I have read many blog posts today on the Sarah Palin speech, from many different political spectrums. A number were critical of Sarah Palin for her attacks on Barack Obama. Many reactions were, to me, irrational.
I ask, isn’t Governor Palin allowed to respond to attacks from the Obama camp (and their surrogates) which are critical of her own experience?
Some of her critiques of Obama and the Democratic left were quite effective – and all done with humor:
“… I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involved. I guess… a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.”
“I might add that, in small towns, we don’t quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they’re listening and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren’t listening. No, we tend to prefer candidates who don’t talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco.”
(The transcript of Governor Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, as delivered)
SARAH PALIN: Mr. Chairman, delegates, and fellow citizens, I will be honored to accept your nomination for vice president of the United States.
(APPLAUSE)
I accept the call to help our nominee for president to serve and defend America. And I accept the challenge of a tough fight in this election against confident opponents at a crucial hour for our country.
And I accept the privilege of serving with a man who has come through much harder missions, and met far graver challenges, and knows how tough fights are won, the next president of the United States, John S. McCain.
An interesting and very revealing exchange, on the subject of VP candidate Sarah Palin, occurred Tuesday night on the floor of the Republican National Convention in St. Paul Minnesota.
Referring to Sarah Palin, MSNBC’s Ron Allen said to former Speaker Newt Gingrich: “But to be fair, her resume is not something we’re familiar seeing with presidential candidates.”
Gingrich’s response was immediate and very assertive:
“It’s stronger than Barack Obama’s. I don’t know why you guys walk around saying this baloney. She has a stronger resume than Obama. She’s been a real mayor, he hasn’t. She has been a real governor, he hasn’t. She’s been in charge of the Alaskan National Guard, he hasn’t. She was a whistleblower who defeated an incumbent mayor. He has never once shown that kind of courage. She’s a whistleblower who turned in the chairman of her own party and got him fined $12,000. I’ve never seen Obama do one thing like that. She took on the incumbent governor of her own party and beat him, and then she beat a former Democratic governor in the general election. I don’t know of a single thing Obama’s done except talk and write.”
“I’d like you to tell me one thing Sen. Obama’s done.”
Missionary Avery Willis, the co-founder of one of the world's largest evangelistic movements 'Call2all', has died after losing his battle with leukemia, his family and the movement's president confirmed Friday, July 30. He was 76.
Rights investigators expressed concerns Monday, July 26, about the plight of a jailed American Christian in North Korea, while U.S.and South Korean warships practiced anti-submarine maneuvers off the Korean peninsula to warn Pyongyang against aggression.
Officials in western Germany say at least 19 people have been killed and 80 injured in a stampede at the famed Love Parade techno music festival in the German city of Duisburg. The annual event is meant to celebrate music, love and peace.
The United Nations International Court of Justice has ruled that Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia in 2008 does not violate international law.
Forensic analysts have exhumed what are believed to be the bodies of late Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, who were executed in 1989. It comes after relatives raised doubts that the couple was really buried in Romania's capital Bucharest.
Two Christian evangelists who were shot and killed by suspected Islamic militants were quickly buried around sunrise Tuesday, July 20, in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad after a night of sectarian clashes, officials told Worthy News and its news partner BosNewsLife.
Gun battles broke out in a predominantly Christian neighborhood of the Pakistani city of Faisalabad Monday, July 19, shortly after two Christian evangelists were shot and killed by suspected Islamic militants, witnesses told Worthy News and its news partner BosNewsLife.
Nearly half of Israelis wants the Temple to be rebuilt in Jerusalem according to a poll commissioned by Israel's Knesset Television Channel, Worthy News learned on Monday, July 19th.
Suspected Muslim militants shot and killed two Christian men who were due to appear in court on charges of blasphemy against Islam in Pakistan's Punjab province, trial observers confirmed Monday, July 19.
A Muslim lawyer has apologized for thousands of anti-Christian leaflets distributed in Pakistan at a reconciliation meeting with Christian leaders who said they forgave him because they are followers of "the Prince of Peace," according to delegates attending the gathering.
In Natures "15 evolutionary gems" evolution-evangelism packet, two of Nature's "evolutionary gems" looked at birds. The first such gem showed "Differential dispersal in wild birds" -- but before we get caught up in the jargon, let's just cut to the main question: What sort of evolutionary change was observed? From reading Nature's evolution-evangelism packet, one is told that the "findings illustrate the large effect of immigration on the evolution of local adaptations and on genetic population structure" or that "evolutionary differentiation can be rapid and occur over surprisingly small scales." So exactly what was this rapid, large evolutionary change?...
Early in 2006, the journal Science published a long article titled "Evolution in Action" purporting to give three examples showing the glory of Darwinian evolution. As I discussed at that time, what it really showed was "microevolution in action." Last year during the bicentennial anniversary of Darwin's birth, Nature tried to top Science by releasing a packet titled "15 Evolutionary Gems." The packet purported to show "just what is the evidence for evolution by natural selection." Yet much like the Science piece, many of the examples in the Nature packet entail trivial examples of small-scale evolution. This first installment of...
Last year, during the bicentennial anniversary of Darwin's birth, Nature released a free online packet titled "15 Evolutionary Gems." Its subtitle was "A resource from Nature for those wishing to spread awareness of evidence for evolution by natural selection." It might have been better subtitled 'A evangelism packet for those wishing to spread the good news about Darwinism.' After all, when Nature announced the packet, they said they were heeding a prior call which "urged scientists and their institutions to 'spread the word'" about evolution and "highlight reasons why scientists can treat evolution by natural selection as, in effect, an...
Advocates of intelligent design have long been skeptical of the claim that the majority of our genome is nonfunctional gibberish, a mere relic of our evolutionary past. Many of the key arguments for common ancestry are based around the supposition that certain loci of our genome are functionless. But the gaps in our knowledge of the genome (in which such supposition resides) are continually shrinking. A recent paper published in Science by Kondo et al. reported on the discovery that some of the supposed "non-coding" regions of the RNA transcript actually actively encode for short peptides that regulate genes involved...
Another school year is set to begin at high schools and colleges where the next round of biology students will be filled with evolutionary misinformation. At the center of this propaganda campaign are the many biology textbooks used to indoctrinate young minds with old dogma. These textbooks contain the latest evolutionary newspeak, but the underlying lies are no different.In their text The Living World (Fifth Edition, McGraw Hill, 2008) evolutionary apologists George Johnson and Jonathan Lobos rehearse the usual lies. Students are told that "Microevolution Leads to Macroevolution" with the giraffe's neck serving as the example of how small change is supposed...
by Jeff Zweerink Twinkle, twinkle little star, My, oh my, how large you are. How’d you get to be so big? When gas pressure and magnetic fields should have prevented you from forming?Okay, so my poem doesn’t rhyme, but it does communicate two important issues regarding stars. First, astronomers [...]
Kenneth Richard SamplesHow can a Christian think about eschatology (the study of “last things”) in a careful and intellectually responsible manner?Let me offer three suggestions for believers to carefully consider when approaching the controversial theological topic of the “end times.”1. Understanding the Bible’s Apocalyptic LiteratureEvangelical theologian and eschatology specialist George Eldon Ladd notes the following: [...]
July 31, 2010 Did you know your heart is an electrical appliance? Thats right. Currents of electrical ions are vital to its function as a contractile organ. Now, researchers at the University of California have found another thing electricity does for your heart: it guides the developing heart into the proper shape. This is a key study showing how epigenetic factors factors above and beyond the genetic code are essential for the formation of body parts. The research team, publishing in PNAS,1 explained the purpose of their investigation (Note: morphogenesis refers to the origin of shape, and cardiomyocytes are the specialized muscle cells that make the heart beat): Cardiac morphogenesis is a complex process that is mediated by a coordinated set of cellular and molecular as well as environmental factors. Recent studies have shown that epigenetic forces such as cardiomyocyte contractility and intracardiac hemodynamic flow regulate this process. Furthermore, in vitro studies suggest that cardiomyocytes can realign themselves according to electrical conduction directionality. However, because electrical cardiac conduction and mechanical contractile forces are intimately coupled in the intact heart, it is difficult to assess the individual contribution of these influences to overall heart organogenesis. Here, we make use of several zebrafish cardiac mutants to uncouple these two influences, and find that electrical conduction exclusive of contractile influences can directly participate in remodeling and morphogenesis of the vertebrate heart. In other words, electrical conduction guides the individual heart cells into position during heart development. They said in the Discussion part of their paper that it is known that The direction of growth and orientation of various cell types in tissue culture can be influenced by externally applied electric fields. They added, Furthermore, endogenous [inside organism] electric currents exist in a variety of tissues and have been hypothesized to influence cell migration and shape. This paper announces confirmation of that hypothesis for heart formation: Our in vivo results [using living zebrafish] indicate that physiologic electric currents can indeed have an impact on cell morphology and overall cardiac organogenesis. The mutant fish without the electrical conduction working properly developed heart disease. So how does this work? They explained, These electrical effects might be mediated through intracellular calcium fluxes which can affect cell polarization. Furthermore, a number of cell surface receptors... can also be redistributed in the cell membrane by electric fields. Does this finding provide hope for heart patients? Patients with electrical conduction disorders get better when the beats are re-synchronized. The researchers explained why that works: Thus, overall cardiac improvement from the resynchronization of the ventricles in heart failure patients manifesting conduction disorders may be due to beneficial realignment and improved remodeling of the myocardium primarily from proper and synchronized electrical signaling. Get the electricity right, and the heart shapes up. Now those defibrillation devices and electrical heart stimulators start to make more sense. This means that stem cell therapy (07/20/2010) may need an electrical jumpstart to work properly: Given that previous cardiac cell-based therapy has provided only a modest improvement in cardiac function, they ended, pointing therapy in a new direction, electrical cellcell communication and stimulation may be required for optimal integration and alignment of engrafted embryonic cardiomyocytes and skeletal myoblasts in the injured myocardium to improve overall myocardial performance. Live better electrically!
I have read many blog posts today on the Sarah Palin speech, from many different political spectrums. A number were critical of Sarah Palin for her attacks on Barack Obama. Many reactions were, to me, irrational.
