Wade, Kobe carry national team to gold medal

The 37 point drubbing of Spain in round robin play meant nothing in last nights rematch. The game remained close throughout, largely in part to a combined lack of defense and good offensive execution. Lebron James and Kobe Bryant got into early foul trouble, so Coach K brought in the tournament's best sixth man, Dwyane Wade. Wade's first half performace was enough to carry the team to halftime with a small lead. In the second half, Kobe took over. Wade finshed with 27 points, Kobe had 25. I wonder what Shaq was thinking when Kobe and Wade hugged at the completion of their interview just prior to the ceremony. Kobe and Wade, when on the floor together, were quite a force throughout the entire tournament. By the way, it's time to stop with the "Redeem Team" crap. While it was cute to start with, it got old fast. Here are some pictures, mostly from the medal ceremony.



Kobe representin


Kobe salutes the Chinese. Wade raises his arms to celebrate his first gold medal.

The team on the podium posing for the crowd before they receive their medals.


You could argue the team was built around these four guys, from left: Bryant, James, Wade, Anthony

James kisses his medal. Greatest accomplishment to this point.


They don't know which camera to look at.

Wade and his medal.

Carmelo during the national anthem. Look closely at his right hand, you will notice he has the Puerto Rican flag tatooed there. Interesting...

Jason Kidd doesn't know what to make of all the younger guys. Deron Williams should really shave his beard.

Unlike Barack Obama, these guys know that when your country's anthem is played, your hand goes over your heart. Not quite sure what Dwight Howard is up to.


Another demonstration of proper etiquette during the national anthem. So funny that the athletes get it, but the man who wants to be commander-in-chief doesn't quite understand.

Is this where Obama stole his campaign slogan??

Biden was a good selection. Two plagarizers on the same ticket. Well done.

Selection of Senator Biden

It's not like I was going to vote for Obama anyway, but his selection of a pro-choice Catholic is quite offensive. Politics always brings up the issue of how can you be both Catholic and pro-choice? The answer is that you can't! Catholicism is about embracing the life that God has given us, belief that Jesus died for our sins and sits at His right hand. As Catholics we are called to not only worship God but to produce offspring, who will be raised in the faith. We are taught to love all of God's creatures, regardless of what form they appear in (ie human or baby). In today's society we have to fight hard against the evilness that is abortion. Some who call themselves Cathoics just don't see it. They can't separate the women's rights argument from abortion. These are two different issues here.

As a woman, I am all for women's rights. I am for women seeking higher educations, seeking jobs that were only once held by men (except priests), becoming more prominent figures in society, receiving the same pay as men. I am for women being allowed to have the same priveledges men have. I am for women having the right to decide when they want to have a baby, keeping in mind that they use abstinence as means of protecting themselves before they are ready to raise a child. I am NOT for women having the right to decide whether their baby lives or dies. This is in the hands of God. There should be no choice when it comes to life. If you are pregnant, you need to accept that you are bringing a baby into this world. Any action to prevent that is murder.

Abortion is not something to joke about as Obama did with the pay grade comment. Obama continues to poke fun at abortion by taking a Catholic pro abortion running mate. His sense of humor is deplorable.

Now onto Mr. Biden. I believe the selection had mostly to do with his foreign policies (interestingly enough, Biden was for the Iraq war). However, I think Obama is mistaken when he thinks that this selection is catering to the Irish Catholics. Any Catholic who votes for the Obama-Biden ticket is voting for misrepresentation of the Catholic faith. This is huge. Biden will become a bigger figure. People will see that he's Catholic and that he is pro-choice and they will think that is what Catholics stand for. Those who are weak in the faith may be swayed to the dark side. Biden could go down as one of the biggest heretics in American history.

Interesting website I cam across

http://www.muslimsforobama.com/

and this one: http://muslimsforobama08.com/

I tried to access the following sites: www.muslimsformccain.com and www.muslimsforjohnmccain.com

Neither one works or has any indication of ever being a working site. Fascinating and scary. I acknowledge many Muslims are not threats but I still find it odd that they all flock to this guy. I thought they were a people of principles. If Obama truly believes everything he stands up for to be true, he is neither a good Muslim, nor a good Christian. I guess that would make him just your run of the mill democrat.

Obama is a Nutjob

The following a well-written article by Patrick J. Buchanan appearing August 12, 2008 at humanrights.com provided by the following link: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=27992

More reason NOT to vote for this guy if you have any value for life at all. The guy is more unreasonable than any pro-choice person I know. In fact, he's not pro-choice, but pro-abortion. How disgusting that democrats think he is the best man for the job. Appalling.

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In the Pennsylvania primary, Barack Obama rolled up more than 90 percent of the African-American vote. Among Catholics, he lost by 40 points. The cool liberal Harvard Law grad was not a good fit for the socially conservative ethnics of Altoona, Aliquippa and Johnstown.

But if Barack had a problem with Catholics then, he has a far higher hurdle to surmount in the fall, with those millions of Catholics who still take their faith and moral code seriously.

For not only is Barack the most pro-abortion member of the Senate, with his straight A+ report card from the National Abortion Rights Action League and Planned Parenthood. He supports the late-term procedure known as partial-birth abortion, where the baby's skull is stabbed with scissors in the birth canal and the brains are sucked out to end its life swiftly and ease passage of the corpse into the pan.

Partial-birth abortion, said the late Sen. Pat Moynihan, "comes as close to infanticide as anything I have seen in our judiciary."

Yet, when Congress was voting to ban this terrible form of death for a mature fetus, Michelle Obama was signing fundraising letters pledging that, if elected, Barack would be "tireless" in keeping legal this "legitimate medical procedure."

And Barack did not let the militants down. When the Supreme Court upheld the congressional ban on this barbaric procedure, Barack denounced the court for denying "equal rights for women."

As David Freddoso reports in his new best-seller, "The Case Against Barack Obama," the Illinois senator goes further than any U.S. senator has dared go in defending what John Paul II called the "culture of death."

Thrice in the Illinois legislature, Obama helped block a bill that was designed solely to protect the life of infants already born, and outside the womb, who had miraculously survived the attempt to kill them during an abortion. Thrice, Obama voted to let doctors and nurses allow these tiny human beings die of neglect and be tossed out with the medical waste.

How can a man who purports to be a Christian justify this?

If, as its advocates contend, abortion has to remain legal to protect the life and health, mental and physical, of the mother, how is a mother's life or health in the least threatened by a baby no longer inside her -- but lying on a table or in a pan fighting for life and breath?

How is it essential for the life or health of a woman that her baby, who somehow survived the horrible ordeal of abortion, be left to die or put to death? Yet, that is what Obama voted for, thrice, in the Illinois Senate.

When a bill almost identical to the one Barack fought in Illinois, the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, came to the floor of the U.S. Senate in 2001, the vote was 98 to 0 in favor. Barbara Boxer, the most pro-abortion member of the Senate before Barack came, spoke out on its behalf:

"Of course, we believe everyone should deserve the protection of this bill. ... Who could be more vulnerable than a newborn baby? So, of course, we agree with that. ... We join with an 'aye' vote on this. I hope it will, in fact, be unanimous."

Obama says he opposed the Born Alive Infants Protection Act because he feared it might imperil Roe v. Wade. But if Roe v. Wade did allow infanticide or murder, which is what letting a tiny baby die of neglect or killing it outright amounts to, why would he not want that court decision reviewed and amended to outlaw infanticide?

Is the right to an abortion so sacrosanct to Obama that killing by neglect or snuffing out of the life of tiny babies outside the womb must be protected if necessary to preserve that right? Obama is an abortion absolutist. "I could find no instance in his entire career," writes Freddoso, "in which he voted for any regulation or restriction on the practice of abortion."

In 2007, Barack pledged that, in his first act as president, he will sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which would cancel every federal, state or local regulation or restriction on abortion. The National Organization for Women says it would abolish all restrictions on government funding of abortion.

What we once called God's Country would become the nation on earth most zealously committed to an unrestricted right of abortion from conception to birth.

Before any devout Catholic, Evangelical Christian or Orthodox Jew votes for Obama, he or she might spend 15 minutes in Chapter 10 of Freddoso's "Case Against Barack." For if, as Catholics believe, abortion is the killing of an unborn child, and participation in an abortion entails automatic excommunication, how can a good Catholic support a candidate who will appoint justices to make Roe v. Wade eternal and eliminate all restrictions on a practice Catholics legislators have fought for three decades to curtail?

And which Catholic priests and prelates will it be who give invocations at Obama rallies, even as Mother Church fights to save the lives of unborn children whom Obama believes have no right to life and no rights at all?

Gasp! I'm more liberal than I thought

I always knew I was moderate, but I didn't know I resided this close to the middle. The following website has a political compass test: http://politicalcompass.org/test Go ahead, try it! I will say that alot of the questions were quite bogus in my opinion. They were trying to paint a bad picture of conservatives. Wow and I answered all those abortion questions and homosexual ones like a true conservative. Here is my compass:

Well I guess it's a good thing I call myself an independent.

It's not really that hard of a question.......

....but it sure caused an awful lot of stuttering. Here is the question followed by the text of Obama's answer (all caught on video Saturday night here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRZX_ndZN-g&feature=related)

Q: At what point does a baby get human rights in your view?Obama's answer: (sigh) Well...uh..I-I-I think that....whetherrrrrrr you're looking at it from a theological perspective or.....uh a scientific perspective uhm....answering that question with specificity uhhmm.....you know is is um above my pay grade. Um but but but-but-but-but let me s-- let me just speak more generally about the issue of abortion, uh cause this is something I ohh-obviously the country wrestles with. One thing that I'm absolutely convinced of is that.....there is a moral and ethical element to this issue. Ehh-ah and so I-eh think that anybody who tries to deNY the moral difficulties and gravity of the abortion issue I think is-is not paying attention. So-so-so-so that'd be point number one. But point number two uh-eh I am I am pro choice. I believe in Roe vs. Wade and uh eh come to that conclusion not because I am pro abortion, but because.....ultimately I don't think women (shaking head) make these decisions casually. I think they eh eh they wrestle with these things in profound ways in consultation with their pastors or their uhm uh spouses or their their doctors and their family members. And s-s-so, f-for mE the goal right now should be, and this is where I think we can find common ground, and by the way, I've now inserted this into the democratic party platform, is how do we reduce the number of abortions?--Be-cause the fact is is that uh although we've had a president who is opposed to abortion over the last eight years, abortions have not gone down. And and and that I think that's something we ask....

(trails off.......Interupted by the following question: Have you ever voted to limit or reduce abortions?) Well the-the I am infavor for example uh-f [nice turning an uhm into the word of] limits on late term abortions. If there is an exception for the mother's health. Now from the perspective of those who uh, you know, are pr-pro life, I think they would consider that inadequate. And I respect their views, I mean one of the things that I've always said is is that on this particular issue uhm yeh if-f you believe that life begins at conception then uh and you are consistent in that belief.....blah blah blah

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My answer: I make around $20,000 a year, yet I do not think that question is above my pay grade. Actually as a biologist I find that to be one of these easiest questions to answer (if only they would ask me this on my prelims lol). It is obvious that upon conception, or the fertilization of the egg with sperm which triggers cells to divide and initiate a human life, a human life is being formed. Therefore the answer to the question of when a baby should get human rights, has to be at the moment of conception. That wasn't too diffcult. Maybe I should run for president. Or maybe someone should pay Paris Hilton to answer the question in another internet ad. That would be hysterical.

For such a great orator, Barack sure had a tough time answering that question without stuttering. The guy has never met a run-on sentence he doesn't like. Goodness. The easiest way to get the man flustered is to ask him about protecting the rights of those who are at the mercy of their mothers.

Barack claims that under Bush, a pro-life prez, the number of abortions has not gone down. And he claims this as a fact! On the contraire, Mr Obama, abortions are among the lowest levels since the induction of every liberal's favorite ruling: Roe v. Wade.

Obama also claims that he is "in favor of limits on late term abortions." The choice of wording here indicates that he is trying to convince people who don't read into it that he is actually opposed to late term abortions. However instead of using strong words to indicate his opposition, he uses the term "limit." This indicates to me that he is still down with late term abortions and still intends to carry out his promise of reversing Bush's legislation on partial birth abortions. Sorry Barry you don't fool me. I can only hope that most of the voting public also doesn't subscribe to your rhetoric and evil ways.