the tindog coffeehouse

Texas Governor Rick Perry campaigned vigorously against the massive $787,000,000,000 “stimulus bill” signed into law Tuesday, but now that the funds have been approved, he’s more than willing to accept the state’s share of the money.

“As I have said during the debate on (the stimulus package), should Congress pass stimulus legislation using Texas tax dollars, I would work to ensure that our citizens receive their fair share,” Perry wrote in a letter to President Barack Obama.

Legislative leaders estimate that the stimulus bill could deliver almost $17 billion to the state budget, including billions for Medicaid, education and transportation. Lawmakers are just starting to see how the money might fit into the state budget. …

“We have begun the process today of accepting the funds,” Perry spokeswoman Allison Castle said. “However, the governor only wants those funds that can be used for one-time expenditures that don’t obligate the state to ongoing costs long after the federal funding has dried up.”

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Today is the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln. As Americans, we can be extremely proud of Lincoln’s accomplishments in holding the country together during and after the Civil War and for formally ending slavery in America.

However, as John Piper points out, even Lincoln wasn’t perfect:

Emancipation would come and Lincoln would be celebrated as a hero in that cause. But like every hero, his feet are clay. That is what human greatness is—deeply flawed.

There is one hero, and only one, who will not let you down—Jesus Christ. All other heroes fail us, and the reason they do is to point us to Christ. There is no one more admirable, and more worthy of our praise, than Christ. At the very moment when he looked least praiseworthy, he was achieving the highest triumph of love—his death.

I thank God for Abraham Lincoln today. And among other great reasons one of them is: admiring and disillusioned I turn to Jesus.

As the scientific community prepares to celebrate Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday tomorrow, the Vatican appears ready to fully embrace his theory of evolution within the Catholic Church.

“In fact, what we mean by evolution is the world as created by God,” said Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture. The Vatican also dealt the final blow to speculation that Pope Benedict XVI might be prepared to endorse the theory of Intelligent Design, whose advocates credit a “higher power” for the complexities of life.

Organisers of a papal-backed conference next month marking the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species said that at first it had even been proposed to ban Intelligent Design from the event, as “poor theology and poor science”. Intelligent Design would be discussed at the fringes of the conference at the Pontifical Gregorian University, but merely as a “cultural phenomenon”, rather than a scientific or theological issue, organisers said. …

Conceding that the Church had been hostile to Darwin because his theory appeared to conflict with the account of creation in Genesis, Archbishop Ravasi argued yesterday that biological evolution and the Christian view of Creation were complementary.

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Buried within the bowels of the massive $838,000,000,000 “stimulus” bill being pushed through Congress right now is a mandate for the establishment of computerized medical records, records which would include a person’s entire medical history from birth to death and which could be accessed by, well, no one knows for sure.

Billions will be handed to companies creating these databases. Billions will be handed to universities to incorporate patient databases “into the initial and ongoing training of health professionals.” There’s a mention of future “smart card functionality.” …

The databases will, “at a minimum,” include information on every American’s race and ethnicity. They will be used for “biosurveillance and public health” and “medical and clinical research,” both of which raise privacy questions. They will become part of a “nationwide system for the electronic use and exchange of health information.”

Plus, the federal government will use its vast purchasing power–think Medicare and Medicaid–to compel adoption of e-records that meet government “standards and implementation specifications.” …

The bill punishes physicians who are not “meaningful users” of a government-certified e-record database, and specifies certain procedures and information exchanges that will “satisfy” the requirement.

Starting in 2015, government reimbursements to physicians who are not participating in the federal e-record effort will begin to decline.

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Oh, snap!

Not only did South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford point out the glaringly obvious about the massive “stimulus” bill being hurried through Congress right now, he took a swipe at the Cult of Obama just for good measure (emphasis mine):

“A problem that was created by building up of too much debt will not be solved with yet more debt,” Gov. Mark Sanford said Sunday, making a reference to the federal deficit spending that will likely finance the federal stimulus package.

“We’re moving precipitously close to what I would call a savior-based economy,” Sanford also said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union.

The South Carolina Republican said such an economy is “what you see in Russia or Venezuela or Zimbabwe or places like that where it matters not how good your product is to the consumer but what your political connection is to those in power.”

“That is quite different than a market-based economy where some rise and some fall but there’s a consequence to making a stupid decision,” Sanford said after pointing to the powers granted to the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve to help deal with the current economic crisis.

“A lot of people who’ve made some very stupid decisions are being bailed out by the population at large,” he added.

I probably would’ve rephrased that as, “A lot of people who’ve made some very stupid decisions are being bailed out by a lot of stupid voters.” But then, that’s why I would never win any elections.

“May you live all the days of your life.”
- Jonathan Swift

A friend of mine posted the following list of items on his blog recently, a checklist of things “completed or experienced,” and I was surprised at the number of items he was able to check off.

(I’ve removed his comments.)

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