidential Debate.” But as noteworthy as that debate was, it paled in comparison to the second Republican debate, which featured an irate Rudy Giuliani denouncing the little known Ron Paul. Well, because of that, Dr. Paul is now much better known — and I am very pleased to say it has given his campaign, and not Rudy’s, a huge boost. In fact, in one area, Dr. Paul is now lapping the field. The oddsmakers have noticed this, too — and they carry much more weight than the pollsters at this point — as I explain in “Letting It Ride on Ron Paul.”
The controversy that has led to this political boon for Dr. Paul was his statement during the second debate that it is not our freedoms that have primarily incited an ever-growing army of Muslims to radicalize and strap bombs to their backs in order to take out Americans, but decades of our own interventionist foreign policy in the Middle East. Giuliani and the GOP establishment thought this statement to be beyond the pale. But Dr. Paul is right. Moreover, the leading expert on Osama Bin Laden agrees with Dr. Paul, as I report in my post, “Terrorism and Bin Laden Expert Has a Lesson for Giuliani.”
And yet, social conservatives seem set on supporting that most liberal of all the Republican candidates, Rudy Giuliani. This is pathetic. See “Social Conservatives Selling Their Souls” to learn more about what surveys of this voting block reveal.
If you would have asked ten years ago any conservative if they would even consider voting for a pro-abortion, pro-homosexual candidate for president, they’d all laugh and look at you like you were out of your mind. My, how far we have fallen: “Social conservatives bite bullet, back Rudy”(The Politico)
Mike Huckabee, the governor of Arkansas and Republican candidate for president, put it well:
“If social conservatives don’t coalesce around issues that brought them in, then they really do no longer serve a political constituency that has clout. If they become just another Republican special interest group then they really are no different than the Republican women of Pulaski County, Ark.”
Shouldn’t we finally raise our voices and place our votes in support of the one candidate who the Christian Founders of this nation would recognize as their political soulmate?
We rightly oppose state gambling operations because of their destructive nature for both the individual and the community. So why do we gamble with politics, placing our money on and votes with the horse we think “most likely” to win? Haven’t the results been just as destructive to all we hold dear? Shouldn’t we rather stand on principle, and act on faith in God’s good and perfect will? Perhaps then we shall receive His blessing. For why should we expect His blessing when we gamble on the “lesser of two evils”?
I believe that gambling, when taken beyond simple, friendly entertainment, is sinful. It is poor stewardship, at the very least, and does nothing to create value for society. It is not like placing capital at risk in order to create a new business, product, or innovation, where success is rewarded by profit. Rather, the gambler seeks only to enrich himself, while placing in jeopardy his well-being, and often that of his family, as well.
But in another sense it is similar to capitalism. It is so in this way: people will place their money on what they believe in — and the odds then reflect some tangible good that the “market” sees. In other words, there is reward for being right, and the oddsmakers perform a function very similar to prices, making constant adjustments to take into account supply, demand, and perceived value.
The fact that there is high-stakes gambling going on, then, can tell us a whole lot about how strong a horse or team actually is, because in the aggregate, those that are placing money on the table know what they are talking about and stand to win or lose based on that knowledge. And people these days gamble on all sorts of things, from the most minute stats in sports to the election of the President of the United States of America. So, the odds placed on political races, for instance, tell us a whole lot more than the polls do. In fact, there is one gambling outfit out of London, I believe, that has correctly predicted every major political race for years (decades?), though I forgot which one. But the polls, as we saw in the 2000 elections, can be and often are way off from reality.
Which brings me to the point of this post. The gamblers are really liking Rep. Ron Paul’s prospects for the White House right now. In fact, at the major online gambling site, Sportsbook.com, the odds on Dr. Paul winning not just the Republican nomination, but the general election even — have been slashed dramatically in the past two weeks. Then, the odds were 200:1 against Dr. Paul winning. Now, they are listed at 15:1. That’s more than a 13-fold improvement in almost a blink of the eye.
And what happened two weeks ago? This happened. And as I reported more recently, the grassroots have made their presence known big time in support of the lone constitutionalist and non-interventionist in the Republican presidential field. “We will likely be slashing odds further in the coming weeks and quite possibly days,” a representative of the gambling site was quoted as saying in an article at Gambling911.com, “since Ron Paul’s momentum is really building.” Read the rest of this entry »
Well, there is an interesting choice of a word: “skeptics.” It is a word oft applied to those who deny religious claims. This, taken with his twice-stated claim that his opposition “hadn’t read the bill” — despite that fact that Bush and the congressional supporters of this bill tried to ram-rod it through without giving legislators a chance to read or debate it — makes clear what the president expects from other Republicans in elected office: blind-faith in the Administration.
On what basis should conservatives have blind faith in President Bush, I ask? Under his watch, the federal government has grown in size and scope at a faster pace than at any time since LBJ’s Great Society. As if to prove that “compassionate conservative” is a synonym for big government liberalism, the president has seen fit to veto just two bills to date, offering no brake to a spend-thrift congress. The intelligence the administration relied upon to make the case for launching (an unconstitutional) war on Iraq has proven seriously flawed, and not to be relied upon in the future without — here’s that word again — a skeptical eye. Even the one shining accomplishment of the Bush Presidency — the appointment of (apparently so far) conservative, originalist justices to the bench — would not be so bright if it weren’t for the exercise of conservative skepticism. Blind faith would have given us Harriet Miers, not Sam Alito.
The fact of the matter is that many conservatives have read the Bush-Kennedy immigration bill and are simply appalled by what they have found. These critics include the foremost conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, as well as the former Attorney General under President Ronald Reagan, the Hon. Ed Meese. So Bush’s complaint is unfounded.
In dismissing his conservative critics as “skeptics,” Bush is signaling his expectation that we should simply stand in line behind him and stop asking questions. His demand for blind faith in and unquestioning allegiance to him is unwarranted. More than that, it is inappropriate of a leader. The demand does nothing to engender trust from conservatives in this administration. Rather, it is one more reason among many to not trust President Bush.
I’ve resolved to keep a better tally of what I’ve read and am reading, rather than simply the evidence of my overflowing bookshelf. What better place than this blog? And what better time to start than now, beginning with recent completions?
Not everyone chose to honor the valor of our fallen soldiers this Memorial Day. See my latest post at The ACRU Blog — “Respect for Our Fallen Braves, M.I.A.” — to learn how low some among us can go.
Dr. Ron Paul, Republican candidate for President, is already the king of the internet.
A week ago today, I wrote here how the GOP’s establishment’s efforts to freeze Dr. Paul out of future presidential debates has backfired badly. At that time, his website was already attracting more visitors than any other candidate, and was the top search of any sort at Technorati, the great tabulator of the blogs. Concerning the latter, there are now, at this minute, 61,674 blog posts about Ron Paul recorded by Technorati. Many are critical, of course, but an increasing percentage are highly favorable. And all are boosting the name recognition of this “second-tier” candidate.
Also at that time a week ago, the congressman from Texas had nearly 8,000 YouTube subscribers, three times as many as the top three GOP candidates according to the polls.
Today, Dr. Paul has 12,489 subscribers to the premier video site on the Web — twice as many as all the other declared Republican candidates combined. Here are the numbers:
Ron Paul is also lapping the top Democrats in the race for the White House; he has twice as many YouTube subscribers as Barack Obama (5,988) and nearly four times as many as Hillary Clinton (3,517). Here is the Ron Paul 2008 YouTube channel.
As I said in my aforementioned post, buzz on the web doesn’t necessarily translate at the polls. But this is amazing, and highly encouraging. Afterall, you can bet that any other candidate would be trumpeting these results if they were their own, claiming that they indicate very strong grassroots support. And they’d be right.
Democrat Howard Dean vaulted to the top of the polls in the 2004 presidential campaign by virtue of the support he raised on the Internet. His campaign ultimately collapsed in Iowa, but his example proves that strong grassroots support on the Internet can lead to substantial moneys being raised for the campaign. That, in turn, can lead to plausibility for the campaign and consideration as a legitimate contender for the party’s nomination.
We don’t know how much financial support the Paul campaign has been able to raise as a result of its phenomenal grassroots network on the Internet. It will be revealing the next time the campaigns release their fundraising numbers to date. Perhaps you will do your part to help make Ron Paul into a legitimate contender and to give his ideas considerable impact on the race for the White House? Visit RonPaul2008.com to learn more.
UPDATE:National Review Online has posted a good and generally even-handed article on the Ron Paul phenomena, written by Peter Suderman and titled, “Not the ‘Ron’ You Were Looking For?”
Just up the road from my house is Arlington National Cemetery. More than four million people visit the cemetery annually, many coming to pay final respects at graveside services, of which nearly 100 are conducted each week. Brave soldiers from every war in which America has fought — from the Revolutionary War to the current War on Terror, are buried here, in recognition of their profound bravery and sacrifice to protect the lives of their loved ones and freedom for their fellow Americans. More than 250,000 grave sites adorn the rolling hills of Arlington, joining hundreds of thousands more across America, in Europe, and across the Pacific.
In honor of this national Memorial Day holiday — and of the sacrifices of the brave servicemen throughout our history who gave all that we might gain and keep our freedoms and our homes — I post the following video, set to Trace Adkins’ moving song, “Arlington.”
If you would have asked ten years ago any conservative if they would even consider voting for a pro-abortion, pro-homosexual candidate for president, they’d all laugh and look at you like you were out of your mind. My, how far we have fallen: 
I believe that gambling, when taken beyond simple, friendly entertainment, is sinful. It is poor stewardship, at the very least, and does nothing to create value for society. It is not like placing capital at risk in order to create a new business, product, or innovation, where success is rewarded by profit. Rather, the gambler seeks only to enrich himself, while placing in jeopardy his well-being, and often that of his family, as well.
As the president tends to do from time to time, George W. Bush came out swinging today in a 
Dr. Ron Paul, Republican candidate for President, is already the king of the internet.