Spurgeon on Who Limits the Atonement?

The World From Our Window: Spurgeon on Who Limits the Atonement?

Comment: Worthwhile read.

As cited in The Doctrines of Grace: Rediscovering the Evangelical Gospel

Claire Holmquist - grading roses

Featured in the Star Tribune yesterday

Plymouth's Busch: Peddling roses

Excerpt:

For the past week, he and his employees at Len Busch Roses in Plymouth have labored 60 to 80 hours, harvesting, bundling and shipping roses to more than 800 florists and supermarkets in the Upper Midwest.

The last of the bouquets will get shipped out today, ensuring that hopeless romantics and henpecked partners can deliver the freshest of buds to their beloveds Feb. 14.

Comment: Image copywrite Star Tribune. Claire and her husband Phil are members at Fourth Baptist Church. Len Busch Roses

Sheriffs Deputy Dumps Paralyzed Man from Wheelchair

That had to hurt!

Traffic violator says he assumes deputy did not believe he’s unable to stand

"No peer pressure"

Ben Witherington: Old Wisdom

Favorite:

Reporters interviewing a 104-year-old woman: "And what do you think is the best thing about being 104?" the reporter asked. She simply replied, "No peer pressure."

Senior Citizen joke:

A woman faithfully visited her friend in the senior citizen's home. Sadly she observed her friend's mind fading. One day she asked her friend: "do you know who I am?". Her friend said, "No, but if you ask them at the front desk, they will tell you who you are."

Comment: Read full Ben Witherington post for more.

Berkeley caves to USMC

Berkeley City Council moderates anti-Marine position

Excerpt:

In a 7-to-2 vote, the council said it would no longer send a letter to the local Marine Corps Recruiting Station and Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway saying recruiters aren't welcome in Berkeley.

Instead, the city is now simply stating it's opposed to the war and the billions spent on it. However, "we recognize the recruiter's right to locate in our city and the right of others to protest or support their presence," the council said.

The council also said it supports and respects the men and women of the armed forces.

Comment: They caved because of the fear of losing federal $$.

GOP VP watch

Running mate guessing game begins

Excerpt:

First, Mr. McCain likely will go for someone from outside Washington — most probably a governor. For the four-term Arizona senator, that would offset his 25 years in Congress, muting a target for Democrats — his Washington-insider status.

"John McCain certainly isn't a creature of the Beltway in most respects, but he has been in Congress awhile, so having someone on the ticket who can talk about change will help," said Dan Schnur, who was communications director for McCain's 2000 presidential campaign.

Mr. Schnur said the "two most likely plausible ones that I hear bandied about" are South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Another outsider is newly elected Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a rising star in the Republican Party.

The man or woman whom Mr. McCain selects will almost definitely be more conservative than the moderate maverick senator and likely will be popular among evangelicals, such as former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, or race dropout Mitt Romney, a former Massachusetts governor.

Comment: I'm starting to think Huckabee based upon his ability to generate turnout among Evangelicals. I'm still pulling for Tim Pawlenty!

More on the "Brooklyn Park devil's triangle"

Heaven help drivers through Brooklyn Park devil's triangle

Excerpt:

In 1986, about 26,000 cars a day were using 169 through the triangle; by 2006, the number had risen to 53,000, and people were calling it by its satanic nickname.

Comments: Star Tribune article from today with nice overhead view. Previous CFG post: Hwy 169 "the devil's triangle" redo delayed. Very rarely do we go this way, so it is of little importance to us personally. But it needs fixing!

Updated: Google map

Obama (in wax) in the Oval Office

Obama makes it to the Oval Office

Excerpt:

Barack Obama has finally got his feet under the most coveted desk in America. Unfortunately for Obama, they were feet of wax. Yesterday, the presidential candidate became the latest politico to go on display in the DC branch of Madame Tussauds

Comment: I find these wax representations creepy!

A visit to Solomon's Porch

Deconstructing Solomon's Porch

Comment: Unclear to me if they have any clear doctrinal postion. Here's the official website

Hanging on for dear life!

Sometimes I feel like this! Select a link below for details w photos.

How to rescue a 250-pound bear stuck under a Calif. bridge

Spectators, officers and advocates save bear from fatal fall

HT: Ben Witherington: The 'Unbearable' Lightness of Being

Fall of the "House of Clinton"

Obama’s Path to Victory

Excerpt:

On Tuesday Obama is expected to prevail in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia. So around 9 p.m. Tuesday night, television networks probably will be announcing, for the first time, that Barack Obama holds an unambiguous delegate lead.

His lead in votes — which is already in the neighborhood of 200,000 — will probably have widened. And Obama should be able to increase those delegate and popular vote totals on Feb. 19, when Wisconsin and Hawaii go to the polls.

Next comes March 4, when Ohio, Texas, Vermont and Rhode Island vote. Clinton’s campaign believes Ohio and Texas will constitute her firewall. Will it hold?

I suspect not. Obama will have momentum. He will likely have more money than Clinton for advertising. His ballot performance among Hispanics and working-class whites has generally been improving as the primary season has gone on. He intends to push a more robust economic message that could help him further narrow the gap among lower-income voters. And an interesting regression analysis at the Daily Kos Web site (poblano.dailykos.com) of the determinants of the Democratic vote so far, applied to the demographics of the Ohio electorate, suggests that Obama has a better chance than is generally realized in Ohio.

As for Texas, look for a couple of possible endorsements to help Obama there. If John Edwards campaigns for Obama in East Texas, and Bill Richardson defies the pleas of Bill Clinton and travels across the border from New Mexico to help out, Obama could prevail.

If Obama wins Ohio and Texas — or even wins one — he’ll be in good shape. He should take Wyoming on March 8 and Mississippi on March 11. Then there’s over a month until the next contest, in Pennsylvania on April 22. That stretch of time could be key. It could be the moment for many of the uncommitted superdelegates to begin ratifying the choice of Democratic primary voters, and to start moving en masse to Obama.

Many of these superdelegates are elected officials. They tend to care about winning in November. The polls suggest Obama matches up better with John McCain. And the polls are merely echoing the judgment of almost every Democratic elected official from a competitive district or a swing state with whom I’ve spoken. They would virtually all prefer Obama at the top of the ticket.

All of this will move the superdelegates to Obama — perhaps as early as just after March 4, or perhaps not until April 22, or perhaps not even until the last match-up on June 7. But the superdelegates will want to avoid a situation in which they could be in the position of seeming to override the popular vote, or of resolving a bitter battle over whether and how to count votes from Florida and Michigan, at the convention.

And there are, as a final resort, two super-superdelegates (so to speak) who would have the clout to help Democrats achieve closure: Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi.

If they stepped forward at the right time, they would earn the gratitude of their party. And they might also enjoy contemplating a derivative effect of their good deed — the fall of the house of Clinton.

Comment: I've been wrong before, but I predict that Obama will beat Hillary 3-0 in today's Potomac primaries! Re the 1960 film "House of Usher", the whole film was made in 15 days for around $250,000.

Updated: Something must give — or will the fight be stopped?

Re: Nancy Pelosi

Ms Pelosi says that she is “torn” and that “the people will speak — that’s the beauty of a democracy,” before adding: “My focus is on re-electing a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives.”

Her voice would carry great authority among uncommitted super-delegates on Capitol Hill — and she is said to be “leaning” towards Mr Obama. “The party Establishment is not going to turn its back on a candidate who is generating this tremendous excitement and bringing all these new voters into the political process,” said a source close to her.

Toleration of "Shariah" law would end democracy as we have known it

Toleration and Islamic Law

Excerpt:

Can a modern democracy house more than one legal system, even on a limited basis, and remain a democracy as we have come to understand that term over the past two centuries?

Of course, modern Western democracies already tolerate a wide range of religious practice. That toleration is one of the fundamental attributes defining such political systems and the law very often compromises some of its rules as a result. In the U.S., for example, the Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution permits Amish parents to end their children's formal education at the eighth grade, even though others must complete 10 or 12 years of schooling. Similarly, even in circumstances where the Constitution's "free exercise clause" does not compel it, the federal government has permitted the use of peyote (containing the hallucinogen mescaline) in American Indian rituals and also excused conscientious objectors from military service.

But there is a critical difference between permitting some flexibility for religious practices within the larger society and encouraging separate, and potentially inconsistent, legal systems for different parts of the population. Toleration suggests an exception to the norm. Interposing alternative legal rules, and institutions to administer them, creates competing norms. In effect, one part of the body politic secedes from the other parts with regard to certain aspects of national life.


Comment: I pray that Shariah law is never tolerated in the United States!

Interstate migration trends

States of Opportunity

Excerpts:

An old adage says high taxes don't redistribute income, they redistribute people. For new evidence look no further than migration patterns within the United States, as documented in a new survey by the moving company United Van Lines.

A record eight million Americans -- some 20,000 people every day -- relocated to another state last year. So where are these families headed and why? The general picture is this: Americans are continuing to flee the Northeast and Midwest, while the leading destinations continue to be Southern and Western states.

The United Van Lines study finds that the biggest population loser last year was Michigan, where two families moved out of the state for every new family that moved in.

...

But one reason to conclude that taxes are also a motivator is because the eight states without an income tax are stealing talent from other states. They are Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming, and each one gained in net domestic migrants.

...

Politicians who think taxes don't matter might want to explain the Dakotas. North Dakota ranked second worst in out-migration last year, while South Dakota ranked in the top 10 as a destination. The two are similar in most regards, with one large difference: North Dakota has an income tax and South Dakota doesn't.

...

Our friends on the left say Americans are willing to pay more taxes to get better government services, but their migration patterns reveal the opposite. Governors would be wise to heed these interstate migration trends as they try to cope with what may be one of the worst years in recent memory for state finances. The people who tend to be the most mobile in American society are the educated and motivated -- in other words, the taxpaying class. Tax them too much, and you'll soon find they aren't there to tax at all.


Comment: This is a choice K and I will have in 8 years. I would consider moving to Tennessee or to South Dakota to escape high state income taxes.

What conservative talk show hosts and hair dressers have in common ...

McCain and the Talk-Show Hosts

Answer:

... like hairdressers, they can talk all day long to one client after another as they snip, have decided that the presumptive Republican nominee does not hew sufficiently close to their gospel.

As anyone who has listened to them knows, the depth of their thought is truly Oprah-like. And if a great institution of the left can weigh-in as it does in the choice of a nominee, why not its fraternal twins on the right? It doesn't matter that Mitt Romney, suddenly their Reagan, became a conservative in a flash of light sometime last year, or that their other champion, a populist theocrat, is in many ways as conservative as Vladimir Lenin. The task is to stop the devil McCain.

More:

... If those who are in a hissy fit about Sen. McCain would rather have Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, they will get Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

Comment: Well said and I agree.

Monday happenings

Roger and I completed our Mac upgrades:

1. I upgraded my MacBook from OS X Tiger to Leopard on Saturday. Roger completed his yesterday
   
2. Roger and I deinstalled Office 2004 and installed Office 2008. I also put Office 2008 on Kathee's MacBook.
   
3. Tonight I installed the HP printer driver on Kathee's MacBook.
   

Basically all three Mac's are alike. I have some HTML development tools on mine: Taco editor, CyberDuck (FTP), and Fetch (FTP)

Our next project is to install a centrally-shared MiniMax 500 gig drive connected to the AirPort Extreme.

Al Gore on the Horizon?

Chuck Dunn: Al Gore on the Horizon?

Comment: Interesting read. I personally think Obama will sweep the Potomac primaries tomorrow and break out ahead of Hillary. American Research Group polls

Affirmative action solution to Bill's dilemma

Campaign Takeout

Anatomy of a Phish

Wikipedia: Phishing

Below was in my Gmail spam folder. Hurray for Gmail to catch this stuff (which the service does quite well!)

Comment: The URL looks legitimate! But you would think that they would spell "receiving" correctly!



The seemingly legitimate weblink takes one here (above). Note that the view (I had to shrink for this blog) looks almost identical to the genuine site below! The fake site url begins with an http:// (not https://) and then an ip address!



Above is the genuine Abbey Bank site. By the way, I do not have an account with nor had even heard of the Abbey Bank until today! The genuine site has an https:// leading the URL.



The real bank has a warning about Phishing!

Updated: Cyberthieves go phishing to rob banks

Repairing one's Internet reputation

Google Yourself—And Enjoy It

Excerpt:

Clearly, you no longer have to be a paparazzi-plagued star to be misrepresented on a worldwide stage. Anyone can say anything online (it's estimated that 1.6 million blog posts are created daily), and dozens of new gadgets, as well as more-powerful search engines, give us easy access to all those indiscriminate bits of information. This convenient yet terrifying reality has created a whole new brand of damage control: Internet reputation repair. ReputationHawk out of Baton Rouge, La.; Washington, D.C.'s International Reputation Management; ReputationDefender in northern California, and Los Angeles's Done! SEO specialize in managing your online legacy, and business is booming. "Anyone can have their image tarnished on the Internet, no matter how good a person they are," says Jeff Henderson of Done! SEO, a search-engine optimization company that claims business increased tenfold when it introduced reputation-management services in 2006. "We're the next generation of public relations. From here on out, you need to own your first few Google pages."

For those of us who still don't know the difference between megabytes and RAM, "owning" online search results seems as elusive as harnessing vapor. But these rep agents for hire can push offending material down off the first couple of pages—which is a page beyond where most users venture. They do it by creating hundreds, even thousands, of links between third-party Web sites and positive content about you or your business. The labor-intensive service runs anywhere from $4,000 to $30,000, and it takes about six months to see all those negative hits clear off the first page. There are no guarantees, but according to John, who went with Done! SEO in November, "things are already moving in a better direction."

ReputationDefender of Menlo Park, Calif., offers a less-expensive and less-complicated service: it hunts down the host of the offending material and asks that the information be removed.

Comment: Why I am not concerned: I died in 1859! Compare Colossians 3:3, "For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God".

How will the Dems handle Michigan and Florida?

Clinton v. Obama: The Lawsuit

Excerpt:

These superdelegates, Byzantine hyper-egalitarian Democratic Party delegate selection formulas, and the fact that many delegates are selected at conventions or by caucuses rather than primaries, combine to offer the distinct possibility that by convention time the candidate leading in the popular vote in the primaries will be trailing in the delegate count.

How ironic. For over seven years the Democratic Party has fulminated against the Electoral College system that gave George W. Bush the presidency over popular-vote winner Al Gore in 2000. But they have designed a Rube Goldberg nominating process that could easily produce a result much like the Electoral College result in 2000: a winner of the delegate count, and thus the nominee, over the candidate favored by a majority of the party's primary voters.

Imagine that as the convention approaches, Sen. Clinton is leading in the popular vote, but Sen. Obama has the delegate lead. Surely no one familiar with her history would doubt that her take-no-prisoners campaign team would do whatever it took to capture the nomination, including all manner of challenges to Obama delegates and tidal waves of litigation.

Indeed, it has already been reported that Sen. Clinton will demand that the convention seat delegates from Michigan and Florida, two states whose delegates have been disqualified by the party for holding January primaries in defiance of party rules. The candidates agreed not to campaign in those states. But Sen. Clinton opted to keep her name on the Michigan primary ballot, and staged a primary-day victory visit to Florida, winning both of those unsanctioned primaries. Her campaign is arguing that the delegates she won in each state be recognized despite party rules and notwithstanding her commitment not to compete in those primaries. Of course. "Count every vote."

Comment: More on the Super delegates and the possibility of the Obama - Clinton contest going to the Convention.