Meet the Blind Month 2012

Today kicks off the 2012 Meet the Blind Month. During this month public outreach is done to educate the sighted public about blindness, what it is and isn't, and generally increase acceptance about blindness. Several activities will be held this month in Denver, one of which I have posted below.

Please Join Us for an OPEN HOUSE as we celebrate National Meet the Blind Month! Thursday October 11th, 3pm to 6 pm at the Colorado Center for the Blind Please come and see how we spend the day learning and practicing blindness skills at the Colorado Center for the Blind • Learn about Braille and even how to write your name. Pick up Braille alphabet cards to share with friends, family, co-workers • See the latest technology that is used: Braille displays, screen readers, iPhones and much more • Step in to our woodshop where blind students will show you their projects and talk about how they use power tools • Learn why you always see us wearing sleep shades (black blindfolds) • Talk to our students about independent travel; find out how they cross complex intersections and much more • Meet our blind seniors and let them show you how they handle everything in their lives now that they are blind • Stop by the kitchen for some delicious light refreshments and discover how our blind students prepare all kinds of foods • See our plans for the future and learn about our upcoming capital campaign Our Open House will be filled with demonstrations and provide you with a whole new understanding on the abilities of blind people. The Center is located at 2233 W. Shepperd Ave. Littleton, 80120. For information or directions please call 303.778.1130 or visit www.cocenter.org

What To Do?

I think the below needs an answer. Any of my Liberal friends care to have a crack at it? What do you do when someone doesn't want to help out the little guy or the poor? How do you deal with those who disagree with you that government is the solution to all man's ills and it is our duty to contribute to the effort? How do you respond to the idea that if we should be able to have porn published freely we should also be able to discuss Jesus in the public square? Questions and thoughts that deserve a serious answer IMO.

"Liberals have never answered the question: what of those who do not choose to join in a 'common end' that government has chosen for them? What of those who refuse to 'belong to government'? These unfortunate souls must be dealt with, as Obama's departments and agencies are dealing with them: by silencing them, litigating against them, jailing them, and ruining their businesses and reputations. Those tactics, and more, were exactly what European leftists from Mussolini to Stalin resorted to. ... Obama's rationale for a second term is that he wants to govern, and that should be enough. Or as Jay Carney suggested, just shut up. ... George Washington called government 'a dangerous servant and a fearful master.' Thomas Paine called it 'a necessary evil.' For Obama, government is the thing we all belong to, the thing that 'made this country great.' Four more years of Obama will not make this country great, but it will ensure that we belong to government to an unimaginable extent. Obama's message is: 'You and everything you own belong to me.'" --columnist Jeffrey Folks

Will Your Church Pray?

I was unaware that 11-11-12 was the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church, so thought I'd share the below.

Will Your Church Pray on Nov. 11?

Dear Friends:

When we ask persecuted Christians in hostile and restricted nations how we can help and bless them, their first response is, “Pray for us!” The International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church, on the second Sunday in November, is an important way of answering their request. It is a day for the worldwide Body of Christ to unite in prayer for members of the Body who suffer for their faith. To assist your church in praying effectively on IDOP Sunday, The Voice of the Martyrs is offering the 2012 IDOP Church Resource Kit. The kit includes a 5-minute DVD that shares the story of Bounchan, who was imprisoned in Laos for almost 13 years because of his Christian faith. It also includes a variety of other resources to help your church “Remember those in bonds” (Heb. 13:3) on this important day. CLICK HERE TO ORDER YOUR CHURCH RESOURCE KIT FOR ONLY $9 While IDOP is set aside as a special day of prayer for the persecuted, it is vital that we remember our persecuted family throughout the year. A VOM prayer banner is available to help remind your church family to pray for the persecuted throughout the year. CLICK HERE TO ORDER THE 2012 PRAYER BANNER Our brothers and sisters of the persecuted church ask that we pray for them. Will you and your church answer their request this November? For those in bonds, The Voice of the Martyrs

The Twin Towers

I received the below from Crown, and thought I'd share. The thoughts are valid and worth considering.

America's Next "Twin Towers"

I just finished Joel Rosenberg’s excellent new book, Implosion: Can America Recover From Its Economic & Spiritual Challenges In Time? Rosenberg’s sobering work is filled with data to support the very real decline of America’s spiritual and economic strength—what I’m calling our next “Twin Towers”—both of which are under attack. The greatest threat to our economic tower is self-inflicted—our national debt. The U.S. government now officially owes $16 trillion, much of it to unfriendly nations. Remember, the Bible tells us that the borrower is slave to the lender. We hit that woeful mark at the end of August with surprisingly little fanfare, save for a few items in news outlets like The Wall Street Journal: Total U.S. government debt eclipsed $16 trillion for the first time Friday [Aug. 31], new government data show, as total federal borrowing continues marching toward the $16.394 trillion borrowing limit…The government is projected to run a deficit of between $1.1 trillion and $1.2 trillion in the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30, meaning that spending will outpace tax revenue by that amount over 12 months…The government is currently running an average monthly deficit of $100 billion and is likely to hit the debt ceiling sometime in late December. We often complain that politicians in Washington don’t know what they’re doing, but that’s a myth. They know exactly what they’re doing. The $16.394 trillion debt ceiling passed in the last “compromise” agreement isn’t exactly a round number. And both parties are responsible for it. That number was skillfully chosen to kick the issue just past the coming election, so politicians of either party wouldn’t be forced to take a stand on raising the debt ceiling in the current campaign. Of course, the issue is not going away. The debt ceiling mess will hit again right at the end of a lame duck session of Congress. Expect little, if anything, to be done about it. The Treasury Department can juggle the books for several months to keep the bills paid, but sometime next spring, the federal government will be legally constrained from borrowing unless the debt limit is raised yet again. Sixteen trillion is just too big a number for the average person to comprehend. So let’s break it down into a more manageable amount. The 2010 Census showed that we have a residential population of roughly 309,000,000. Divide the $16 trillion that we now owe by that number and you’ll discover your individual share of our national debt—$52,000. For the average family, the share is $135,000. Now ask yourself, what exactly did you get for taking on that kind of liability? We’re told by politicians not to worry. The liberals believe that the solution to this debt is to get the rich to pay their “fair share,” but this is a straw man argument at best. The idea that we can solve our problems by getting the so-called rich to pay their fair share, whatever that means, is a complete fraud designed to get the votes of the uninformed. President Obama’s defines “rich” as anyone making over $250,000 a year. He wants us to believe that raising taxes on these people will solve our deficit problem. But according to Kevin D. Williamson, writing for National Review Online, the numbers just don’t add up: In fact, in 2006, the Census Bureau found only 2.2 million households earning more than $250,000…The 2012 deficit is forecast to hit $1.1 trillion under Obama’s budget. (Thanks, Mr. President!) Spread that deficit over all the households in Club 250K and you have to jack up their taxes by an average of $500,000. Which you simply can’t do, since a lot of them don’t have $500,000 in income to seize: Most of them are making $250,000 to $450,000 and paying about half in taxes already. You can squeeze that goose all day, but that’s not going to make it push out a golden egg. Believing that raising taxes on “the rich” is the solution to our deficit and debt problem means you have to ignore cold, hard facts. As Williamson points, out, we’re going to need an awful lot more rich people to tax our way out of a deficit hole this deep. And that’s just to break even this year—never mind making a dent in the $16 trillion debt. Any politician who tells you that taxing Americans more will solve our problem is simply wrong. If you still believe that the federal government has a revenue problem and not a spending problem, perhaps this thought might change your mind. After they tax everything from the rich and still can’t balance our dangerously bloated federal budget, who do you think they’ll come after next? Remember, you already owe a $52,000 share of that $16 trillion national debt. For that kind of money, you’d expect to get a “free” college education, or “free” health care for life, or maybe half of your house paid for. Last time I checked, those things weren’t free. Students are still graduating with tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of student loan debt, Obamacare is loaded with new taxes, and millions of Americans are still underwater on their mortgages. Meanwhile, Christianity is under siege in the western world, even right here in America. While we see events unfold in Libya and Egypt, mobs attacking our consulates and killing our diplomats, all purportedly because of an affront to Islam, our State Department apologizes for something we haven’t done. At the same time, it’s open season on Christian beliefs. God is booed at one of our own party’s national conventions. Our spiritual tower is becoming as wobbly as our economic tower. It seems their fates are entwined, just as the World Trade Center Towers were 11 years ago. So what exactly do we need to avoid a spiritual and economic collapse? Joel Rosenberg argues that there is still good reason to hope for America’s recovery. Many times in our short history we have pulled out of a downward spiral, evidencing God’s grace on this nation. The New York Times bestselling author advocates that we need a revival or the Third Great Awakening to change the self-destructive course of our nation. Rosenberg cites the definition of a revival by Charles Finney who was himself a part of the Second Great Awakening to sweep America at the dawn of the 19th century. It was “the renewal of the first love of Christians, resulting in the awakening and conversion of sinners to God.” Yes, we need to see Christians returning to their first love. Perhaps our misplaced dependency upon our money and wealth is being destroyed for that very purpose, to get our attention and to move our hearts back to the Giver and off the gifts. Rosenberg also notes that we have a voice in the political process. While we should never place our hope in government or the next President or the next election, we should speak up and expect a return to fiscal sanity in Washington. We need real cuts in federal spending or we will have those cuts forced upon us by our lenders. In two months, we’ll have the opportunity to choose new leaders. I pray you’ll use your vote wisely to elect men and women who are prepared to make the tough choices we need to solve this crisis. Regardless of the outcome of the election, join me in praying with Joel Rosenberg for the Third Great Awakening to sweep our nation before our next “Twin Towers” collapse.

The DNC

Found the below article on the DNC so apt that I had to share it here. Vote in November! Read this on the Web at http://patriotpost.us/editions/14671/ Subscribe to The Patriot Post — It's Right and It's Free The Picture They Painted in Charlotte "It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth -- and listen to the song of that syren, till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty?" --Patrick Henry An elderly Spanish woman recently set about the work of restoring a 102-year-old oil painting of Jesus. To put it generously, her work was less than successful. Just as she attempted to refurbish the cracked and peeling fresco, however, Democrats at their North Carolina convention tried -- and failed just as miserably -- to improve the image of their own tarnished and faded messiah. Restoring the Obama fresco In a video produced for the opening of the convention, Democrats succinctly summed up their entire philosophy: "Government is the only thing we all belong to. We have different churches, different clubs, but we're together as a part of our city, or our county, or our state, and our nation." Everything separates us but government. Indeed, the rest of the convention paid homage to government as the be all and end all, the Alpha and Omega, the solution to every problem. Because, let's face it, as someone once said, "You didn't build that." The Obama campaign quickly denied having anything to do with the video, but no one doubts it's Obama's vision. And nothing could be further from what our Founding Fathers established -- a republic with limited and enumerated powers in which "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" were the rights and values to be cherished, not the bureaucratic labyrinth at the Department of Health and Human Services. It was also no small irony that the gavel came down on the convention just as our national debt passed $16,000,000,000,000. Democrats have done more than their "fair share" to help us reach that horrendous number. With all that in mind, we chose a few of the more egregious quotes from the DNC floor -- and believe us, the choosing was hard -- with concise rebuttals to the various attacks, distortions and outright lies. Barack Obama: "[T]hose of us who carry on [FDR's] party's legacy should remember that not every problem can be remedied with another government program or dictate from Washington. ... We don't think government can solve all our problems, but we don't think government is the source of all our problems -- any more than are welfare recipients, or corporations, or unions, or immigrants, or gays, or any other group we're told to blame for our troubles." Except George W. Bush. He's definitely to blame. Obama has yet to offer a single solution to anything that isn't top-down government control. Ronald Reagan once said, "[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Reagan was right. You can choose a future where we reduce our deficit without wrecking our middle class. Independent analysis shows that my plan would cut our deficits by $4 trillion." His plan will further increase our debt by about $10 trillion, regardless of a nominal "cut" in the rate of growth. "I want to reform the tax code so that it's simple, fair, and asks the wealthiest households to pay higher taxes on incomes over $250,000 -- the same rate we had when Bill Clinton was president ... [W]hen Governor Romney and his allies in Congress tell us we can somehow lower our deficit by spending trillions more on new tax breaks for the wealthy -- well, you do the math. I refuse to go along with that." Letting people keep their own money by leaving tax rates where they've been for 10 years is NOT a spending item. "You didn't elect me to tell you what you wanted to hear. You elected me to tell you the truth." He should try that some time. "[Republicans] want your vote, but they don't want you to know their plan. And that's because all they have to offer is the same prescription they've had for the last 30 years." Yes, conservatives have offered a working free-market plan for more than 30 years. By contrast, the Left has offered the same failed governments solution since the 1930s. Forward!™ Joe Biden: "After the worst job loss since the Great Depression, we've created 4.5 million private sector jobs in the past 29 months." Who created those jobs? "Mitt Romney grew up in Detroit. His father ran American Motors. Yet he was willing to let Detroit go bankrupt." Barack Obama, on the other hand, had "the guts to stand up for the automobile industry" by ... letting it go bankrupt. The only difference was, Obama protected the unions. Bill Clinton: "In Tampa, the Republican argument against the president's re-election was pretty simple: We left him a total mess, he hasn't cleaned it up fast enough, so fire him and put us back in. In order to look like an acceptable alternative to President Obama, they couldn't say much about the ideas they have offered over the last two years. You see they want to go back to the same old policies that got us into trouble in the first place: to cut taxes for high income Americans even more than President Bush did; to get rid of those pesky financial regulations designed to prevent another crash and prohibit future bailouts; to increase defense spending $2 trillion more than the Pentagon has requested without saying what they'll spend the money on; to make enormous cuts in the rest of the budget, especially programs that help the middle class and poor kids." No doubt the economy Obama inherited was a mess, but that certainly wasn't due to conservative policies, which didn't exactly dominate the Bush administration. Fiscal responsibility didn't cause the mess -- there was none. Free and truly deregulated markets didn't cause it -- regulation increased. Lower taxes didn't cause it. Exploding government spending and over-regulation caused it -- recall Clinton's own expansion of the Community Reinvestment Act that played a critical role in the housing crash. Obama then multiplied these failed policies to prolong the economic malaise. Michelle Obama: "I love that for Barack, there is no such thing as 'us' and 'them.'" Except when he's demonizing "The Rich" or those awful Republicans. "Being president doesn't change who you are, it reveals who you are." We can all agree on that! Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth "One-Sixty-Fourth" Warren: "[F]or many years, our middle class has been chipped, squeezed and hammered. Talk to the construction worker I met from Malden, Massachusetts, who went nine months without finding work. Talk to the head of the manufacturing company in Franklin trying to protect jobs but worried about rising costs. Talk to the student in Worcester who worked hard to finish his degree, and now he's drowning in debt. ... People feel like the system is rigged against them. And here's the painful part: They're right. The system is rigged." Wait -- isn't this Honest Injun supposed to be helping Obama? Who's running the system? Obama's been president for the last three-and-a-half years, and Democrats took Congress in 2006. "Mitt Romney ... wants to give tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires. But for middle-class families who are hanging on by their fingernails? His plans will hammer them with a new tax hike of up to $2,000." Actually, that's the Democrats' plan if the GOP won't agree to hike taxes on the "rich." Romney plans to cut taxes across the board by 20 percent. Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick: "We believe that freedom means keeping government out of our most private affairs, including out of a woman's decision whether to keep an unwanted pregnancy and everybody's decision about whom to marry. We believe that we owe the next generation a better country than we found and that every American has a stake in that." Every American has a stake in our future, all right -- about $51,000 in debt per citizen, in fact, thanks in large part to redistribution for things like paying for those "most private affairs." "In Massachusetts, we know Mitt Romney. By the time he left office, Massachusetts was 47th in the nation in job creation -- during better economic times." National Review's Patrick Brennan replies, "While the 47th number has some basis in reality (over his four years, that was Massachusetts's rank), Patrick actually insists on distorting it anyway: He implies that Romney took a state with robust job growth and ran it into the ground. Exactly the opposite happened: Romney inherited the dot-com disaster, but boosted the Commonwealth from 50th in job creation in his first year to 28th in his final year." Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer: "When a politician doesn't want to be honest about a tax hike, he calls it a fee." Sort of like a health care "reform" law we've heard of... In conclusion, Barack Obama once again: "[W]hen all is said and done -- when you pick up that ballot to vote -- you will face the clearest choice of any time in a generation. Over the next few years, big decisions will be made in Washington, on jobs and the economy; taxes and deficits; energy and education; war and peace -- decisions that will have a huge impact on our lives and our children's lives for decades to come. On every issue, the choice you face won't be just between two candidates or two parties. It will be a choice between two different paths for America. A choice between two fundamentally different visions for the future." Truer words were not spoken at the DNC. All things considered, we drew one overarching conclusion from the Democrats' week in Charlotte: Their messiah is awfully small. If you could stand to watch a minute, what did you think of the DNC? Publisher's Note Patriots, we encourage you to set aside any and all divisive criticism of the Romney-Ryan ticket and form a unified front to defeat Barack Hussein Obama and his socialist regime. If we have the opportunity to hold a "President Romney" to the high standard of Liberty after inauguration day in January, we will be grateful!

Dining in the Dark?

I have been amused in the past by various stereotypes involved with the sighted and the blind. I have found this amusing article particularly helpful in aiding me to laugh.

event however brings it to a whole new level of dark amusement, if you’ll pardon the pun. The chief highlights are the following:

•Coffee, tea and other hot drinks are not served in the dark, for safety reasons, but are available in the lighted lounge at the end of the experience. •Wine is served with a special sleeve to prevent the bottle from breaking.

Now the last time I checked drinking hot beverages did not require sight, and although I love iced coffee I don’t drink it for the safety. Although I may or may not have been known in my college days for breaking a wine bottle or two with my head, my friends assure me that my blindness had absolutely nothing to do with any such events. I understand the need to have those who are not trained in alternative techniques to be careful, and in our sue happy society one can never be too careful, but I wonder how much of this can be chalked up to the need to cover one’s donkey and how much points to a misunderstanding about blindness. Thoughts?

Are the Rich Patriotic?

In this article the President makes the argument that having the rich pay more tax is patriotic. He suggests that with this "modest" amount added to the federal income we can invest in things that create jobs like education. I would suggest to the President that education that results in a job at the end is indeed a good thing, but why then shouldn't the families and individuals who would benefit from this education not be willing to make that investment themselves? Additionally, the President seems to think that education, regardless of the goal of said education, is of value. I think that a degree in underwater basket weaving, while fun, is not worth investing in. Then again I have come to appreciate eating on a regular bases.

In regards to the President's larger point on it being patriotic for the rich to pay more, if they wish to do so they may without being forced. All those wishing to pay off the public debt, and here I particularly look to my liberal friends who believe so much in the goodness of big government and its ability to fix problems, may do so by the following.

There are two ways for you to make a contribution to reduce the debt:

•You can make a contribution online either by credit card, checking or savings account at Pay.gov •You can write a check payable to the Bureau of the Public Debt, and in the memo section, notate that it's a Gift to reduce the Debt Held by the Public. Mail your check to: Attn Dept GBureau of the Public DebtP. O. Box 2188Parkersburg, WV 26106-2188

So why should the rich, or anyone else for that matter, be forced to pay more when they may do so voluntarily?