The devastated grandparents were told they would never see the youngsters again unless they dropped their opposition.
The couple, who cannot be named, wanted to give the five-year-old boy and his four-year-old sister a loving home themselves. But they were ruled to be too old - at 46 and 59.
For two years they fought for their rights to care for the children, whose 26-year- old mother is a recovering heroin addict.
They agreed to an adoption only after they faced being financially crippled by legal bills.
The final blow came when they were told the children were going to a gay household, even though several heterosexual couples wanted them.
When the grandfather protested, he was told: ‘You can either accept it, and there’s a chance you’ll see the children twice a year, or you can take that stance and never see them again.’
So the social workers take two grandchildren away from their grandparents because they say the grandparents are too old to raise them. The couple in question are 46 and 59 I believe. It is not like they are 95 and on the verge of death.
After two years of legal battle the grandparents, now broke, give up the fight. They just want to make sure that the kids will go to a loving family at this point. That is when they are told that the family is two gay men! The gays were chosen even though several qualified normal families where available.
Social activism, being played out with children, and it is despicable. England has gone completely, batshit, crazy. God save us from the Eurosocialists.
If something like this happened here, there is a good chance that the grandfather might show up to the foster home, armed, to save his grandbabies. Then the family, having to be on the run from the government, could survive hopefully. In jolly ‘ol England, unarmed peasants have no such options, to fight totalitarian leftism run amok, and must bow down, and ask for another helping.
This is why we must fight to the death if necessary, to keep from becoming unarmed peasants ourselves.
From Drudge we get this bit of complete misunderstanding of concepts.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi boldly defended a move to add birth control funding to the new economic “stimulus” package, claiming “contraception will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.”
Pelosi, the mother of 5 children and 6 grandchildren, who once said, “Nothing in my life will ever, ever compare to being a mom,” seemed to imply babies are somehow a burden on the treasury.
The revelation came during an exchange Sunday morning on ABC’s THIS WEEK.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Hundreds of millions of dollars to expand family planning services. How is that stimulus?
PELOSI: Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children’s health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those - one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So no apologies for that?
PELOSI: No apologies. No. we have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy.
Wow, just wow. This is almost unbelievable. It is very illustrative of two facts though. Democrats don’t understand the difference between the private economy of the nation, and the public government. They also don’t understand that the taxpayer’s money does not belong to the government.
This is an incredibly stupid idea. We are going to spend $100 million on rubbers. Of course this idea is central to leftists. They can’t wait to hand you a condom for some reason. How this is going to “save” money is beyond me. I guess less babies equals less welfare, and other entitlement programs? This has to be the logic our vapid Speaker of the House is using to justify spending that kind of money on rubbers.
That probably is not even true. For some reason these people take delight in people having unwed sex randomly with strangers. They encourage it every time they can, and now they are going to use federal tax dollars to do it. It is almost like some kind of legislated immorality.
This bill is supposed to be about stimulating economic growth. Let’s set aside the fact that pumping money into the economy, and taking on another trillion dollars of debt, is not how an economy gets a jump start. It is a recipe for super inflation.
This item is not economic stimulus at all however. Handing out free condoms does not create jobs, or get people to spend money. It simply becomes another bloated government program that serves little purpose, but sucks up plenty of resources.
The states budgets should not be a concern of the federal government, and they surely should not make a bit of difference, when you are trying to stimulate the economy. This Democrat idea of population control being fiscally smart, is asinine on its own. Actually claiming that it will help the economy somehow is just plain stupid.
She doesn’t even mention stimulating economic growth in her answers. The reason for this is simple. This bill has nothing to do with stimulating the economy. It is simply a trillion dollar list of liberal pet projects. It is set to be the largest instance of government largesse and corruption in our nation’s history.
Pelosi is an evil lunatic. Her devious fake smile is alarming when you see it. This woman has no business running a fruit stand, much less our great nation.
Update: Well, after doing a little more research this is worse than it seems.
This is a good start from the Heritage Foundation. RTWT!
Some lowlights:
Contrary to current law, the income of parents or even a spouse may not be counted in determining eligibility. A state would have the option to “consider only the income of the applicant or recipient.” In other words, a child in a family at any income level may be eligible for free family planning services.
So, this is a massive expansion of government, as I had suspected. Now just about anyone can receive family planning service (read contraceptives and probably abortions) on the federal government’s dime.
A child would be able to receive benefits through a “presumptive eligibility period” and beyond without parental knowledge that he or she applied for Medicaid.
End run for parental notification for abortions?
Typically, Medicaid eligibility is restricted to individuals in a family with a dependent child. Section 5004 creates a new eligibility group that would include college students, adults without children, and even adults in a household that has significant income but little or no income for the applicant. Moreover, applicants would not have to prove their citizenship before their “presumptive eligibility” is determined.
Illegals can get in on this too!
The Obama Administration will interpret whether the payment language (”[n]otwithstanding any other provision of law”) may be used as a backdoor means of overturning Hyde Amendment restrictions on federal funding of abortions.
There it is! I knew this was the reason behind this entire thing. This means Eric Holder, the leftie new Attorney General, will be able to decide whether abortions will be part of this or not. Survey says, “Yes”.
So soon we will be stimulating the economy by more taxpayer funded baby slaughtering.
It always comes down to killing children with these people for some reason.
Update 2:Greg Pollowitz put up more of the conversation here
PELOSI: No apologies. No. we have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy. Food stamps, unemployment insurance, some of the initiatives you just mentioned. What the economists have told us from right to left: There is more bang for the buck, a term they use, by investing in food stamps and in unemployment insurance than in any tax cut.
Nonetheless, we are committed to the tax cuts because they do have a positive impact on the economy, even though not as big as the investments.
Seriously? She really made that claim.
“Economists” say that giving away abortions, and racking up the national debt to do so, is better than just giving the people that money back, and letting them spend it on whatever they want, without any more debt.
This may just be the most completely asinine thing that I have ever heard.
It also illustrates again how Democrats view taxpayer’s money. When she says invest, she is talking about blowing taxpayer’s money. When she says spend, she is talking about letting us keep it for ourselves. You see, she doesn’t understand that letting people have their money, instead of using the government to steal it, does not equal government spending. She sees tax cuts as government spending. This is one of the biggest problems with big government types. They often will say things like, “This is a giveaway to the rich!”, when in fact it is the “rich” keeping more of the money they actually earned. When they are actually spending the “rich” people’s money, it is called investing, even though it never actually comes back to the investor, and is lost entirely down the sinkhole of entitlement.
All of the new President’s executive orders will be published here.
One of the first he will likely create will rescind President Bush’s order which made it illegal for federal aid money to be given to foreign abortion operations. President Obama wants to make sure that all of us taxpayers get to spend some of our hard-earned cash on murdering foreign babies.
It isn’t enough to fund abortion, which many of us are totally against, here in States. We need to export this culture of death and destruction to all foreign lands, so every citizen get’s to have a hand in the fun of infanticide.
The moral depravity of such abortion lovers as Obama, is something that I will never understand. It is not enough for the procedure simply to be legal. They just have to do everything they can to make certain, that everyone that could possibly want to kill their child, has the opportunity to do so. We have welfare abortions in this country, and I am sick of being forced to contribute to a practice that goes against everything I stand for.
In the post about the little girl that was killed by the dog, I said that laws need to be strengthened to punish dog owners who are neglectful, when their dog maims or kills someone.
I did not know this, but Texas has just such a law, and it has been used for the first time to send two people to prison.
Tanner Monk, 7, was mauled to death by four dogs owned by Crystal Watson and her fiance, Jack Smith.
The couple, now free on an appeals bond, are the first sent to prison under “Lillian’s law,” named for Lillian Stiles, who also was killed by a pack of dogs.
The legislation is an effort to reduce the incidence of maulings by locking up the owners.
They were never agressive; never seen them agressive,” Watson said. “Never bit no one.”
That doesn’t matter.
Watson and Smith’s four four pit bulls savagely attacked Tanner Monk last May near his home outside Breckenridge.
By the time medics reached the little boy, there was nothing they could do for him. He was already dead.
The scene was so gruesome that even seasoned emergency responders broke down and cried.
“Oh, it was terrible,” said Stephens County Deputy Caleb Hodges. “Something you can’t even imagine unless you’ve seen the pictures.”
Hodges said responding lawmen had to shoot two of the dogs to protect themselves; the other two were captured and euthanized.
Crystal Watson said she didn’t think twice about how her dogs were kept. “We lived out in the country. Everyone’s dog ran loose — not just ours,” she said.
But under Lillian’s law, if dogs get off their property and make an “unprovoked” attack, owners now face up to 20 years in prison.
Steve Bristow prosecuted the Tanner Monk case, and summed it up in four short sentences: “They had dogs. They didn’t secure them. They caused a death. They went to prison.”
Good. It is a tough lesson to learn, but you have to be responsible for your dogs, especially if you have large breeds that are more than capable of doing significant damage. In this case, these people, had a pack of pit bulls they allowed to roam the area. Stupid, and tragic.
After he was slammed to the floor of a Lincolnshire day-care center, 16-month-old Benjamin Kingan, his skull fractured, grabbed his blanket and crawled to his “comfort zone”—a bouncer seat—collapsed and later died, police said.
Reading this line took my breath away, and made tears pour out of my eyes.
This stupid, evil, woman slammed this little boy’s head into the floor with such force that the coroner said, it would have taken a normal fall of one to two stories, to create his injuries. She did it simply because he would not quit crying.
My God, what in the hell is wrong with people? We are desensitized to a certain extent to stories we here every day. Another hooker getting murdered, or a college coed disappearing, while creating empathy in many of us, does not really affect us too much.
These kinds of stories affect me. They affect me a lot. My wife would say I am a sensitive guy. I cried at the end of Old Yeller, and when Wayne Gretzky retired. Hell I cry at, sentimental Christmas commercials, so it is not all that unusual.
These kinds of tears, are different. After reading about an innocent baby being killed, especially by a guilty adult, it rips my heart up. How could anyone hurt a baby? Really. How can you hurt a baby?
Babies represent everything good in the world. They are innocent, represent generational hope, and nearly limitless potential. Raising a baby, is the best experience of my life. Brooke is totally dependent on us for her every need, and she shows us so much love. The responsibility is enormous, and was almost crushing when I first realized what it entailed, but the rewards are so worth the effort.
There is evil in the world, and it is written about at this very blog quite often. This is the explanation for this type of thing. Seeing small children harmed however is more real to me now, than it used to be. I always thought the “You don’t understand if you don’t have a kid.” mantra was overblown. The fact is, it isn’t. The first thing that enters my mind after reading one of these stories, is “What if that had been Brooke?”. Immediately my emotions overcome me at that point, and my empathy for the parents of the child involved, and for the child himself, becomes almost overwhelming.
Beyond my wife, my little baby girl is one of the few people on this planet that I would really do anything to protect. I mean really protect. Walk over a continent of broken glass, or drag myself up a mountain by my fingernails if need be, kind of protect. Committing homicide and spending the rest of my life in prison is not beyond the limits of what I would do to protect either of them. Luckily it is fairly hard to fathom a reason where unjustifiable homicide would be necessary.
It is with great sadness, and massive empathy that I read stories like this one, and the one about the poor little Milburn girl. The difference in the two stories is stark however. The Milburn’s baby girl lost her life in a tragic accident, while little Benjamin was murdered by his caretaker. He was murdered by someone that trusted completely, and who his parents trusted completely.
I wish I had been there for Benjamin. I wish someone had been there to try to comfort him as he laid down, and died. My soul screams out in pain at the thought of him lying there alone.
Dear Lord, please protect my wife and child today and every day father. Please make sure that nothing happens to them. Please God don’t take them from me. If it is necessary that someone should die, take me instead. I pray that you will comfort the families of these children as much as possible Lord, and help them heal these horrible wounds.
This does not come easy. I have been trying to construct this post for weeks now, and finally it must be done today. It is more a stream of consciousness than anything, so please read it as that. We are in for Dark Days ahead folks. For all true freedom loving Americans, today will be remembered as not a day of hope and change, but a day that represents the beginning of more governmental tyranny, and less freedom. The day we took a step back from the boldness of self determination, and real personal responsibility.
In a few hours President Obama will be a reality. He will bring his big government sycophants back into power in the executive branch in our government, and they will proceed to regulate us into oblivion, all the time promising it is for our own good.
I have been struggling with something over the last month or so, and it has to be shared now. Currently my reading time is taken up with the voluminous Atlas Shrugged. The book is a novel that illustrates the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Her ideas are collectively known as objectivism. While there is much I agree with her on, there is a whole lot that I don’t.
Rand believed that altruism was evil. She thought that no man had a responsibility to help another, nor should he wish to. For her, producing something worthwhile was the most important thing a man could do, so she idolized successful entrepreneurs. A man’s worth, should be judged by his financial worth. Ayn believed that no man should be subjected to the whims of another man or any God. The free market, and money where her symbols to worship.
As a Christian I have struggled reconciling these thing with my beliefs. Jesus said we are our brother’s keeper, as Obama repeated countless times on the campaign trail. He urges us all to serve each other, and no doubt plans to force us to do so. Many people apparently buy into his ideas, and are actually taking some kind of weird cult-like oath to serve him.
This is one of the creepiest things I have ever seen. Here is some background.
So how does this tie into Rand’s ideas, my own ideals, and the future of our country?
First, I disagree with Rand completely as to self sacrifice being evil. Wishing to help your fellow man is not evil. There is great reward to be realized for being of service to other human beings. Self sacrifice to help another is truly a wonderful thing, that all of us should partake in, if we are inclined to do so. My God tells me this is so, as does my mind and heart. We should not be overly calloused individuals purely out for our own self interests. Giving someone a hand up is a worthy and noble thing. This is one of my ideals, and is part of my morality.
Ayn was correct however, with regard to government (or otherwise) forced altruism. No man should be forced to give away what he has created himself by another man. That is simply tyrannical theft. It, does not jive with my morality, and my idea of what freedom and liberty mean. The government DOES become evil when it forces a man to sacrifice himself for another, when he is not involved in the choice to do so. It is a cynical self defeating cancer, which does nothing more than hurt everyone involved ultimately.
When Obama calls on us to sacrifice and be of service to others, he is talking about forced sacrifice. We are to sacrifice ourselves for people we don’t even know of, and for policies that we are against. We are to sacrifice ourselves to grow the already overly intrusive government into an irreversible, all knowing, nanny state. We will be told how to act, and what we can and cannot do, and many of us will do so smiling in self deluded egalitarian glee the whole way.
I heard a professor on the radio this morning claim that Obama will lead us into the vision of the country’s founders, and the framers of our Constitutional Republic. Nothing could be further from the truth. The man had the nerve to say that we will become more democratic, and this is what the founders would want.
Obviously the man is either not as well educated as he believes himself to be, or he is intentionally misconstruing the principles on which this country was founded. We do not live in a mob democracy. Our freedoms are not to be fooled with by the whims of the majority. Our financial well-being will never be best served by fascist ownership of industry, nor will markets bloom under the thumb of unqualified beaurocrats.
This topic is too big to tackle in one post, and I don’t have time to flesh out my thoughts well. As I said this is a stream of my consciousness. Someday soon, I want to discuss all of this in a more constructed manner, until then this must be sufficient.
I will not bow down to any man, nor sacrifice myself, without my own will being involved. While I believe in helping others, it is wrong to force me to do so.
My freedom is dear to me, and I WILL fight to preserve it for myself and my children.
The Republic must survive, and be protected from the clutches of those that would destroy it from within, if real free men are to exist on the planet.
So, as you watch the coronation of our new President today, pray that he is not made into our benevolent king sometime in the not so far away future.
Last week a three year old girl was killed by a Rottweiler in Fort Worth. The poor little baby girl, Brooklynn Milburn, managed to crawl through a very small hole in the fence into the neighbor’s backyard, where the dog attacked and killed her.
The story hits close to him for two reasons. First, the parent of the girl is a co-worker of the wife of a co-worker of my best friend. Not much of a connection certainly, but finding out where the guy works and seeing the email sent out by his HR department to his company made it a bit more real than just reading the story.
Additionally, my little angel, Brooke Lynn has a very similar name. I cannot imagine the thought of losing her in such a way. My heart would never heal. My prayers are going out to this family, and if you are so inclined, I ask that you pray for them as well. Little Brooklyn Milburn was such a beautiful child. It is such a horrible tragedy when they are taken so young.
I was disgusted to see the comments left on the story at the link above. So many human beings have lost their minds it seems. To many people, bend over backwards to defend their favorite breed of dog when something like this happens. Others apparently value a dog’s life over that of an innocent little child’s. There are several responses there bemoaning the fact that dog was put down, while barely acknowledging that a family has lost their most precious thing in the world, their baby girl.
I can understand advocates of these breeds reacting in this way to a certain extent. There is a slight correlation in our fight for gun rights. Of course a gun is an inanimate object, while a dog is not. A gun cannot think for itself. The dog made the decision to attack this child. Furthermore, there is no Constitutional amendment protecting an individual’s right to own such a dog.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not calling for government control or regulations regarding large dogs. I don’t think we need to band them or anything of the sort. Free societies come with certain dangers, and responsibilities.
Clearly this case is just an overwhelming tragedy, with no one really to blame. The dog did not escape the back yard, and the hole in the fence appeared to not be a concern. This is a tragedy for both the dog’s owner and the family of the little girl. They will both blame themselves for the death of this child, and will need some real help in coping with these feelings.
This is a blog, where I discuss my feelings on issues however, and this event brings up a lot of conflicted thoughts that have been going through my mind for a few years now. The following discussion should not be seen as related to this story, as I don’t see any blame in this instance, on the part of the parents or the dog’s owner.
Certain large breed dogs, regardless of claims to the contrary, do have more frequent issues with interacting with humans than others. People, trying to justify their ownership of certain breeds, will deny this fact, but it remains true.
Breeds such as Rottweilers, American Staffordshire Terriers, and Pit Bull Terriers, attack humans more often than other breeds, with often devastating effect. Whether this is a function of their genetics, their popularity, or just their size and strength does not really matter.
I am not saying these breeds are crazed beasts with blood on their minds constantly. They are capable of doing severe damage however, and that is probably the main reasons negative encounters with them are reported more often than other breeds. More damage is done.
So, knowing these facts owners of large breed dogs have more responsibility than owners of smaller breeds. The owner is responsible to protect their dogs from perceived threats, and to protect these perceived threats from their dog. If a dog escapes from a fence and kills a child, the owner of the pet is responsible.
This is where government involvement is welcome in my opinion. If you own a large breed dog, and it does some damage, fatal or otherwise, because you were negligent, you should be held responsible. I think laws need to be toughened up for owners of these dogs. If your dog kills a kid, because you failed to control it, you need to go to jail for a while. This obviously depends on the severity of the attack of course.
We need to find a way to make owners of these dogs more responsible. If they know that a lengthy jail sentence could result from them having a shoddy fence, maybe they will think about buying that pit bull puppy at the flea market. Maybe, they will strengthen the fence first and make sure it can reliably contain the dog, and prevent others from entering the dog’s yard.
I am a dog lover. This topic is hard for me to sort out honestly, so I don’t know where the lines should be drawn necessarily. What do you think?
Update: Chris Byrne reminds us in the comments that cockers and golden retrievers bite more than the breeds I was discussing. He is correct based on the published studies. I should have been more clear in stating my position. The large breeds do more damage, than smaller breeds, and therefore, cause more serious problems, whether it be injuries requiring medical attention or death.
The Texas Department of Health Services provide stats on reported “Severe” dog bites. The summaries can be viewed here.
Their 2002 report has Pit Bulls (probably Staffordshires included here), Chows, Rottweilers, German Shepherds, and Labradors making up for about 55% of the incidents. A pit bull variant was involved in 72 of the 546 reported instances, and the Chows and Rottweilers were involved in 39 and 38 attacks respectively. The Labs and Shepards each were at about 25 attacks.
Unfortunately, Skidboot passed away in March of 2007. The relationship this man and his dog had illustrate how special a dog can be, and why they are known as man’s best friend.
While my childhood dog Toby, a Shetland Sheepdog, was not quite as amazing as Skidboot, this video reminded me of the hours we spent playing fetch with his Frisbee. He died four or five years ago, and was the best dog I have ever had. I still miss ya little buddy.
While playing around on my new Acer Aspire One (story upcoming), I was thinking about probably my favorite time in my history with computers. This would have been back around 1999-2000. I was young and idealistic.
This was the time of uncapped cable modems, and all the music you cared to download via Napster. TechTV was in full swing, and I lived and breathed all things computing. The magic of online gaming with ever improving performance consumed much of my time. The internet, while not something new, became more than a slow novelty with the addition of broadband. I was young and idealistic, and foolishly thought it would never change. Alas, this is all for another post. For now, we will look at two bits of technology whose promise seemed almost endless to me, and who both were complete disappointments that totally failed in their goals.
First, let’s look at the now defunct BeOS. BeOS started as a PowerPC operating system that was to be run on Mac hardware. The company wanted their software to be the new OS for Macs. Unfortunately for them, this did not happen, so in 1998 they released BeOS R3 for x86. It was a very neat OS, and I ran it on one of my machines for quite a while. It was a fairly thin OS, and as a result was very fast booting. Beyond that, I don’t know why it was so attractive. Most likely its underdog status really appealed to me at the time. Not many people ran it, so it felt like I was part of a special club.
By this point Be was doomed already. They gained no traction on the desktop market, and the tech just was not there for the little internet devices and tablets they aimed at once they knew the desktop market was out of reach. We all remember the endless promises of neato tablet PCs, and small net appliances of that time. The magic devices never materialized, and by the time they did become viable Be was long dead.
This leads us to my second disappointment of the era. The Transmeta Crusoe processor. The President of Transmeta was on every tech show constantly regaling us with the magic of his new chip. It was supposed to use a lot less power than anything else out there, while still having great performance.
This played in well to the promise of the tiny web appliance running Be of course in my mind, and a tablet PC prototype is usually what the Crusoe was demonstrated on. Throw in the fact that the firm hired Linus Torvalds to write software, and you had a geek dream. At the time, I bought into the stupidity that big companies were evil, so anything that challenged them was a good thing in my mind.
Transmeta’s hiring of Linus was probably their high point however. Once the chip became available we all found out the sad truth. It sucked. Crusoe turned out to be a slow performing, not all that energy efficient chip. In the real world you saved about fifteen percent on power consumption, at a lesser level of performance as a comparable Intel chip, and the Crusoe cost more. This truth came out once people tested the chip with real-world software. Their weird software x86 emulation just did not work all that well. Their promised results had come from benchmarking software only, which turned out to be completely unrealistic.
So it goes. Two companies that one could be excited about, that made poor business decisions. They are certainly not alone, as there were hundreds of such examples when the dot com bubble bursted.
If only TechTV had survived, this would not be such a sad story.
The beautiful Wifey, gave me a very special Christmas present this year. Every year we give each other lists of things we would like and for the most part, we purchase things on each others list. We also always find a gift or two that weren’t asked for, and these usually end up meaning the most to us.
This year I received an awesome special edition Case canoe knife. It is a Christmas knife, and one of only 350 made.
The main blade is inscribed with “Joy to the World!”, and the gorgeous navy bone handle is inlaid with a lovely rendition of the manger scene. What a perfect gift for a guy like me. I love pocket knives, and collect them. My wife bought one that truly has sentimental value, and will be passed down to Brooke when the time comes.
The knife represents the true meaning of Christmas. As Christians, we celebrate our Lord and Savior’s birth at Christmas. This awesome reminder of that could not be more perfect.
