Monthly Archives: October 2010

Commentary

Black Republicans offer hope after Barack Obama’s failures on race

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That’s not my headline, that’s the headline on the UK Telegraph article. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Campaigning a few miles from Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the Civil War were fired in 1861, Tim Scott described last week how he was born into poverty and a broken home, much like Barack Obama.

“My dad was gone by the time I was seven,” the black candidate for the House of Representatives told a mixed group of students at Fort Dorchester High School in North Charleston. “I was flunking out of high school. I failed geography, civics, Spanish and English. When you fail Spanish and English, you are not bilingual, you are bi-ignorant.”

But the conclusions that Scott, 45, drew were very different from those of Obama. When he was 15, a man who ran a Chick-fil-A fast-food restaurant taught him “that there was a way to think my way out of the worst conditions”. Scott went on to became a small businessman and a proud “conservative Republican”.

Barring a cataclysmic upset, Scott will be elected to Congress on November 2nd. There, he will be a ferocious opponent of Obama, to whom he gives a withering “failing grade” for his presidency.

“Obamacare’s an atrocity around the necks of average Americans,” he told me. “His intentions might be good but he’s leading us towards the brink of bankruptcy. Right now, the American people are simply saying they’ve had enough.”

Scott will be the first black Republican congressman from the Deep South in more than a century. Republicans hope to elect at least two other black candidates to Congress next month. Allen West, in Florida, and Ryan Frazier in Colorado, both with distinguished military records, are in very close races against Democrats.

Allen West and Ryan Frazier are both ex-military men.

Here’ s an ad from Ryan Frazier:

And a clip of Allen West:

And we also have another military woman running for Lt. Governor in Florida – her name is Jennifer Carroll. She’s also a black Republican. We need more people with military backgrounds in office, and more people with private sector backgrounds, too.

Videos

Robin Collins explains why fine-tuning is necessary for life

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A short video from Lee Strobel’s DVD “The Case for a Creator”.

Actually, that WHOLE DVD is available on YouTube if you want to watch it. Here’s the playlist. There is a lot more about the fine-tuning argument in that DVD.

Fine-tuning of the gravitational force

I actually wrote about the fine-tuning of the force of gravity, which is mentioned in the clip. I link to an article from the New Scientist in the post to show that the fine-tuning argument is quite mainstream.

You can read more about the fine-tuning of the gravitational force from Robin Collins, who is the best we have on the topic. Collins started a Ph.D in Physics at the University of Texas at Austin, but ended up completing a Ph.D in philosophy at Notre Dame, under Alvin Plantinga, the greatest living philosopher today, in my opinion. I heard Collins speak at the Baylor ID conference in 2000.

Other DVDs on design arguments

Actually, I prefer the Unlocking the Mystery of Life and The Privileged Planet DVDs, instead, especially for people who want more detail.

News

Construction workers prevent gunman from shooting up school

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Story here in the Union-Tribune. (H/T Gateway Pundit via Wes Widner)

Excerpt:

A man seemingly bent on violence and destruction stormed Kelly Elementary School in Carlsbad Friday and fired into a crowd of children on the playground, striking two girls, before being chased and tackled by nearby construction workers.

Brendan L. O’Rourke, 41, believed to be a transient, was arrested on six counts of attempted murder and various weapons charges, Carlsbad police said.

A trail of blood led to a classroom, which held two second-graders who suffered bullet wounds to their right arms, police said. The girls, ages 6 and 7, were flown to Rady Children’s Hospital for treatment and were doing well, Carlsbad Police Chief Gary Morrison said.

“We are grateful to God only two children were hurt,” Carlsbad Mayor Bud Lewis said. “We know in this tragedy, it could have been far worse.”

Several witnesses saw the gunman clad in black, running on the school grounds shortly after noon carrying a gas can and shooting at random during recess.

“He was dressed just like a bad guy,” in a black hooded sweatshirt and black pants, said neighbor Scott Chandler, who saw the violence unfold from his driveway near the schoolyard on Kelly and Riviera drives.

Chandler ran toward the school as fast as he could and caught up with two construction workers, Steven Kane and Mario Contreras, assigned to a cafeteria expansion project. They chased the gunman through the field and over a fence.

Carlos Partida, another construction worker, said he jumped into his black Ford F-150 pickup when his co-workers started chasing the gunman. Partida struck the man with his truck, knocking him to the ground, police said.

Partida, Kane and Contreras wrestled a .357 Magnum silver revolver with a wooden handle from O’Rourke.

Here’s a previous post I did about whether multiple-victim shooters prefer to target areas where people will be armed or whether they prefer to attack “gun-free zones” provided by liberal educators. The left really doesn’t understand the difference between intentions and incentives. The only people who obey gun-free zone signs are people you don’t have to fear. Criminals see a gun-free zone sign and they think that you’ve opened a shooting gallery just for them. Luckily, the men standing near the area had not attended women’s studies classes at the local elite university. They did not know that all men are evil oppressors, so they had the confidence to act on their convictions.