A reprimand is considered a moderate punishment, more serious than the minor sanction of admonishment but not especially severe: members including Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, and Barney Frank have received reprimands.

Word of the panel’s recommendation came on the same day that Congressional officials said that Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, would face ethics charges that are expected to be announced next week.

On Thursday, the ethics committee released a report detailing 13 charges against Mr. Rangel, including his improper use of his office to solicit donations for a City University of New York center to be named in his honor; his failure to report rental income from his villa in the Dominican Republic and to pay taxes on it; his omission of some $600,000 in assets on his House financial disclosure forms; and his acceptance from a Manhattan developer of four rent-stabilized apartments, one of which he used as a campaign office.

The report said Mr. Rangel had shown “a pattern of indifference or disregard for the laws, rules and regulations of the United States and the House of Representatives.” It also documented the major charges.

via Panel Advises Reprimand for Rangel, Not Ouster – NYTimes.com.

As long as there are lifelong politicians, there will be this type of corruption.  Don’t expect it to change until we change the faces we send to DC.  Lindsay Graham is an example of those who believes that the people who send them to Washington aren’t smart or elite enough to understand what it takes to run the country.  Indeed, they ignore the people who send them there until a short time before elections, and unfortunately in most cases, they don’t have a viable candidate running against them anyway so it isn’t much of a threat.

If you want proof that people are really tired of the idiots we have in Washington, look at what the Dems picked for their opposition to Jim DeMint in this year’s Senate race in South Carolina.  Not that very many people would actually be a threat to Senator DeMint anyway since he’s one of the few in DC who actually listen to their constituents outside of election season.  Also note that this is DeMint’s first term in the Senate.  I certainly hope that he doesn’t go the way of Graham, the OTHER Senator from SC.  Graham would feel more at home calling New York or California his home, I think.  He’s much too sophisticated to represent South Carolina, you know.

Waters, 71, has been under investigation for a possible conflict of interest involving a bank that was seeking federal aid. Her husband owned stock in the bank and had served on its board.

New York Democrat Rep. Charles Rangel also faces an ethics trial this fall on charges that include failure to disclose assets and income, nonpayment of taxes and doing legislative favors for donors to a college center named after him.

via California Rep. Waters may face fall ethics trial – Yahoo! News.

Bill Connelly, of Rock M Nation, has produced a statistical comparison for Football Outsiders that ranks the best college football teams in the last 100 years. Using a metric that gauged on points scored and points allowed – the same tool OTS relies on to derive his Pythagorean Wins statistics – Connelly created a historical comparison of every team in the past century of college football.

Today, over at Football Outsiders, he reveals that Alabama’s 1961 squad is ranked No. 2. Furthermore, no less that 12 Crimson Tide teams made the list, more than any other program in college football. Here is how Alabama fared in Connelly’s rankings.

via Ranking The Last 100 Years of Alabama Football – Roll ‘Bama Roll.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs seems to have forgotten that his boss has already broken his central campaign promise – a “firm pledge” that “no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”

Responding to a question during his daily press briefing today, Gibbs said, “The President believes raising taxes on the middle class during this economic time would not make a lot of economic sense.”

But President Obama has already broken his “firm pledge” at least eight times:

via Gibbs Misleads Public on Obama’s Broken Tax Pledge.

“Senator Kerry will only pay the taxes because he got caught,” party Chairwoman Jennifer Nassour said in a statement. “He should spend more time creating jobs rather than customizing his yacht. Democrats think they live by another set of rules, and the voters of the commonwealth will soon remind them they do not.”

via FOXNews.com – Kerry Agrees to Pay Massachusetts Tax on Yacht Docked in Rhode Island.

Interesting how we are all supposed to pay our fair share, but Senator Kerry works the loopholes to his advantage.  Then again, he’s a senator and a Democrat, so he doesn’t have to pay his fair share just like Al Gore doesn’t have to conserve energy like the rest of us.  They are better than the common people they are trying to protect, you know…

“Everyone is selling up the little they have and leaving,” said Villasenor, 31, who is headed for Pennsylvania. “We have no alternative. They have us cornered.”

The two women are among scores of illegal immigrant families across Phoenix hauling the contents of their homes into the yard this weekend as they rush to sell up and get out before the state law takes effect on Thursday.

The law, the toughest imposed by any U.S. state to curb illegal immigration, seeks to drive more than 400,000 undocumented day laborers, landscapers, house cleaners, chambermaids and other workers out of Arizona, which borders Mexico.

via Migrants sell up, flee Arizona ahead of crackdown | Reuters.

Tell me again how this is a bad thing?  With state budgets already running on borrowed money, why should those who don’t pay any taxes be getting the same benefits as those who are?  Hopefully this will take some of the strain off of Arizona, but it will definitely hurt neighboring states who allow illegals to continue to mooch off working Americans.

So where does it end?  Do we now admit idol worshipers into the ministry because they deserve the same respect?

Everyone should be welcomed into the church family as members with the recognition that everyone sins, but to allow leadership roles to those who blatantly defy God’s word, publicly and proudly, goes directly against what the ministry of Christ is about. You don’t put leadership in the hand of these people.  Apparently there are already some in the leadership or this wouldn’t have come to fruition in the first place.

The Church isn’t about making people feel good about themselves or political correctness. It’s about doing your best to live as God has commanded and getting the support structure and guidance from others who actually try to follow the Word as well.  I’ve seen this coming for a long time and as a member of an ELCA congregation it will be interesting to see how our church reacts to it.  I’m afraid that it will pass with nothing more than a small rumble as so many similar problems have in the past and it saddens me greatly.

I know that we have homosexuals in our membership.  Some are out and some are not.  None that I know of make a ruckus about “inclusion” in anything.  They come and worship as we all do.  They shouldn’t be excluded from worship because we all sin every day.  They also shouldn’t be recognized as leaders of the church because they blatantly practice what is forbidden by God.  When man continues to hack away at God’s word and His most basic teachings, it becomes a church of man and not of God.

My dilemma is that there doesn’t seem to be any middle ground for Christian faiths.  The Baptists are too far in one direction along with Catholics and it seems that most of the others are caving in to political correctness over Godly teachings.  Why have we come the point where there doesn’t seem to be moderation in anything?  In politics it’s the same.  You are either too far in one direction or too far in the other direction.  Christianity has become the same way.  The ELCA for me was a happy medium, though you could see its leanings over the past several years with all of its “exploratory committees” studying whether or not you can defy the bible directly and still be accepted as a leader of the church, etc.  What bullshit!

So here we are again, destroying ourselves in the name of political correctness.  You cannot give in to the enemy (those trying to water down the faith) and still call yourself a worker for God.  Making your neighbor happy isn’t the way to make God happy when the price is the true nature of your faith.  We have been infiltrated and will fall from within.  We all have our decisions to make and I can see that mine aren’t going to be easy.  I’ve loved my church and my church family for 12 years now and I do not want to say goodbye, but I will if something isn’t done in response to this.  I won’t be a party to financing or supporting a ministry that worries more about political correctness than staying true to the Word of God.

As the midterm election season approaches, new road signs are popping up everywhere – millions of dollars worth of signs touting “The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act” and reminding passers-by that the program is “Putting America Back to Work.”

A look at where the stimulus money is going.

On the road leading to Dulles Airport outside Washington, DC there's a 10' x 11' road sign touting a runway improvement project funded by the federal stimulus. The project cost nearly $15 million and has created 17 jobs, according to recovery.gov.

However, there's another number that caught the eye of ABC News: $10,000. That's how much money the Washington Airports Authority tells ABC News it spent to make and install the sign – a single sign – announcing that the project is “Funded by The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act” and is “Putting America Back to Work.” The money for the sign was taken out of the budget for the runway improvement project.

ABC News has reached out to a number of states about spending on stimulus signs and learned the state of Illinois has spent $650,000 on about 950 signs and Pennsylvania has spent $157,000 on 70 signs. Other states, like Virginia , Vermont , and Arizona do not sanction any signs.

via Millions for Road Signs?: That’s Stimulating? – ABC News.

Besides raising the retirement age for full Social Security benefits to 70 for people now 50 or younger, Mr. Boehner suggested curbing benefit growth by tying cost-of-living increases to the consumer price index rather than growth in wages, and providing benefits only to those who need them.

“If you have substantial non-Social Security income while you're retired, why are we paying you at a time when we’re broke?” he said. “We just need to be honest with people.”

via Both parties mull raising retirement age – Washington Times.

First the “we are broke” argument doesn’t cut it.  We are broke because they stole money from Social Security to buy votes by spending it on other things unrelated to SS.  In any corporation if you did this you would be put in jail, yet our government has been doing it for years and calling it legal!  BS!

The second argument of not paying people just because they planned better than other people is just as bogus!   Why should anyone be required to pay an insurance premium only to be told upon maturity that they planned too well outside the plan so they aren’t eligible?  It’s ridiculous!

How do these people still have jobs?  Oh wait, they are using this money to buy votes, I almost forgot.

We can’t afford to continue to let this go on.  We have to take back Washington.  We need more Jim DeMint style senators and representatives who aren’t willing to trade their morals for money or political victories.  We can’t continue to send the likes of Hoyer, Boehner, and the rest back up there to spend without regard for our future and the future of our kids.  If you want to do something about it then do it.  Vote them out!