Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska was convicted last year during the election campaign of corruption charges in a federal court in Washington D. C. I voted in the federal election, and I had to choose between the Republican Stevens and the Democrat Mark Begich, former mayor of Anchorage, whose father was the esteemed Congressman Nick Begich who disappeared in a 1972 plane crash while serving Alaska. I didn’t know how to vote. I felt that Stevens, an octogenarian should have ceded his place to a younger Republican because of the corruption charges; Alaska Republicans could have found a suitable candidate. But he did not. Nevertheless, I could not in good conscience vote for a Democrat. So I held my nose and voted for a convicted felon for the first time in my life, realizing that, if Stevens won and his appeals were unsuccessful, Governor Sarah Palin would appoint a Republican interim senator until a new election could be held.
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Month: April 2009
Another victim of the Sexual Revolution? (Updated)
Farrah Fawcett, Jaclyn Smith, Kate Jackson
A sex icon when I was growing, Farah Fawcett is in the hospital. She is apparently suffering from complication related to treatment for anal cancer. Again, the media skirts the issue of what are the main causes of anal cancer, just as when Jade Goody was dying of cervical cancer.
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Affirmative Action: Why American-style liberalism would be bad for Africa, I
See the preamble to this series.
An acquaintance of mine, Dr. Tyler F. Williams laments the lack of women bibliobloggers as part of a more general discussion of lack of minority writers in blogs in general. Well, if there was ever something less worthy to fret over. Blogs are free for the asking. Anyone can start and maintain a blog. Perhaps there are good reasons why men do biblioblogs and not women, but they have nothing to do with discrimination.
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More media malpractice: Reuters
Warner Todd Huston at Redstate has pointed out a Reuter’s article (screen shot) in which a member of the Taliban claims responsibility for the shootings yesterday in Binghamtom, New York. Reports suggested that a certain Jiverly Voong (apparently a Vietnamese name) is the shooter responsibe for the attack. Huston suggests that the article was politically motivated to undermine US efforts to fight terrorist with unmanned drones. Whatever be the case, Reuters has reported a rumor that promotes terrorist propoganda without even attempting to verify the story. This is a serious breach of journalistic ethics (or are those two terms an oxymoron?).
“I was a soldier” / “Je fus militaire”
A few years ago I was teaching a course in church history in Bangui, and one of my students came to see me. He wanted to explain why he was studying at the seminary. He said to me in French, “Je fus militaire” (I was a soldier).
I remember this because of the simple past tense, which is literary and sounds funny in spoken French. He had been a rebel soldier and had spent years in the forest of Congo on the opposite side of the Ubangi river from Bangui; as a rebel, he could not return to Bangui until President Ange-Félix Patassé was deposed by François Bozizé, the current President. While in the forest, he said, they had little to eat and nothing to do. They started reading the Bible together and praying, and so the soldiers in this new church elected my student to come to seminary to become an army chaplain and to lead them as a pastor.
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The Righteous Investor 
