Well, with Fred Thompson resigning from the race, I found myself groping around for a candidate to support.

John McCain is out.  For many reasons, not the least of which is that he is more of a Democrat than a Conservative, Republican, or Libertarian.

Likewise, Mike Huckabee is a liberal in conservative clothing.

I like Rudy Giuliani, but it just seems like he doesn’t want it enough.  This isn’t europe, and we don’t coronate a leader by virtue of his past service.

So, of the people left in the race on the Right, I find myself left with Mitt Romney.

What do I like about Mitt?  All of his stands today are pretty much my stands.

What DON’T I like about Mitt?  Many of his past stands are NOT his current stands.

Some people say that he has Grown In Office.  I consider it political opportunism at best; flip flopping at worst.

But he is running an over-all positive campaign; he is saying and running on the right things now; and he has the financial resources to stay in the race, despite the best (or worst) efforts of the Press, and their fellow travellers on the left.

I can, in good conscience, support Mitt. 

I cannot, in good conscience, support McCain or Hucakbee.

Should the eventual Republican Nominee be McCain or Huckabee, I will not support them, and will, in all likelyhood, vote for a third party, or write in candidate.

The Business and Media Institute has a report on a recent speach by former Secretary of State Madeline Albright (once seen dancing with North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, as he whispered into her ear that he wasn’t developing nukes)…

Quoth Albright:

Albright’s message centered on the need for equality – not just domestically, but also on a global scale.

“If we were all rich, that would be very nice,” Albright said. “If we were all poor, it would be too bad, but we would be the same. What the problem is now is the poor know what the rich have as a result of information technology and the spread, generally, of knowledge.  And, it creates a whole new host of problems in terms of disquiet and anger.”

I just don’t know what to say to that.  Let’s hear the money line again:

If we were all poor, it would be too bad, but we would be the same.

Wow.  And this woman was in charge of Foreign Policy for the US.

Oh, and who is she supporting for President?

 “I know Hillary Clinton very well and she is strong and has lot of resolve and I think would be a great commander-in-chief,” Albright said.

Yeah.

Oh, and one more thing, from her bio on Wikipedia:

She and her parents fled …when the Communists assumed power over Czechoslovakia, moving to the United States of America in 1948.

I wonder how her father would feel today, knowing that he risked everything to get his family out of the Communist path, only to have his daughter become the very thing he feared?

Courtesy of WebMD:

 It appears that more people in the U.S. now die from the mostly hospital-acquired staph infection MRSA than from AIDS, according to a new report from the CDC.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) was responsible for an estimated 94,000 life-threatening infections and 18,650 deaths in 2005, CDC researchers report in the Oct. 17 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.

That same year, roughly 16,000 people in the U.S. died from AIDS, according to CDC figures.

I have long maintained that going to your Doctors Office was one of the most dangerous things you could do for your health.  There you are, stuck in a waiting room for HOURS (subjectively, anyway), with a bunch of coughing, wheezing, mucus dripping fellow patients.  You’d be better off in a room full of Zombies.  At least none of them have the Flu.

Now, to add to the death-defying leap of faith that medical worker might actually be able to help you (why DO they call it ‘practicing medicine’, anyway? Shouldn’t they know what they are doing by the time they get to you?), you have a chance of picking up the MRSA bug.  And you didn’t even have the fun of risky unprotected sex, or sharing a dirty needle.  And MRSA kills a LOT faster than AIDS, in days, not years.

And the main source of MRSA in Hospitals?

Why, the Medical Workers themselves:

“Hand washing is one of the most important ways to decrease the spread of MRSA in hospitals, but hand washing compliance rates [among health care professionals] are rarely 100%,” she says. “One thing a patient can do to reduce their risk is make sure everyone they come into contact with washes their hands or uses an alcohol hand rub.”

So, hear me now, and believe me later:  Before a Doctor, Nurse, Nurse Practitioner, Candy-Striper, or ANY OTHER Medical Worker touches you, make sure they have washed/sanitized their hands first!

And try not to think about where that Thermometer was before is was under your tongue.  Disposable plastic sleeve or no…

I am not a very Holiday oriented person.  I mark them passing, but they are, for me, essentially extensions of the weekend.  Days with less work, and a little more peacful, with a reduction in the amount of phone calls and emails.  Of course, I go through the motions for the family, as it is important to have these touchstones.

This year, though, I find myself truly happy to see the passing of the year, and the dawn of a new one.

2007 was, personally and professionally, a simply horrible year.  Maybe not the worst of my life, but certainly not the best.

It began, in earnest, when on Jan 2, I found out that a friend and mentor had passed away.  As January progressed, we discovered at work that making the transition to a new software platform for the business would be slightly more painfaul than the two weeks of chaos we had been promised… It was more like three or four months.

Things went that way through the summer, until late this fall, we found that my brother had a serious medical problem, that might have been cancerous as well.

As the year ended, my Brother is fine, and mending, but my friend and mentor is still gone, and his legacy is fading fast.  It looks like issues at work have bottomed out, and may start to improve, though I am finding that there are other opportunities out there.

2008 will have it’s own issues and problems.  It started last night, with the Fireworks “computer error” at the space needle (Y2K08), and near the end we will have another Presidential election to live through.

But, it’s another chance to try to get things right.  Good luck to everyone for a better year!

I had hope that Benazir Bhutto would prove to be a moderating influence on Pakistan, and would come to some kind of power sharing agreement with President Musharraf, to combat the Islamic Fundamentalists in the nation, and provide a beacon of hope to the Muslim world.  Sadly, that will never come to pass.  I had considered what, exactly, to say on this, and found a link from LGF to a piece by Pamela Bone in the Australian that said it all:

Bhutto was murdered because to her enemies she was Westernised, a traitor to her culture and an American stooge. She was murdered because she had vowed to bring secularism and democracy to Pakistan. She was murdered because she was all these things, and a woman.

“I know I am a symbol of what the so-called jihadists, Taliban and al-Qa’ida, most fear,” she wrote in her autobiography, Daughter of the East. “I am a female political leader fighting to bring modernity, communication, education and technology to Pakistan.”

Yes, fear is the right word. The fear of women, of women’s freedom, and most of all, of women’s sexuality, runs through Islamism. It is a large part of Islamist hatred of the West. “The issue of women is not marginal,” writes the Dutch scholar Ian Buruma. “It lies at the heart of Islamic occidentalism (anti-Westernism).”

Al-Qa’ida has made it perfectly clear that its aim is an Islamic caliphate, first in all nominally Muslim countries and ultimately in the whole world. The jihadis would, if they could, impose the same rampant misogyny on women worldwide as was, and still is to a large extent, imposed on the women of Afghanistan.

Could the murder of Bhutto be enough to wake up Western women to the fact that the war being waged by the Islamists is very much about them? Could the modern Left be persuaded that the people who killed Bhutto are the ones we are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq and other places across the world? Can we, in our niceness, stop telling ourselves they are justified in their hatred of us?

It’s a great piece, and I recommend reading the whole thing.  The one mistake she makes is:

They can’t win. No one, apart from extremists like themselves, wants the kind of society they envisage. But they could, if the West fails in its determination, win enough to make life very unpleasant for millions of women for a generation or more.

They most certainly CAN win, for several generations, over a great swath of the globe.  It doesn’t matter what people want, if they aren’t going to stand up and fight.

The West as a whole has already failed to confront this evil.  Only the United States is standing against the tide today, despite the best effirts of the Democrat Party, and the American left in general, who are doing their best to beak our will as well. 

It is curious that the very people that claim to support Womens Rights, and Gay Rights, also support the very people that want to kill all the Gays, and make all women slaves.