Month: September 2014

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Our Daily Thread 9-30-14

Good Morning!

The MLB playoffs start today. Sadly my Yankees are not playing. So for my prediction to win it all, which may or may not be the curse of death, see the header photo. 🙂

On this day in 1777 the Congress of the United States moved to York, PA, due to advancing British forces. 

In 1787 the Columbia left Boston and began the trip that would make it the first American vessel to sail around the world. 

In 1882, in Appleton, WI, the world’s first hydroelectric power plant began operating. 

In 1947 the World Series was televised for the first time. The sponsors only paid $65,000 for the entire series between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Yankees. 

And in 1954 the U.S. Navy commissioned the Nautilus submarine at Groton, CT. It was the first atomic-powered vessel. The submarine had been launched on January 21, 1954. 

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Quote of the Day

“Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it.”

Rumi

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Today is Sir Charles Villiers Stanford’s birthday. So it’s “The Blue Bird.”

 And today is Johnny Mathis’ birthday.

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Anyone have a QoD?

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Prayer Requests 9-30-14

Anyone have a request or praise they’d like to share with us today?

Psalm 93

¹The Lord reigneth, he is clothed with majesty; the Lord is clothed with strength, wherewith he hath girded himself: the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved.

2 Thy throne is established of old: thou art from everlasting.

3 The floods have lifted up, O Lord, the floods have lifted up their voice; the floods lift up their waves.

4 The Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many waters, yea, than the mighty waves of the sea.

5 Thy testimonies are very sure: holiness becometh thine house, O Lord, for ever.

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News/Politics 9-30-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. Under the bus with ’em!

Shockingly, Obama once again blames others for his administration’s shortcomings.

The buck stops….. somewhere else.

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2. Just like with the Ft. Hood shootings, the Obama admin refuses to admit the obvious.

From HotAir  “It’s becoming a disturbing trend.

For months, Ali Muhammad Brown, a man described as a devout Muslim convert, engaged in what prosecutors allege was a “bloody crusade” aimed at avenging the deaths of Muslims killed by American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. From Seattle, Washington to West Orange, New Jersey, Brown left four bodies in his wake. But the national press refused to report on his case until weeks after he was indicted. Almost none outside local media outlets in Seattle noted that Brown had intentionally targeted gay men is his campaign of vengeance.

A Seattle-based Fox affiliate called Brown a “radical jihadist,” but few other press outlets followed their lead. Perhaps because Brown was not receiving coded transmissions from Pakistani handlers, some apparently determined that his actions should not be considered terrorism. One has to wonder whether the members of Seattle’s gay community who use the social media app Brown utilized to target his victims felt terrorized. Whether we call it terrorism or not, the effect of Brown’s spree was to instill fear and to force those who survived his attacks to rethink their routines.

This familiar pattern is happening again, now in Oklahoma City. On Friday, what was reportedly a disgruntled former employee of a food processing facility decided to take his frustrations out on his coworkers. He killed one, according to initial reports, and wounded another before being incapacitated by the gun-carrying company’s owner.

But as more details emerged, the more an ominous pattern began to emerge. Some have begun to determine that they are again being lied to in service to the ignoble mission of defining terrorism down.”

And once again they’ll insist that Islam played no role in it.

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3. Is locking parents up for non-payment of child support a modern-day debtors prison? And is there a better way to do things that benefits all parties?

From TheWashingtonPost  “Dwayne Ferebee, 36, father of four, has been sent to jail four times over the past 12 years on civil contempt charges for failure to pay his court-ordered child support. The first two times, he spent a couple months behind bars until his mom came up with the $3,000 the judge told him he had to pay. The third go-around, he stayed in jail six of the maximum 12-month sentence before he could scrape together the money. The fourth, he had to wait until his fiancée received her tax refund. All told, he spent about a year locked up.

Ferebee, a high school dropout,  had a series of run-in with the law and ended up with a felony. You know the formula by now. Lack of education plus felony record equals poverty. Unless you can work two jobs. Which child support enforcement and the court told him to do. “And when am I supposed to see my kids?” he asked.

“All I was saying was, ‘Give me an opportunity instead of throwing me in jail because that just puts me further behind in child support,’” Ferebee says. “Let me find work so I can earn money.’”

A slow-moving but seismic shift is taking hold in Virginia’s child support enforcement community of judges and lawyers and case managers. That shift, still underway, has seen the rise of new partnerships between child support enforcement, the courts, social service agencies and fatherhood programs seeking to figure out what’s keeping parents from paying the child support they owe. And then — this is the seismic part — helping those parents  address their issues instead of locking them up. The state’s Intensive Case Monitoring Program joins a national movement nearly a decade in the making in which problem-solving measures in child support enforcement have been replacing punitive ones.

As they say in child support, there is a difference between deadbeat and dead-broke, and discerning it is key. Civil contempt is meant to coerce a parent to pay and get out of jail, says Craig Burshem, the director of Virginia’s Department of Social Services Division of Child Support Enforcement. “It’s not meant to be a debtor’s prison.”

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4. And school taxes will rise everywhere because of it.

From TheAP  “American schools are scrambling to provide services to the large number of children and teenagers who crossed the border alone in recent months.

Unaccompanied minors who made up the summer spike at the border have moved to communities of all sizes, in nearly every state, Federal data indicates, to live with a relative and await immigration decisions. The Supreme Court has ruled that schools have an obligation to educate all students regardless of their immigration status, so schools have become a safe haven for many of the tens of thousands of these young people mostly from central America living in limbo.

Delaware’s rural Sussex County has long attracted immigrants, partly because of work in chicken factories, and soybean and corn fields. The district’s population is more than one-quarter Hispanic, and for years has offered an early learning program for non-English speakers.

Still, officials were caught off guard by about 70 new students mostly from Guatemala – part of the wave crossing the border – enrolling last year, mostly at Sussex Central High School. The Indian River School District over the summer break quickly put together special classes for those needing extra English help.”

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5. Weak oversight on Wall St.? Not shocking.

From TheNYPost  “Wall Street is about to be rocked by secretly recorded audio tapes that purport to show a too-cozy relationship between the New York Federal Reserve Bank and the financial institutions it is supposed to regulate.

The 45 hours of tapes, made by Carmen Segarra, a former NY Fed worker, capture former co-workers, whose job was to keep banks like Goldman Sachs in line, instead deferring to the banks, being unwilling to take action and being extremely passive, according to public radio’s “This American Life,” and ProPublica which obtained the tapes and is scheduled to air a program about the matter Friday night.

Segarra, ironically, was hired by the NY Fed in October 2011 to help toughen up their oversight. She was fired in 2013 after, she claims in a lawsuit, she tried to get Goldman to toe the line on regulations.”

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Our Daily Thread 9-29-14

Good Morning!

On this day in 1789 a regular army was established by the U.S. War Department with several hundred men. 

In 1943 Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Italian Marchal Pietro Badoglio signed an armistice aboard the British ship Nelson. 

In 1951 the first network football game was televised by CBS-TV in color. The game was between the University of California and the University of Pennsylvania. 

In 1960 “My Three Sons” debuted on ABC-TV. 

And on this day in 1999 I married my lovely wife Cheryl. Hands down, the smartest move I’ve ever made. 🙂

Happy 15th Anniversary Cheryl! 🙂

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Quote of the Day

“Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can’t sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can’t sleep with the window open.”

George Bernard Shaw

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 For Cheryl.

And this one is because I like it. Old song, new version, from AmartianHD

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Anyone have a QoD?

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Prayer Requests 9-29-14

Anyone have a request or praise they’d like to share?

Psalm 92

¹It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord, and to sing praises unto thy name, O Most High:

2 To shew forth thy lovingkindness in the morning, and thy faithfulness every night,

3 Upon an instrument of ten strings, and upon the psaltery; upon the harp with a solemn sound.

4 For thou, Lord, hast made me glad through thy work: I will triumph in the works of thy hands.

5 O Lord, how great are thy works! and thy thoughts are very deep.

6 A brutish man knoweth not; neither doth a fool understand this.

7 When the wicked spring as the grass, and when all the workers of iniquity do flourish; it is that they shall be destroyed for ever:

8 But thou, Lord, art most high for evermore.

9 For, lo, thine enemies, O Lord, for, lo, thine enemies shall perish; all the workers of iniquity shall be scattered.

10 But my horn shalt thou exalt like the horn of an unicorn: I shall be anointed with fresh oil.

11 Mine eye also shall see my desire on mine enemies, and mine ears shall hear my desire of the wicked that rise up against me.

12 The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree: he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon.

13 Those that be planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God.

14 They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing;

15 To shew that the Lord is upright: he is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in him.

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Our Daily Thread 9-27-14

Good Morning!

Happy Saturday!!!

Or Sunday, if it’s tomorrow. Or today if it is tomorrow when you read this…..

Now I’m confused.

And since I won’t have many more chances to do so this year…

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On this day in 1779 John Adams was elected to negotiate with the British over peace terms. 

In 1939, after 19 days of resistance, Warsaw, Poland, surrendered to the Germans after being invaded by the Nazis and the Soviet Union during World War II. 

In 1979 the Department of Education became the 13th Cabinet in U.S. history after the final approval from Congress. 

And in 1989 two men went over the 176-foot-high Niagara Falls in a barrel. Jeffrey Petkovich and Peter Debernardi were the first to ever survive the Horshoe Falls.

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Quote of the Day

“Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty.”

Samuel Adams 

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 Today is Shaun Cassidy’s birthday.

And it’s Nikki Hassman’s too.

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Anyone have a QoD?

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Prayer Requests 9-27-14

Anyone have a request or praise to share?

Psalm 91

¹He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.

2 I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust.

3 Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence.

4 He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler.

5 Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day;

6 Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.

7 A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.

8 Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.

9 Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation;

10 There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.

11 For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.

12 They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.

13 Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet.

14 Because he hath set his love upon me, therefore will I deliver him: I will set him on high, because he hath known my name.

15 He shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him, and honour him.

16 With long life will I satisfy him, and shew him my salvation.