New Missouri billboard tells Americans to ‘prepare for war’ against the government.  This billboard replaces one that warned that the socialist “Obama-Nation” is “coming for you.” It’s unclear who the owner of the billboard is, but the first one was the work of a “Missouri businessman.” (HT: Oliver Willis)

Fired Up! Missouri points out that the Lafayette County Republican Central Committee is highlighting a new billboard in the state with steps for a “citizens guide to revolution of a corrupt government”. 

Anti-O Billboard In Missouri

And Missourians respond…

Outrage over the sign triggered West Plains resident Becky Estes to write a letter in Monday’s edition of the Daily Quill newspaper saying “such a tasteless display merely reinforces the wide-spread belief that Ozarkers are ignorant country bumpkins.” [...]

“I can find nothing wrong with this sign/cartoon, which is truthful by Obama’s own statements,” wrote James E. (Jay) Gentry Jr. of Mountain Grove. “If this is upsetting to Ms. Estes, then she should do some hard thinking about what is forthcoming if he is elected.”

Raymond Fine, 74, of West Plains, said the sign is a form of free speech.  “If they can burn a flag, then they can put a sign up like that,”  Fine told the News-Leader.

On a cold Chicago night, four-year-old Barbara climbed onto her father’s lap and asked, “Daddy, why isn’t my Mommy just like everybody else’s mommy?”

Bob May stole a glance across his shabby two-room apartment. On the couch lay his wife, Evelyn, racked with cancer. For two years she had been bedridden and all Bob’s income had gone to paying for her treatment.

How do you explain cancer, poverty, and differences to a child?

A copywriter for Montgomery Ward, Bob was deep in debt and depressed. Even so, that night he held his daughter near. Then, before he began, Bob prayed, he asked God to give him the words to answer his little girl’s question. God gave Bob those words. This is how they came:

“Once upon a time there was a reindeer named Rudolph, the only reindeer in the world that had a big red nose. Naturally, people called him, Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer.”

As Bob went on, he tried to share with little Barbara the knowledge that, even though some people and things are different, God has a purpose for them.

Bob’s story continued: Rudolph and his family were embarrassed by his condition, and others laughed at him. Even so, the time came when Rudolph was called upon to be the point-reindeer for Santa’s sleigh. And so it happened Rudolph became the most famous and beloved of all the reindeer.

When Bob was finished, his daughter laughed. Every night Barbara asked for the story to be retold and every night the father repeated the tale of Rudolph.

Eventually, Bob’s wife died. And once again, Bob turned to God for help. Sitting at his desk in his lonely apartment he worked on “Rudolph.” Through his tears, he worked at making the story into a poem, a Christmas gift for his daughter.

Barbara loved that story. So did the folks at Montgomery Ward. In 1938 Bob was asked to an employee’s Christmas party. He took his poem and read it. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Just thought you might want to know how the Lord brought about one of our non-Biblical Christmas traditions.
From a devotion originally written for “By the Way”

The other day I needed to go to the emergency room.      

Not wanting to sit there for 4 hours, I put on my old Army fatigues and stuck a patch onto the front of my shirt that I had downloaded off the Internet.

When I went into the E.R., I noticed that 3/4 of the people got up and left.  I guess they decided that they weren’t that sick after all.  Cut at least 3 hours off my waiting time.

Here’s the patch.  Feel free to use it the next time you’re in need of quicker emergency service.

It also works at DMV. It saved me 5 hours.
 
At the Laundromat, three minutes after entering, I had my choice of any machine most still running.
 
Don’t try it at McDonald’s though…

The whole crew got up and left and l never got my order…

Read below the picture before making judgment on ‘The Finger’ gesture and you’ll understand…

Leading the fight is U S Marine Gunnery Sgt. Michael Burghardt, known as ‘Iron Mike’ or just ‘Gunny’. He is on his third tour in  Iraq  . He had become a legend in the bomb disposal world after winning the Bronze Star for disabling 64 IEDs and destroying 1,548 pieces of ordnance during his second tour.

  Then, on September 19, he got blown up. He had arrived at a chaotic scene after a bomb had killed four US Marines. He chose not to wear the bulky bomb protection suit. ‘You can’t react to any sniper fire and you get tunnel-vision,’ he explains. So, protected by just a helmet and standard-issue flak jacket, he began what bomb disposal officers term ‘the longest walk’, stepping gingerly into a 5 foot deep and 8 foot wide crater.

The earth shifted slightly and he saw a Senao base station with a wire leading from it.  He cut the wire and used his 7 inch knife to probe the ground.  ‘I found a piece of red detonating cord between my legs,’ he says. ‘That’s when I knew I was screwed.’

Realizing he had been sucked into a trap, Sgt Burghardt , 35, yelled at everyone to stay back. At that moment, an insurgent, probably watching through binoculars, pressed a button on his mobile phone to detonate the secondary device below the sergeant’s feet  ‘A chill went up the back of my neck and then the bomb exploded,’ he recalls. ‘As I was in the air I remember thinking, ‘I don’t believe they got me…’ I was just ticked off they were able to do it. Then I was lying on the road, not able to feel anything from the waist down.’

His fellow Marines cut off his trousers to see how badly he was hurt. None could believe his legs were still there ‘My dad’s a  Vietnam  vet who’s paralyzed from the waist down,’ says Sgt Burghardt . ‘I was lying there thinking I didn’t want to be in a wheelchair next to my dad and for him to see me like that.

They started to cut away my pants and I felt a real sharp pain and blood trickling down. Then I wiggled my toes and I thought, ‘Good, I’m in business.’  As a stretcher was brought over, adrenaline and anger kicked in. ‘I decided to walk to the helicopter. I wasn’t going to let my team-mates see me being carried away on a stretcher.’ He stood and gave the insurgents who had blown him up a one-fingered salute. ‘I flipped them one.. It was like, ‘OK, I lost that round but I’ll be back next week.‘

Sgt Burghardt’s injuries – burns and wounds to his legs and buttocks – kept him off duty for nearly a month and could have earned him a ticket home.  But, like his father – who was awarded a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts for being wounded in action in  Vietnam  – he stayed in Ramadi to engage in the battle against insurgents who are forever coming up with more ingenious ways of killing Americans.
Copies of a photograph depicting his defiance, taken by Jeff Bundy for the Omaha World-Herald, adorn the walls of homes across  America  and that of Col John Gronski, the brigade commander in Ramadi, who has hailed the image as an exemplar of the warrior spirit.

That’s a hero.

Darwin Awards ~~~~2009
 
And once again, it’s time for the Darwin Award Nominees. “The Darwins ” are awarded every year to the persons who died in the stupidest manner, thereby removing themselves from the gene pool.

Here is the official 2009 list.  This years nominees are:

Nominee No. 1: (San Jose Mercury News):

An unidentified man, using a shotgun like a club to break a former girlfriends windshield, accidentally shot himself to death when the gun discharged, blowing a hole in his gut.

Nominee No. 2: (Kalamazoo Gazette):

James Burns, 34, (a mechanic) of Alamo, MI, was killed in March as he was trying to repair what police describe as a “farm-type truck.” Burns got a friend to drive the truck on a highway while Burns hung underneath so that he could ascertain the source of a troubling noise. Burns clothes caught on something, however, and the other man found Burns “wrapped around the drive shaft.

Nominee No. 3: (Hickory Daily Record):

Ken Charles Barger, 47, accidentally shot himself to death in December in Newton, NC. Awakening to the sound of a ringing telephone beside his bed, he reached for the phone but grabbed instead a Smith & Wesson 38 Special, which discharged when he drew it to his ear.

Nominee No. 4: (UPI,Toronto):

Police said a lawyer demonstrating the safety of windows in a downtown Toronto skyscraper crashed through a pane with his shoulder and plunged 24 floors to his death. A police spokesman said Garry Hoy, 39, fell into the courtyard of the Toronto Dominion Bank Tower early Friday evening as he was explaining the strength of the buildings’ windows to visiting law students. Hoy previously has conducted demonstrations of window strength according to police reports.
 
Peter Lawson, managing partner of the firm Holden Day Wilson, told the Toronto Sun newspaper that Hoy was “one of the best and brightest” (ed note:????) members of the 200-man association.

Nominee No. 5: (The News of the Weird):

Michael Anderson Godwin made News of the Weird posthumously. He had spent several years awaiting South Carolina’s electric chair on a murder conviction before having his sentence reduced to life in prison.  While sitting on a metal toilet in his cell attempting to fix his small TV set, he bit into a wire and was electrocuted.

Nominee No. 6

A cigarette lighter may have triggered a fatal explosion in Dunkirk, IN. A Jay Countryman, using a cigarette lighter to check the barrel of a muzzle loader, was killed Monday night when the weapon discharged in his face, sheriffs investigators said. Gregory David Pryor, 19, died in his parents’ rural Dunkirk home at about 11:30 PM. Investigators said Pryor was cleaning a 54-caliber muzzle-loader that had not been firing properly. He was using the lighter to look into the barrel when the gunpowder ignited.

Nominee No. 7: (Reuters, Mississauga, Ontario):

A man cleaning a bird feeder on the balcony of his condominium apartment in this Toronto suburb slipped and fell 23 stories to his death. Stefan Macko, 55, was standing on a wheelchair when the accident occurred, said Inspector Darcy Honer of the Peel Regional Police.  “It appears that the chair moved, and he went over the balcony,” Honer said.

Finally, THE WINNER!!!: (Arkansas Democrat Gazette):

Two local men were injured when their pickup truck left the road and struck a tree near Cotton Patch on State Highway 38 early Monday.  Woodruff County deputy Dovey Snyder reported the accident shortly after midnight Monday. Thurston Poole, 33, of Des Arc, and Billy Ray Wallis,38, of Little Rock, were returning to Des Arc after a frog catching trip.

On an overcast Sunday night, Poole’s pickup truck headlights malfunctioned. The two men concluded that the headlight fuse on the older-model truck had burned out. As a replacement fuse was not available, Wallis noticed that the 22 caliber bullets from his pistol fit perfectly into the fuse box next to the steering- wheel column.  Upon inserting the bullet the headlights again began to operate properly, and the two men proceeded on eastbound toward the White River Bridge.

After traveling approximately 20 miles, and just before crossing the river, the bullet apparently overheated, discharged, and struck Poole in the testicles. The vehicle swerved sharply right, exiting the pavement, and striking a tree. Poole suffered only minor cuts and abrasions from the accident but will require extensive surgery to repair the damage to his testicles, which will never operate as intended. Wallis sustained a broken clavicle and was treated and released. “Thank God we weren’t on that bridge when Thurston shot his n**s off, or we might both be dead,” stated Wallis.

“I’ve been a trooper for 10 years in this part of the world, but this is a first for me. I can’t believe that those two would admit how this accident happened,” said Snyder.

Upon being notified of the wreck, Lavinia (Poole’s wife), asked how many frogs the boys had caught and did anyone get them from the truck. Priorities, after all!!

Though Poole and Wallis did not die as a result of their misadventure as normally required by Darwin Award Official Rules, it can be argued that Poole did, in fact, effectively remove himself from the gene pool.

XEROX IS DOING SOMETHING COOL …

If you go to this web site, www.LetsSayThanks.com  -  you can pick out a thank you card and Xerox will print it and it will be sent to a soldier that is currently serving in Iraq. You can’t pick out who gets it, but it will go to a member of the armed services.

It is FREE and it only takes a second.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the soldiers received a bunch of these?  

This takes just 10 seconds and it’s a wonderful way to say thank you.    Please take the time and please take the time to pass it on for others to do.  We can never say enough thank you’s.

Twas the month before Christmas*

*When all through our land,*

*Not a Christian was praying*

*Nor taking a stand.*

*See the PC Police had taken away,*

*The reason for Christmas – no one could say.*

*The children were told by their schools not to sing,*

*About Shepherds and Wise Men and Angels and things.*

*It might hurt people’s feelings, the teachers would say*

* December 25th is just a ‘ Holiday ‘.*

*Yet the shoppers were ready with cash, checks and credit*

*Pushing folks down to the floor just to get it!*

*CDs from Madonna, an X BOX, an I-pod*

*Something was changing, something quite odd! *

*Retailers promoted Ramadan and Kwanzaa*

*In hopes to sell books by Franken & Fonda.*

*As Targets were hanging their trees upside down*

* At Lowe’s the word Christmas – was no where to be found.*

*At K-Mart and Staples and Penny’s and Sears*

*You won’t hear the word Christmas; it won’t touch your ears.*

*Inclusive, sensitive, Di-ver-si-ty*

*Are words that were used to intimidate me.*

*Now Daschle, Now Darden, Now Sharpton, Wolf Blitzen*

*On Boxer, on Rather, on Kerry, on Clinton !*

*At the top of the Senate, there arose such a clatter*

*To eliminate Jesus, in all public matter.*

*And we spoke not a word, as they took away our faith*

* Forbidden to speak of salvation and grace*

*The true Gift of Christmas was exchanged and discarded*

*The reason for the season, stopped before it started.*

*So as you celebrate ‘Winter Break’ under your ‘Dream Tree’*

*Sipping your Starbucks, listen to me.*

*Choose your words carefully, choose what you say*

*Shout MERRY CHRISTMAS ,

not Happy Holiday !*

Please, all Christians join together and

wish everyone you meet during the

holidays a

***MERRY CHRISTMAS***

Christ is The Reason for the Christmas Season!