Brutally Honest

Are Republicans really going to blow this opportunity?

H/T to Mark.

Has Newt's campaign just been derailed... by Newt's own words?

It's a little hard to think otherwise at this juncture.  

These are the links up currently at Drudge:

NEWT FLASHBACK 1983: REAGAN RESPONSIBLE FOR NATIONAL 'DECAY'... 

NEWT 1986: 'The Reagan administration has failed, is failing...

NEWT 1988: 'If Bush runs as continuation of Reaganism he will lose'...

VIDEO...

INSIDER: GINGRICH REPEATEDLY INSULTED REAGAN

And then there's this from Politico:

After nearly a week on the defensive, CNN's John King reports tonight that Newt Gingrich'sclaim about offering witnesses to ABC News in his defense — to rebut the network's interview with his second wife, Marianne Gingrich — was not true.

"Tonight, after persistent questioning by our staff, the Gingrich campaign concedes now Speaker Gingrich was wrong — both in his debate answer, and in our interview yesterday," King said on tonight's edition of John King USA. "Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond says the only people the Gingrich campaign offered to ABC were his two daughters from his first marriage."

Not good people.

Not good at all.

Will Mr. Santorum reap the benefit of Newt's apparent derailment?

God only knows.

God's help is needed.

Because an Obama re-election is beginning to look more and more likely from my corner of the world.

Oh how I hope I'm reading the tea leaves wrongly.

Crossposted at Wizbang.

Cruise ship in Med runs aground, flips on side, 3 dead, many missing (UPDATED)(AGAIN)

I expect the death toll to climb:

Survivors from a luxury cruise ship that ran aground and tipped over, leaving at least three dead and 69 people still unaccounted for, described Saturday a chaotic evacuation, as plates and glasses crashed and they crawled along upended hallways trying to reach safety.

Three bodies were recovered from the sea after the Costa Concordia ran aground off the tiny island of Giglio near the coast of Tuscany late Friday, tearing a 160-foot gash in its hull and sending in a rush of water.

The ANSA news agency quoting the prefect's office in the province of Grosseto as saying that authorities have accounted for 4,165 of the 4,234 people who had boarded the liner.

By morning Saturday, the ship was lying virtually flat off Gigio's coast, its starboard side submerged in the water and the huge gash showing clearly on its upturned hull.

Passengers described a scene reminiscent of "Titanic", complaining the crew failed to give instructions on how to evacuate and once the emergency became clear, delayed lowering the lifeboats until the ship was listing too heavily for many of them to be released.

...

"Have you seen 'Titanic?' That's exactly what it was," said Valerie Ananias, 31, a schoolteacher from Los Angeles who was traveling with her sister and parents on the first of two cruises around the Mediterranean. They all bore dark red bruises on their knees from the desperate crawl they endured along nearly vertical hallways and stairwells, trying to reach rescue boats.

"We were crawling up a hallway, in the dark, with only the light from the life vest strobe flashing," her mother, Georgia Ananias, 61 said. "We could hear plates and dishes crashing, people slamming against walls."

She choked up as she recounted the moment when an Argentine couple handed her their 3-year-old daughter, unable to keep their balance as the ship lurched to the side and the family found themselves standing on a wall. "He said 'take my baby,'" Mrs. Ananias said, covering her mouth with her hand as she teared up. "I grabbed the baby. But then I was being pushed down. I didn't want the baby to fall down the stairs. I gave the baby back. I couldn't hold her.

"I thought that was the end and I thought they should be with their baby," she said.

"I wonder where they are," daughter Valerie whispered.

Horrific stuff.  

The BBC has more:

"We were having supper when the lights suddenly went out. We heard a boom and a groaning noise. All the cutlery fell on the floor," Luciano Castro told Italy's Ansa news agency.

The passenger said people were told there were electrical problems.

Others described chaotic scenes as the liner began to move violently.

"The boat started shaking. The noise - there was panic, like in a film, dishes crashing to the floor, people running, people falling down the stairs," said survivor Fulvio Rocci.

Those on board said the boat suddenly tilted to the left.

"We told the guests everything was ok and under control and we tried to stop them panicking," cabin steward Deodato Ordona recalled.

It was about an hour before a general emergency was announced, he said.

Then the ship rolled again, now listing to the right, and the captain ordered the ship to be abandoned.

Mr Ordona said his colleagues and passengers were waiting to use lifeboats but the change in the direction the boat was sinking prompted them to seek lifeboats on the other side of the ship.

Monica, a German passenger who was in the cruise liner's theatre when the ship began to suffer problems, said it was hard to reach the lifeboats.

"It was difficult to walk. First it moved once, then to the left and then more on the right. The boat was tipping one side. You could see the ship was sinking more and more. In half an hour it sank halfway into the water," she said.

Cruise ship shop worker Fabio Costa said when people realised there was a serious problem, there were scenes of desperation.

Elizabeth Nanni of the Isola del Giglio Tourist Information described ''desperate people looking for each other''

"Everything happened really fast. Everybody tried to get a life boat and people started to panic. A lot of people were falling down the stairs and some were hurt because things fell on them.

"Everybody was trying to get on the boats at the same time. When people had to get on the lifeboats they were pushing each other. It was a bit chaotic. We were trying to keep passengers calm but it was just impossible. Nobody knew what was going on."

He said children and women were given priority when it came to allocating places on lifeboats, but the system proved to be difficult to implement because many men "weren't accepting this" because they wanted to remain together as a family, prompting "huge confusion".

Some people decided it was too difficult to get on to a lifeboat and chose to swim, with a number safely reaching the nearby island of Giglio.

"We were on the same level as the water so some people started to swim because they weren't able to get on the lifeboats," said Mr Costa.

He said he saw some people jumping but could not get a sense of just how many people did so.

It'll be interesting to see what led to the incident.  

I suspect some sort of serious lapse in navigational competence.  Time will tell.

Crossposted at Wizbang.

UPDATE: Some incredible photos found here... here are but a couple:

UPDATE II: Instapundit links... thanks Glenn.

UPDATE III: Captain arrested for manslaughter and abandoning ship.

Ceding the high ground

And American exceptionalism:

Americans better get used to it: Watching China's rockets and astronauts launching from Earth to explore new frontiers in space, near and very far.

With the U.S. space shuttle fleet now fully retired and decommissioned by the Obama administration, NASA must rent $62 million seats on Russian rockets to get Americans up to the International Space Station. And no farther.

On Thursday, the emerging superpower of China, flush with cash from its booming economy and overseas investments, released a major policy paper, announcing far more ambitious goals for its own national space explorations.

It is already constructing its own space station, experimenting with robot spaceships and is expected to launch more crews in the new year, possibly its first female astronaut, just eight years after the first Chinese flew in orbit. This plus ambitious plans for new rockets. fuels and even moon orbiters.

But the big news from China's new white paper was the revelation of plans to land crews on the Moon for detailed lengthy explorations, possibly late this decade. The Moon has not seen new human footprints in 39 years, since the last U.S. lunar mission, Apollo 17 in December 1972.

Bush administration plans to return U.S. astronauts to the Moon to construct a permanent base and explore for mineral deposits, among other things, were scrapped by Obama, ostensibly for financial reasons. This has resulted in thousands of recent layoffs among Florida's highly-skilled space industry workers.

Although Obama's specific long-term goals for an American space program appear muddled at best -- he has, for instance, talked vaguely of someday landing on an asteroid for some reason -- clearly the U.S. will be incapable of launching its own astronauts into space for several years due to development lags in spacecraft and launch vehicles.

Hope and change for the Chinese.  Hopeless and changeless for we Americans.

Bring on 2012.

"If he wants money. Get a job. Work, like everybody else in this world."

A would be robber occupies the left cross of one Derek Mothershead, a store clerk who decided he wasn't going to roll over:

H/T Bookworm.

Crossposted at Wizbang.

"I think Jesus is getting lost in the data stream"

Apathy reigns in the hearts of more than you might care to know:

When Ben Helton signed up for an online dating service, under "religion" he called himself "spiritually apathetic."

Sunday mornings, when Bill Dohm turns his eyes toward heaven, he's just checking the weather so he can fly his 1946 Aeronca Champ two-seater plane.

Helton, 28, and Dohm, 54, aren't atheists, either. They simply shrug off God, religion, heaven or the ever-trendy search-for-meaning and/or purpose.

Their attitude could be summed up as "So what?"

"The real dirty little secret of religiosity in America is that there are so many people for whom spiritual interest, thinking about ultimate questions, is minimal," says Mark Silk, professor of religion and public life at Trinity College, Hartford, Conn.

As Christmas Day glides by — all gilt, no substance — for many, clergy and religion experts are dismayed. They fear for souls' salvation and for the common threads of faith snapping in society. Others see no such dire consequences to a more openly secular America as people not only fess up to being faithless but admit they're skipping out on spiritual, the cool default word of the decade, as well.

...

Hemant Mehta, who blogs as The Friendly Atheist, calls them the "apatheists"

The Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, Episcopal Bishop of Washington D.C., calls them honest.

"We live in a society today where it is acceptable now to say that they have no spiritual curiosity. At almost any other time in history, that would have been unacceptable," Budde says.

She finds this "very sad because the whole purpose of faith is to be a source of guidance, strength and perspective in difficult times. To be human is to have a sense of purpose, an awareness that our life is an utterly unique expression of creation and we want to live it with meaning, grace and beauty."

...

They're uninterested in trying to talk a diverse set of friends into a shared viewpoint in a culture that celebrates an idea that all truths are equally valid, he says. Personal experience, personal authority matter most. Hence Scripture and tradition are quaint, irrelevant, artifacts. Instead of followers of Jesus, they're followers of 5,000 unseen "friends" on Facebook or Twitter.

Most So Whats are like Gerst, says David Kinnaman, author of You Lost Me on young adults drifting away from church.

"I think Jesus is getting lost in the data stream," says Kinnaman, president of the Christian research firm The Barna Group.

" 'Spiritual' is the hipster way of saying they're concerned with social injustice. But if you strip away the hipster factor," says Kinnaman, "I'd estimate seven in 10 young adults would say they don't see much influence of God or religion in their lives at all."

I'm not sure what the root cause for this might be but I'm of the firm belief that society will suffer as a result. In fact, I think a strong argument could be made that we're already experiencing the consequences.

Do you know an apatheist or two?

Crossposted at Wizbang.

"We want full implementation of the Sharia system..."

"... and we want democracy and the constitution to be suspended."

Those are the demands from the cretins responsible for bombings in Nigeria targeting Catholic churches:

At a Nigerian Catholic church where a terror attack killed 35 people on Christmas, women tried to clean the sanctuary ahead of Mass on Monday while one man wept uncontrollably amid the debris.

Outside St. Theresa Catholic Church, crowds gathered among the burned-out cars in the dirt parking lot, angry over the attack claimed by a radical Muslim sect and fearful that the group will target more churches.

Rev. Father Christopher Jataudarde told The Associated Press that Sunday's blast happened as church officials gave parishioners white powder as part of a tradition celebrating the birth of Christ.

Some already had left the church at the time of the bombing, causing the massive casualties. In the chaos after the bombing, Jataudarde said one mortally wounded man, cradling his shredded stomach, begged him for religious atonement.

"Father, pray for me, I will not survive," the man said, according to the priest.

At least 52 people were wounded in the attack, said Slaku Luguard, a coordinator with Nigeria's National Emergency Management Agency. Victims filled the cement floors of a nearby government hospital, some crying in pools of their own blood.

On Christmas, attacks by the radical Muslim sect left 39 dead across Africa's most populous nation. A bomb also exploded amid gunfire in the central Nigeria city of Jos and a suicide car bomber attacked the military in the nation's northeast.

After the bombings, a Boko Haram spokesman using the nom de guerre Abul-Qaqa claimed responsibility for the attacks in an interview with The Daily Trust, the newspaper of record across Nigeria's Muslim north. The sect has used the newspaper in the past to communicate with public.

"There will never be peace until our demands are met," the newspaper quoted the spokesman as saying. "We want all our brothers who have been incarcerated to be released; we want full implementation of the Sharia system and we want democracy and the constitution to be suspended."

Pope Benedict offered these words in reply:

"Holy Christmas inspires us in a particularly strong way to pray to God so that the hands of the violent are stopped, (hands) that sow death in the world ..." the pope said.

He said news of the bombings in Nigeria had brought him "profound sadness" and he wanted to assure Nigeria's Christian community, hit by "this absurd gesture", that he was close to them.

"At this moment, I want to repeat once more forcefully: violence is a path that leads only to pain, destruction and death. Respect, reconciliation and love are the only ways to achieve peace," he said.

I join in prayer for loved ones lost and injured, loved ones left behind to pick up the the pieces of their lives. 

I pray as well for wisdom for Western world leaders as the threat posed by Islamic extremists grows.

Crossposted at Wizbang.

'Nothing says Christmas quite like LMFAO's holiday classic, "Sexy And I Know It"'

My sister-in-law found this one... and I stole the title of this post from her as well:

All it needs is a crèche and it'd be complete wouldn't you say?

Sigh.

"violative of the religious liberty assured us by the first amendment to our Constitution"

The Bishop of St. Petersburg in Florida weighs in on Obamacare and the consequences it will have on his diocese:

The Diocese of St. Petersburg, Florida will be forced to end health insurance coverage for its 2,300 employees if the Obama administration presses forward with its plan to force Catholic employers to cover contraceptives and abortifacients, insisted Bishop Robert Lynch on Wednesday.

“For the first time in my adult life, I foresee the possibility of some form of civil disobedience and I am extremely uncomfortable at even the hint of such a thing,” the bishop told the lawyers and judges gathered for the annual Red Mass in Tampa Bay.

“If they fail to shift in their present positions, then 2300 employees of the Diocese of St. Petersburg will lose their health care coverage which they have come to treasure and rely upon,” he said.

The bishop explained that if they were forced to do so, the diocese would give its employees the funds that would have gone to the insurance plan to put towards their own private coverage.

He said the diocese’s health plan at present covers “almost everything,” but excludes contraceptives, abortifacients, and sexual enhancements like Viagra.

In a blog post Thursday commenting on his homily, the bishop explained that the HHS mandate is “violative of the religious liberty assured us by the first amendment to our Constitution and also of our personal moral consciences.”

He said that while the mandate currently has an exemption for Catholics employed by a Catholic organization, the employer would still be required to provide objectionable services to non-Catholic employees.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has argued that the religious exemption is so narrow that it excludes most Catholic social service agencies, healthcare providers, and other institutions.

Bishop Lynch noted also that because the diocese is self-insured, it is deemed an insurance company and so even it would not qualify for any exemptions.

At what point will Americans see the threat to religious liberty posed by this administration?  What will it take?

Wake the hell up people.

H/T Mark Shea.

Crossposted at Wizbang.

Shooting, killing at Virginia Tech (UPDATED)

Again:

Virginia Tech says a police officer and another person have been shot and killed on campus, and authorities are seeking a suspect.

In a statement posted to the university website, school officials said the officer was shot and killed during a traffic stop.

There are witnesses to that shooting.

Following that shooting, witnesses reported to police the shooter fled on foot and was headed toward a parking lot on campus. At that second parking lot, police found a second person, who was dead.

As of this writing, shooter is still at large.

Takes me back to a horrific day.

Crossposted at Wizbang.

UPDATE: The shooter is dead, apparently from a self-inflicted gunshot:

A manhunt that locked down Virginia Tech University came to an end today when police indicated that a gunman who ambushed a cop on the campus later died of gunshot wounds.

It was the second time the Blacksburg, Va., school became the scene of a gunfire since the 2007 massacre of 33 students.

Police declined to say outright that the second shooting victim was the gunman, but said "no additional victims or shooting reports have given to the police" since the second person was shot.

"I think the investigators feel confident that we've located the person, but I don't want to give you specifics," Virginia State Police Sgt. Robert Carpentieri said at a news conference. "You can kind of read between the lines."

School officials also felt secure enough to lift the campus lock down.

And on a more personal, poignant and moving note.  

In the original post above, I linked to that which I published shortly after the first VT shooting.  In that piece, I had cut and pasted an Instant Message with a VT student who was a close friend of my youngest son and who was on campus during the shootings.  It was a harrowing thing for him as you can imagine and it took me back to that day and my own emotions felt as I chatted with him while events were still unfolding.  That young man, my youngest son's high school best friend, is no longer with us.  David died suddenly a few short weeks ago and is missed terribly by many.  This post has brought back how much he is missed.