Anyway, just a short review of the iPad as a writing tool. It’s great! Sure, you have to get used to typing a fast two- or four-fingered, but with time you’ll build up speed. That’s what I’ve discovered using Pages and this little free WP blogging app whose name I can’t recall.

Marni Pont O’Doherty was 31 when she died on 9/11. She’s gone, but she’ll never be forgotten. Even though we never met, let me tell you a little about her. First, so you can see her and keep her in your memory, here’s a picture of Marni with her husband Joe.

She was a hard-working (senior vice president with Keefe, Bruyette & Woods) but fun person, the kind of person anybody would have loved to have as a friend: she had a curious mind and loved to know and do things. What’s the clue to that? Marni’s siblings, “Steven and Stefanie Pont [say t]heir younger sister threw herself into a series of hobbies, from needlepoint to painting to gardening, and delighted in researching amusing information and e-mailing her findings.” She liked needlepointing! How utterly fabulous that we have that in common. Plus, Marni liked to tell funny stories; she loved to talk. Just writing this about her brings a smile to my face cuz I’m thinking about some of the stories I’ve heard from other talkers. Providing substance for her gift for gab, Marni was also a voracious reader.

Marni had her life planned, her wedding and car saved for while still in college. Focused, bright, joyous, a source of delight to family and friends, a loving wife, a woman who loved life and gave it all she had. That was Marni Pont O’Doherty.

So, let us remember her on this eighth memorial of 9/11 and every day, taken so swiftly and cruelly from us. Let us rejoice in her life and the joy she brought to all those who knew her. Let us mourn her death and never ever forget how it came about. For Marni. For America.

Eternal and ever-wise God, for Marni’s loved ones, I pray that you may comfort them in their sorrow and give them peace, not as the world gives but as only You can give, in Christ Jesus, Amen.

Let us remember, prayerfully, our slaughtered, their families, the military lives lost and the bodies broken in defense of our nation, President Bush who defended this country, President Obama who is destroying this country’s defenses. Lord have mercy.

Thanks to FoxNation for the photo.

Sarah Palin is now driving the presidential agenda. She has done this through her judicious use of her Facebook page. Moreover, her control of the presidential agenda is made possible by a media and an administration that hates, fears, and sees her as a threat to the Obama administration’s attempt to replace the U.S. Constitution with socialism-communism.

Why if they hate and fear her are they letting her control the agenda? That control is an unforeseen consequence of their effort to destroy her.

The media and the Obama administration strongly desire to destroy Palin’s credibility as a viable presidential candidate. Thus, they have gone all out to decry her as stupid, as a lightweight, as being intellectually deficient. In spite of her return to Alaska after the election, Democrat party hacks continued their efforts to destroy Palin, this time financially through a series of groundless ethics charges which cost the state of Alaska and the governor herself both money and time to defend against. With Palin’s resignation from the governorship, the media and Democrat minions (I’m being really redundant here) have not let up on their assault on Palin. In the typical Obama manner of dealing with political opponents, Palin must be swept off the board entirely without any hope of restarting the game to unseat him.

This elimination of a powerful opponent cannot be accomplished unless the state-run media (SRM; the term also includes other administration lackeys) pay attention to Sarah Palin. That means not just reporting what she has said, but also distorting her words. Sarah Palin’s response has been contrary to what Obama hoped for. Instead of disappearing into the Alaskan wilderness to lick her wounds, she has created her own forum via Facebook through which she speaks to America. Given the media’s investment in her destruction, they are following her avidly and reporting on what she writes, with distortions, of course. This SRM attention has served to insert Palin into the news cycle as a major player even while telling us she’s too dumb to understand much of anything.

The change in control began with this statement of Palin’s on Section 1233 of H.R. 3200:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Note the quotes around “death panel.” That signifies not an actual but a figurative usage for impact. Had the SRM been less hell-bent on destroying Sarah Palin, they would have ignored her statement. Instead, they seized upon her figurative and distorted it into a literal as though Palin didn’t know what she was talking about. Moreover, commentators and politicians, Democrats and Republican, piled on thereby proving Palin’s ignorance to the SRM. True, the actual words “death panel” do not appear in Section 1233 of H. R. 3200. Who would expect it to?! However, that is the logical inference that is the be drawn from the passage, and Sarah Palin drew it thus proving she is more astute than the SRM and the politicians who, having not read the bill at all, hastened to the mike to proclaim her idiocy, ignoring Obama’s own support for such commissions.

Obama, following the precedent he laid down during the campaign of paying attention to the opposition VP candidate when he should not have at all, did not ignore Palin but responded to her remarks and made them even more graphic. He spoke of “death panels that will pull the plug on Grandma.” If Sarah Palin’s properly drawn conclusion did not insufficiently attract the attention of Americans, Obama’s flippant response certainly did. Where “death panels” was a vivid figure of speech, Obama personalized it further and gave it a face, “Grandma,” and made Americans recoil in horror. Obama’s response gave Palin the opportunity to amplify and strike back at him with support from his own side of the aisle. As usual, Obama’s tendency to heckle his opponents as idiots led him deeper into hot water. For, the point at which he not only used Palin’s figurative as a literal, and amplified it, became the point at which he lost control of the agenda and Palin began to drive it. Had he and the SRM been less arrogant and less intent on destroying Sarah Palin, events might have unfolded differently. Instead of Obama framing the debate, Sarah Palin did and brought Obamacare down around his big ears.

She’s no longer the former failed VP-candidate, as the SRM loved to say; instead, she’s the David who brought down the goliath called Obamacare with one graphic figurative, “death panels,” and, in so doing, with his help, dealt a devastating blow to Obama and the Democrats. Palin ground Obama’s face in the mess. She said, “I join millions of Americans in expressing appreciation for the Senate Finance Committee’s decision to remove the provision in the pending health care bill that authorizes end-of-life consultations (Section 1233 of HR 3200). It’s gratifying that the voice of the people is getting through to Congress; however, that provision was not the only disturbing detail in this legislation; it was just one of the more obvious ones.” In other words, Palin was the game changer and she was letting Obama and his SRM know it.

Not content to rest on her laurels, Palin is now asking questions that will continue to drive the health care agenda, wresting power and control away from Obama. This will happen no matter who in the SRM and the political chattering class is unwise enough to claim she doesn’t know anything. Palin writes, “So I have new questions for the president: Why no legal reform? Why continue to encourage defensive medicine that wastes billions of dollars and does nothing for the patients? Do you want health care reform to benefit trial attorneys or patients?” With these questions, Palin strikes at the crux of Obamacare: it’s not about health care reform and improvement but about power and control. It is about benefitting Democrats and their constituents. It is not about saving money but about controlling lives. “Why no legal reform?” is a question that Obama must address if he is to have any credibility on the health care issue, especially since Palin has already laid out the case demonstrating that tort reform is a cost saver to the tune of about $200 billion and increases the availability of medical services where tort reform has been enacted.

Having responded to Palin on the first issue, Obama dare not be silent on this second. To be silent is to sit back and watch tort reform come to front and center stage without his input. Palin did not just destroy Obamacare; she provided a viable and better alternative to the one proposed by Obama when she introduced tort reform as a way of fixing what is broken with the U.S. health care system without the drastic measure of converting it into a single payer (government run) system. If Obama ignores Palin, he will be steamrolled as talks about tort reform takes front and center stage; he will be made irrelevant to the reform as it will be Palin’s agenda, rather than his, that is being implemented.

Palin’s full court press against Obama’s pernicious agenda continues with another question on the American economy: “So why is it that during these tough times, when we have great needs at home, the Obama White House is prepared to send more than two billion of your hard-earned tax dollars to Brazil so that the nation’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras, can drill off shore and create jobs developing its own resources? That’s all Americans want; but such rational energy development has been continually thwarted by rabid environmentalists, faceless bureaucrats and a seemingly endless parade of lawsuits aimed at shutting down new energy projects.” Again, she is hitting Obama and the Democrats where they are weak and at a time when fuel prices are once more rising. Is Brazil better than America? Is Brazil more just and less racist than America? Why does Obama deem that it is well to invest two billion of American taxpayer dollars into the Brazilian oil industry while shutting down the U.S. oil industry? Is that not what he and the Democrats are doing with their refusal allow drilling anywhere at all, in the U.S., that is? The hypocrisy of this investment is astonishing. If alternative fuels are good enough for the U.S., though yet unrealized, should they not be good enough for other countries? Are Brazilians more worthy of employment than Americans that taxpayers should invest in Brazilian oil exploration, which will provide jobs there but not here? It is to be hoped that Palin will raise the issue again and again so that the SRM, convinced of her idiocy, will report on her “ignorance” on energy matters.

As candidate, Obama framed the race as one between himself and Sarah Palin. As president, Obama finds that he’s overmatched by the woman the SRM misunderestimates. For, she’s busy proving that she doesn’t need to be in political office to be in charge of the national agenda; all she’s got to do is ask the right questions. Obama is phoning in his presidency; he’s got no idea of what’s in the health care bill because, just like his fellow Democrats, he hasn’t read it. All he knows is the one big thing: he wants to bring America to her knees. Sarah Palin is not phoning in her opposition to him. That is why she will unseat him from the White House in 2012, in spite of ACORNs best efforts to steal the election for Obama.

For a stupid woman who has no idea what she’s about, Sarah Palin has positioned herself to be more powerful and influential than the sitting president. It takes great stupidity to accomplish a feat like that.

Watch the best ever political speech since Ronald Reagan’s 1976 Convention speech. H’tip Conservatives4Palin.

Palin’s delivery, timing, tone, scalpel were sharp and dead on. When she finished, the entire world knew that Barack Obama was an egotistical, self-obsessed do-nothing who had “written” two “autobiographies” but never a piece of legislation to benefit the constituents who had elected him to office. Obama’s always saying “it’s not about me”; Palin’s speech showed that statement for the lie it is.

Listen to Palin’s speech and reflect on the eight months of the Obama administration. She didn’t lie about him. She revealed him to the bone. Everything she said he’d do, he’s doing.

Palin began to kill Obama softly that night at the GOP Convention, death by a thousand cuts. She’s still slicing and dicing him. Her last victory? “Death panels” stuck a fork in his communist agenda for the U.S. She’s driving Obama now. That’s why the media and the Obama administration hate her and will do anything to destroy her.

On July 14, 1920, Bastille Day, the French flag was flown above the WH, and for good reason. France stood with the U.S. at a critical juncture meriting such an honor. Furthermore, the POW/MIA flag of the National League of Families has most deservedly “been displayed in this place of honor on National POW/MIA Recognition Day since 1982.”

If the Chinese flag is flown at the White House, whose flag will be next? How soon after the Chinese flag can we expect to see the flag of Islam flying from the pinnacle of the WH? You think the Muslims won’t demand? They’ve already stated their intention. Allowing the Chinese to fly their flag at the White House on September 20th, 2009, will set a precedent for when Obama consents to the Muslims’ request to have the flag of Islam to be flown atop it. See, he will say, we flew the Chinese flag on September 20th, why should we discriminate against Muslims who want the same thing—thus making the Chinese a fig-leaf to mask a darker Islamic supremacist agenda.

Obama has already declared that the U.S., with 70% of the population as self-professed Christians, is not a Christian nation but rather is “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.” The flag of Islam at the WH would set the seal on that, in the minds of the world’s Muslims at least.

It is debatable whether this Chinese flag issue is really aimed at the PRC celebration. It is more likely intended to look past the Chinese to the Muslims, to his groveling before, lauding, and elevation of Islam. The Chinese here are likely tools to be used to further another piece of Obama’s anti-America, anti-Constitution agenda, and the flag of Islam is the embodiment of that to the nth degree. Tools or not, let the Chinese use their own embassy, a bit of China on American soil, to hoist their flag and have their celebration.

H’tip InstaPundit.

Emerging stars.

The subtext of the story linked is that soldiers saw and identified Jawad as the thrower, but doubted it because of his age and size, and they arrested him. US soldiers aren’t in the habit of grabbing kids and imprisoning them for kicks.

Was it right for them to send a 12 year old boy to Guantanamo? Here’s the answer to that question: Is a person killed by a juvenile any less dead than a person killed by an adult?

The pearls are sold in long strands.

That’s why the black pearls were quickly strung together; the clerk only needed to remove enough pearls to make the bracelet and add the extras to the necklace.

On the other hand, a choker and matching bracelet took most of the three hours because they were made from nine strands which had to be broken apart so each pearl could be added, one-by-one, to create them. It was a lengthy and tiring process requiring excellent vision and steady hands.

I’m just beginning to weave this on a basic frame loom with a continuous warp. I should say “just beginning to TRY to weave this because I’m not sure how to recreate the starry effect.

There are three possible solutions, from what I can see: spots; crossed wefts in contrary/parallel motion; and soumak. I’m leaning towards parallel motion. Ideas would be helpful.

UPDATE: Well, I have been weaving Eye of the Universe, my name for the image, using crossed wefts in parallel motion, and I like how it looks. I use needles that are about six inches long cuz they give me more control than a shuttle or bobbin system.

They’re easier to handle and hold, and they’re can be navigated through the warps in a way that a shuttle or loaded bobbin can’t.

Here’s also a tapestry needle made from a wooden knitting needle using a knife and a screwdriver set to create a hole in one end. No, no drill, so I just used what’s handy.

UPDATE: Scrap that. The regularity of the dots with crossed wefts in parallel motion is not quite what I’m looking for. Best thing to do, ask advice from the tapestry list.

UPDATE: I got good advice from the tapestry list, so now the ‘stars’ are being woven with soumak knots. My only other problem is to insert enough white in the stars to create an impression of glow. Above my pay grade? I don’t know. I don’t think that problem-solving creativity is above anybody’s pay grade.

UPDATE: The loom broke. I took it to get it repaired. The moron who repaired it hammered in a screw at the wrong angle and ruined one of the joints. Then, he compounded his idiocy by screwing the two pieces together not snugly fitting but with a gap. That’s the ethic here: who cares how the thing is done as long as it’s done? Anyway, I rewarped the loom; it has a nasty twist to it that suggests I’ll be looking for a loom in short order. Sigh.