Entangling alliances

In his “Farewell Address,” George Washington famously advised America to engage in commerce with everyone, but to avoid getting involved in Europe’s politics, concluding, “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”

Thomas Jefferson, in his inaugural address, echoed the sentiment: “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”

Strangely enough, this has rarely worked for us.  In spite of the natural defences of two oceans, neutrality has never lasted for the U.S.A.

• Britain, not quite over losing its best colony, dragged us into the War of 1812 by kidnapping American sailors at sea, encouraging Native American tribes to attack our western frontiers, and trying to prevent the U.S. from trading with France.
• We got into the Civil War (with casualties equal to the combined casualties of every U.S. war from the Revolution through most of Vietnam) and the Mexican-American War (over Texas’ secession from Mexico and subsequent annexation by the U.S.) all by ourselves, no Europeans necessary.
• We tried to avoid WWI, but the isolationists lost the argument when the Zimmerman Telegram was revealed, where German diplomats were discussing bringing Mexico into the war to fight the U.S. if the U.S. were to join on Britain’s side.  The Germans promised to argue for Mexico’s recovery of territories lost to the U.S., including Texas.  We did not enter WWI on the strength of our alliances (in fact, there was a great deal of doubt as to whether the U.S. would side with Britain or Germany).
• We tried to avoid WWII.  We were dragged into that one by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  Although we had alliances with the countries we’d fought alongside in WWI, those alliances were not what brought us into WWII.

Although rarely truly isolationist, the U.S. has not done a bad job of avoiding “entangling alliances.”  We have been rather poor at avoiding wars, but at least they were mostly not for the sake of rigid adherance to alliances.

I think we finally found one that we can’t say no to, though: money.  While not technically an alliance in the way Washington and Jefferson were advising against, this one is much more dangerous.

President Obama just submitted a new budget to Congress.  Something like 40% of his $3.8 Trillion budget will have to be borrowed.  Much of that borrowed money will be from China, if they continue to choose to invest in us.  Of course, if they don’t, we’re pretty much SOL (and I don’t mean the Virginia Standards of Learning).

In totally unrelated news, China has announced that President Obama should not meet with the Dalai Lama, who will be in Washington, DC next week.  The President’s office insists the meeting is on, this time… but Obama failed to receive the Dalai Lama properly last fall, the first such presidential snub since the Dalai Lama began visiting DC in 1991, also after Chinese warnings not to meet with the Dalai Lama.  Beijing also recently protested a long-standing arms sale agreement with Taiwan.

But that has nothing to do with any entangling alliances… or entangling purse strings.

The Tebow Ad: part 2

Wow.  What an anticlimax.

The pro-abortion groups got all riled up over an incredibly oblique ad that not only didn’t mention abortion, but didn’t even clearly mention the decision Mrs. Tebow made to carry Tim to term.  (The ads included a web address for Focus on the Family for the full story.)

As a pro-lifer, I thought the ads were cute, but, IMHO, I doubt they will appeal to the age groups you need to reach to influence abortion decisions.  I hope I’m wrong; maybe people who hadn’t heard about the whole thing were surprised enough to see Tim Tebow show up at the end of the ads and will go to the website to see what the whole story is.

The funny thing is, the ads caused a hundred times more discussion and interest in the news than they ever would have if the pro-abortion groups had just shut up.  Sort of like the time they complained about Sarah Palin being a member of Feminists for Life, or Chief Justice Roberts’ wife having done free legal work for FFL.

Feminists for Life was thrilled to be criticized.  They replied calmly to the press, then sent out fundraising letters, since their office was being deluged with calls from people interested in joining the group who hadn’t even heard of FFL before NOW raised a stink.

Hey, Planned Parenthood, I hear there’s going to be a controversial pro-life ad during the Olympics, too.  Want to throw another conniption?

The Tebow Ad

Nobody’s seen it yet, but tons of people are talking about it.  (including Lindy)

Tim Tebow, the talented, faith-filled, intelligent quarterback of the Florida Gators is the subject of a Focus on the Family ad during the Super Bowl.  Apparently, while his mother was pregnant with him, she was in the Philippines on a missions trip, where she got dysentery and lapsed into a brief coma.  After treatment, doctors advised her that the medications they had to use to save her almost certainly damaged her child, so she had to get an abortion.

Mrs. Tebow refused and went on to give birth to Tim, who doesn’t seem to be laboring under any major disabilities.

The ad, reportedly, doesn’t mention making abortion illegal at all.  It simply tells the Tebows’ story.  You could say that it’s just a touching story about a college quarterback who just finished his college career, presented by a group that encourages families and faith.  Of course, you could also say that it’s a story about how the worst-case scenarios don’t always come true, abortion is not always the answer, and life is a tremendously precious gift, not to be thrown away.

Pro-abortion forces are furious.  Life is not the “choice” they’re pushing.

Some have accused Mrs. Tebow of lying, either about the entire incident, or about the advice to get an abortion.  “Abortion wasn’t legal in the Philippines when the alleged incident happened!” they cried, as if they didn’t know that that never stops everybody, or that a doctor could have recommended an abortion for specific medical reasons (in this case, possibly that the baby was expected to die from the drug exposure anyways and the mother could not safely carry him any longer).

Others simply pointed out that Mrs. Tebow wasn’t really that smart, because, according to Joy Behar on The View, “I mean, he could’ve been a rapist pedophile or something.  You don’t know!”  Um… except we do know in this case that he turned out to be a wonderful human being and an incredible athlete.  And if we’re going to execute those with a propensity to criminal behavior, well, that would open an entirely new can of worms.  Does the brilliant Ms. Behar think we should sterilize anyone with a criminal conviction or execute their children as a matter of normal policy?

Never ones to pass up an opportunity to make themselves look petty and shrill, Planned Parenthood is running a counter ad.  (I have to note that both of the sports figures they picked are black, which was no coincidence.  Most of Planned Parenthood’s clinics are in minority neighborhoods.  They claim they don’t follow their foundress’s racist eugenist ideas, but the numbers say otherwise.  Black women account for a disproportionately high percentage of the abortion business in this country, and unplanned black children have only about a fifty/fifty chance of living to see daylight.  It sure looks like PP aggressively goes after black business.)  The two sports stars talk about how their strong moms taught them that only women have the wisdom to make these decisions. Furthermore, the two sports figures say, they hope that their daughters grow up in a world where all women’s choices are respected.

Really?

So the teacher who slept with her fifth grade student was just making a choice that we shoudn’t judge? (Well, not that choice, obviously.)

Or the woman who killed her husband for excessively pressuring her in the bedroom?  (Um, not that choice, either.)

The fact is, some choices are not moral.  Some choices are evil.  Being “pro-choice” is not the defensible position when the choice you’re defending is immoral, including the murder of an innocent child.

And, contrary to one particularly deluded student I had one year in CCD who complained to the parish, Planned Parenthood and their allies are not “pro-choice,” and I will not call them by that deceptively nice misnomer.  If they were actually pro-choice, they’d shrug over the Tebow ad and say, “Glad it worked out for you.”  They wouldn’t fight pre-abortion ultrasound laws.  They wouldn’t fight parental consent laws (if the pregnant teenager has a choice about what happens to her baby, then the teenager’s mom gets a voice in what happens to her baby).  They’d never tell anyone the lie that the baby, “Isn’t really a, you know, baby yet, it’s just a clump of cells.”  Maybe the pro-choicers would even have come up with a campaign on their own to encourage colleges to include pregnancy care in their student health plans, instead of just offering abortion coverage (it took Feminists for Life to come up with the fix to that problem).

But they don’t, because those who profit by abortions, those who promote abortions, those who drool platitudes about “respecting women’s choices” are not really pro-choice.

They are pro-abortion.

You have got to be kidding me…

We had another three or so inches of snow today.  Which is weird, considering that I live in southeastern Virginia, where we can go years without seeing snow at all.  I’ve actually lost count of how many snows we’ve had that have actually been heavy enough and cold enough to stick, including the eight inches we got last weekend.  This may have been the fifth snow that stuck this winter.  (DC, according to the National Weather Service, has now had 13 recorded snowfalls of a foot or more.  Two were this winter.)

How’s that global warming thing working out for you?

So, in between steaming batches of char siu bao for the upcoming party, I had time indoors to check WebMD.  Number one suggestion for laryngitis: rest your voice.  Oh, well, so much for that idea.

And what do they mean two weeks of laryngitis is “not a problem”?!?

Does it count as bad language if you can only mouth the words?

Constrained

Last week, we were constrained to the house (and the yard) for snow… and a notable lack of proper snow plows in our area.

Tonight, I can’t take a walk around the neighborhood because, yet again, it is raining cats and dogs.  (I was standing at the window wondering if I shouldn’t have placed bags of sand or concrete in the bottom of the deck boxes to prevent one from floating away again.  Once was more than enough fun.  And the lake is much colder now.)

I can’t even sit comfortably where I want.  I had a lovely deep cleaning done by a friend’s company (I never thought the carpet could be this color again after what three kids and a dog have done to it)… but now my couches, chair, and living room floor are all damp.  I can’t put back the wood furniture until tomorrow (it could stain, with the dampness), so I don’t even have my normal laptop perch on the end table.  And I’m sitting on a beach towel to avoid a wet butt.  I can’t go sit in the library (it was supposed to be the dining room, which we decided we didn’t need), because the toys, sidetables, toys, etc. from the living room are all over the floor and chairs in there.

Furthermore, and most annoying, my voice is gone, just as I thought I was getting over being sick.  By dinner, I was reduced to clapping hard to get anyone’s attention.  Empress cried because I couldn’t sing the bedtime song.

And it finally occured to me that I was being ungrateful.

I have three kids who care very much whether or not momma sings the bedtime song.

I have so much furniture, I can’t clean out one room for deep cleaning without filling another room.

I can worry about the deck boxes floating away because I am fortunate enough to live on a lovely little man-made lake.

I can miss my regular walk because I live in a very safe neighborhood, where solo nighttime walks aren’t a worry.

I was stuck in the house for snow because we had the most wonderful (and heavy) snowfall in more than a decade, and a whole weekend as a family to enjoy it.

Sometimes constraints can remind you how much freedom you really have.

CCHD: Update

I was just thinking that, in the process of adding cool new widgets (like the nifty little world map showing where people are visiting from), that I should clean out old ones, like the “Reform CCHD Now” button (Catholic Campaign for Human Development, a nationwide collection administered by a committee working for the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops (USCCB)).

That’s got to be resolved by now, right?  EWTN’s news program, The World Over, talked about it a while back.  Apparently, some of the groups fingered as being pro-abortion and/or pro-gay, were dropped from funding by this USCCB project.

But not all of the problem groups.  The CCHD dismissed the allegations against about half of the problem organizations.

Apparently, since then, the news is actually getting worse, not better.

New investigations turned up another troubling connection: John Carr, the person charged with overseeing the CCHD, who has worked for the USCCB since 1987, also had a position in the Center for Community Change.  The CCC has supported “lifting restrictions on women’s access to health services”, the usual code language for abortion “rights”.  They fought against the Stupak Amendment, which was written to prevent taxpayer money from paying for abortions in the recently deceased health care bills.  Carr, in spite of having worked with CCC from 1983 until 2005 and for the USCCB from 1987 until today, claimed that he was unaware of CCC’s pro-abortion, pro-homosexual adovcacy.  Oh, yeah, and Carr was on the board for CCC.  But he didn’t know what they advocated, really!

One article mentioned the CCC partnering with the Gamaliel Foundation.  Hmm… wait, that sounds familiar.  Yep, it was.  The Gamaliel Foundation claims it is abortion-neutral, which alone ought to preclude it receiving USCCB money.  In reality, though, it has hardly been “neutral.”  From an article on the CCHD scandal (emphasis mine):

Can an organization actively working with radical advocates of abortion, abortifacient birth control, forced participation of health care workers against their consciences, etc. still claim neutrality? Gamaliel’s buddies in the network are proponents of the liberal creed including positions anathema to Catholics. Faith in Public Life is one of the umbrella group that pulls together faux religious communities to neutralize moral issues in the public debate. Spearheaded by Jim Wallis, head of the liberal Sojourners, Faith in Public Life has been very effective at shilling for liberals including Kathleen Sebelius, the Kansas governor so enamored with late-term abortionist George Tiller.

On their website, Gamaliel proudly acclaims their relationship with President Obama and his roots as one of their community organizer. Gamaliel is deeply rooted in liberalism. That the Catholic Church would fund this group that does little to actually help the poor, but much to radicalize the Church to engage in advancing the liberal agenda is a scandal that continues year after year. Catholics need to realize that not only is CCHD funding liberalism around the country primarily focused on creating support for Democratic pro-abortion, pro-sodomy polticians, but it also funds “education” in parishes that teaches the principles of liberation theology. Instead of planting mustard seeds that grow into trees of faith, CCHD plants ACORNS that grow into Catholic dissent groups.

The Gamaliel Foundation and its affiliates receive millions from the CCHD, approximately 5% of the money distributed.  The organizations turned up to be working against Catholic moral teaching made up a fifth of the organizations funded by the CCHD (I have not been able to find a report detailing what percentage of the CCHD’s money these problematic organisations have received).

Lifenews had a new article by Deal Hudson on the CCHD scandal.  Townhall.com even picked up on the CCHD scandal.  The CCHD isn’t fixed.  Frankly, I’m not sure it can be fixed.  The CCHD does not actually promote or fund those who work to teach, enfranchise, feed, clothe, or house the poor and marginalized; those activities are banned in their grants application.

The CCHD was founded to fund those who do “community organizing”, which, we have been educated over the last few years, is largely code language for “getting the government to fund more family-undermining hand-outs”.  Why not just fund those who help the poor?  Wouldn’t that make more sense?  And isn’t that what the CCHD tries to give the impression it’s doing?  (We got a flyer in the bulletin; it didn’t say anything about promoting community organizers.  It talked about helping the poor and marginalized, which most people would assume meant actual assistance.)

The USCCB, hopefully, will fix its reaction.  When a lay organization approaches them and says, “Your emminences, respectfully, you’ve been snookered, and we have proof,” the proper reaction isn’t to attack the whistleblowers.

I want to trust my bishop.  Even though they have no cannonical standing, I’d like to believe the USCCB is doing good things, too.  But, after repeated scandals, it’s more of a “trust, but verify,” unfortunately.

For the full results of the investigations, please see the Bellarmine Veritas Ministry.

Laugh-out-loud Strangeness

I was looking for something else, honest.  I don’t even know how this came up on the search engine.  I mean, do you think I was actually looking for a Chinese steamed bun doing martial arts?  Just one of those things I didn’t know I needed to see, I guess.

For anyone local and coming to the New Year’s party, I promise that my char siu bao (stuffed pork buns) are much, much tamer than this.

Then again, I’ve never snuck up on them with the lights out, so I really don’t know, do I?

New Year’s greetings for the Year of the Tiger:

Super Baozi vs. Sushi Man  (DH preferred this one… and said it was good he doesn’t like sushi.)

If you’ll excuse me, I have to go get the char siu in the oven.

Snow!

A while back, Em at Merry’s Cloister talked about how Northerners miss the magic of snow and can be a little unfair for laughing at Southerners’ tendencies to empty the grocery stores of milk and toilet paper any time snow threatens.   Yes, I’ll admit, we didn’t get excited or worried in Wisconsin over an inch or less of snow; it happened so often, it just wasn’t worth it.

Plus, snow in the South is more like a vacation flirtation; there’s absolutely no long-term committment involved, just an emotional flash-in-the-pan.  About the time the newness wears off, it’s gone (generally 24 hours or less around here).

Snow in the North is a lot closer to marriage for life.  It will be there tomorrow.  And the week after.  And the month after.  The initial fun will wear off, and a number of the endearing quirks you loved at first will become annoying oddities.  You’d better be really committed, or you’ll be fleeing for south Florida before March.

Strangely enough, we actually had snow here in Virginia.  Real snow.  And it’s still here after three days, and likely to be here for a few more.  They’re saying we could get more snow by the weekend.  Our usual technique of just letting the driveway melt clean may not cut it.  (There are advantages to living in Virginia and not Wisconsin.  I don’t even own a snow shovel, and this is the first time in more than a decade when that’s been an issue.  My parents were waffling between amusement and disappointment that any child of theirs wouldn’t own a snow shovel.)

I think they're having fun.

Our snowman. The kids named him Louis, because we read about St. Louis last week. Empress and Crash are on the verge of declaring themselves too cold and going in. The dog is searching for his lost snowball.

A gardener’s snowman: magnolia leaf nose, rosemary smile held on by a plant label stake.

The birds have been very visible at the water fountain and feeders.

When I was at the Naval Academy, I told someone I loved winter.  Befuddled, he looked at me and asked, “Why?!?”  Because this is my idea of winter: snow forts, fun, clear skies, and sun sparkling on the snow.

 (The forts, like the snowman, were made of packed snow off the driveway, using the big, lime green Tub Trug garden bucket as a mold.  Wow, I wish I’d had one of these things when I was a kid.)

And my first trip out?  To get milk, then straight back home.

 Because I’m still trying to pretend I’m a Northerner, and I don’t stock up on milk for snowstorms.

I have an excuse…

Whoops!  Absent from the blog again… but I have excuses!

1.  It snowed.  No, not a heavy dusting.  REAL snow for once: we measured eight inches on our back deck.  Which might not sound like much, but it’s really, really odd for southeastern Virginia to get that much.  The governor declared a state of emergency, and DH is not sure he’ll actually be going in to work tomorrow.  We watched mass on EWTN this morning instead of risking the roads (and the other drivers).

So I’ve been busy throwing snowballs at the kids, building snowforts, and throwing snowballs for the Big Dummy to chase (who still can’t figure out that when we throw the little white balls, he can’t catch them in his mouth or dig them out of the snow… although he keeps trying both).

2.  DH has been hogging my laptop (the submarine game… again).  Which means that all my wonderful photos of snow fun are inaccessable at the moment… but coming tomorrow!

3.  I’ve been busy on preparations for the Chinese New Year party.  Specifically, a large Kai-Lan poster and a dragon.  A smallish dragon, as these things go, but he’s going to be more than nine feet long.  We’re calling him Xiao Long (Little Dragon- creative, huh?).   

Which is ten times better than “Snappy”, the local adoption group’s dragon.  In fact, after several years of overpriced, absolutely awful Chinese food at various hotel ballrooms, this year, the Families with Children from China group will be serving an “American buffet.”  On the chat board, a board member defended the decision, saying that Chinese food at Chinese New Year’s is just “anecdotal references” and not that important.  (And nobody argued- which worries me.)

My jaw literally dropped when I read that.  If you think Chinese food isn’t important to Chinese culture, well… you’re absolutely clueless.  Really, there’s no nicer way of putting it, and that may be too nice.  There are tons of traditional New Year’s dishes representing prosperity, luck, family togetherness, etc. for the new year; I’m not expecting all of them, but something that reflects a true New Year’s feast would be nice.  Most people who don’t eat their ancestors’ traditional foods at least eat them for holidays; I’m Slovak, so the uplatky at Christmas, and the sirach and kolach at Easter are absolute must-have dishes.  But Chinese food is merely an “anecdotal reference” to our trips to China?!?

Words fail me.  At least it made the decision to skip renewing our membership really easy.

The good news is, we had already decided after the overpriced, not-so-great New Year’s party last year (and the year before, and the year before that…) that we probably wouldn’t be going this year, so we’re throwing our own!  I caught Empress this morning kissing the Kai-Lan poster I made.  The kids squeal every time the dragon gets a little closer to done (I have again been declared The Best Mommy Ever).  They’re already drooling over the promise of sweet red bean buns and char siu bao (BBQ pork stuffed buns).  They don’t know I found a recipe for toffee candy at Nick Jr. (they have recipes to go with their shows, so “Ni Hao, Kai-Lan” had a recipe for toffee fruit on a stick.).

When I can get out of the house again (and the stores are open), I can get more red spray paint, a variety pack of flesh tone markers, and a few other things I need, and there will be photos and how-to on the dragon and party games.

I’ve got snow.  I’ve got a half-finished dragon.  I have a party coming (hoping I’ll have some guests, too).

Yep, life is good.

Why I don’t watch CNN…

A while back, the DH and I were part of a counter-protest in DC.  Now, normally, the counterprotesters are the ones the police really worry about.

We, on the other hand, were not particularly worrisome.

One officer was on his radio to another officer commenting, in a slightly bored/why-am-I-here tone, “Yeah, I’m on the block with the moms and strollers.”

Apparently, though, CNN thought we were felons.

You see, the day before, we had picketed a DC abortion clinic.  We were specifically told beforehand not to block the sidewalk, since blocking the sidewalk to an abortion clinic is a federal crime.  (Gays can break up worship services, PETA can throw paint at fur wearers- those will get a slap on the wrist.  But blocking access to an abortion clinic is a felony.).  I was there almost the whole time.  Nobody was blocking the sidewalk.

(One man was arrested for transporting a dead body across state lines.  A friend of his had recently miscarried and asked him to take the baby (respectfully, preserved in a jar) to the clinic to show people what/who they were aborting.  Well if it was a dead body, then your problem is with the murders happening inside the clinic, don’t you think?  Because there’s no law against transporting body parts.)

Watching CNN that night in our hotel room, wondering what they were going to say about the March for Women’s Lives (there were tons of celebrities coming in to speak), we were surprised that our little group even made the news.  We were even more surprised at the lie that was told.

“Meanwhile, anti-choice protesters blocked access to an abortion clinic in preparation for the pro-choice march tomorrow.”

And that’s when we stopped believing or watching CNN.

We told everyone we knew about the entire experience.  My brother couldn’t be bothered to read the admittedly lengthy account, and shot back that he’d rather get his news from an “unbiased source like CNN.”  Apparently, he didn’t get to the part where CNN used exactly the language in the law to falsely claim that we had been breaking a federal law.

Recently, an acquaintance with a PhD in intelligence told me that she “looks at all the info out there”, then bases her views on what she believes is most accurate from every source.  Passing a yard sign for the Tea Party, she burst out with, “Those teabagging, racist rednecks!  They don’t even know what the Tea Party was about!  It was about taxation without representation, which they have!”

My opinion of the usefullness of a PhD in intelligence plummeted.

Now, in case I was ever going to consider watching the Communist News Network again, we have a new failing, and it’s a doozy.  Apparently, while covering the annual March for Life in DC, their reporter couldn’t figure out what the balance was in the crowd of “pro-choice” vs. “anti-abortion”.  The CNN anchor Rick Sanchez commented:

“It’s the 37th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade case….both sides being represented today, but it does appear to me, as I look at these signs that – which side is represented the most….Do we know? … As far as we can tell, following this protest on this day, the bulk of the protesters that we have seen here – that doesn’t mean there aren’t others, because we haven’t gone out and counted them individually – seem to be anti-abortion activists. We’ve seen more pro-life signs than we have the others.”

Really?  You think?  Let me clue you in, here: the pro-abortion protesters are the half dozen or so grouchy, yelling women with gray hair off to the far side of the steps in front of the Supreme Court; I’ve never seen pro-abortion protesters at the main rally site on the National Mall.  They won’t have strollers or teenagers with them.  Neither have I ever noticed any men with them.  They may be hard to find, though; the women and men of Silent No More always outnumber them by at least a factor of three, and the Silent No More speakers are only a tiny fraction of the participants in the March for Life.  If you really want a video clip of the pro-abortion protesters, though, you could reuse anything from the 80’s, because their rhetoric has hardly changed, although “My body, my choice,” seems to be losing popularity as it becomes glaringly obvious to anyone who ever took high school biology that the baby is, in fact, not part of the mother’s body.  (Also at LifeSite news is a blurb on the Washington Post reporter at the March for Life, who was horrified to discover that the pro-lifers have strong representation from the younger demographics, although he falsely low-balled the crowd as “tens of thousands”.)

The rally on the Mall is gigantic; if anyone thinks the pro-life movement is defeated, they haven’t seen the March for Life.  There are hundreds of parishes, churches, youth groups, pro-life clubs, student groups, colleges, and families, and every single sign you’ll see is pro-life, and often from several states away  (both Pennsylvania’s bishops and people turn out in droves; I saw groups from as far as Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Alabama.  We’re talking twelve hour drives to get to the March, if not more.).  All the stickers, even many of the backpack tags, were pro-life, many with 1-800 numbers for crisis pregnancy centers.  It was glaringly obvious “which side is represented the most” every single year for the last 37 years.

And if CNN can’t figure that out, I wouldn’t trust their reporting on whether or not it’s raining right now.