Conservative Papa

Length: 9:31.
Just throw away the mouse and keyboard, step up to the screen, and step into the future. This is one computer screen you will want to touch!
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No, not just an automatic garage door opener — an automatic parking garage that stows cars into their own storage slots until their owners return.  The driver parks on the automatic platform, swipes his credit card, and leaves.  The robots do the rest.  Watch it work in this AP Video.

This morning about 6:15, the radio announcer highlighted our frigid northwest Florida temperature of 24° F. “There might be frost on your windshield,” he warned. Not mine! Saturday night I reached a major milestone: both vehicles were snuggly stuffed into our two-car garage! (more…)

It’s a day to celebrate Australia and what makes the country great.  You can read about it’s history and send a postcard to your mates! It seems analogous to the Fourth of July in the USA.

Cheers!

Hey, our family is techno-savvy after all! The only problem with this great T-shirt is that it comes in sizes 2T, 4T, and 6T. For the uninitiated, that means approximate sizes for two-, four-, and six-year-olds. In my opinion, it might be funny on a two-year-old, but not at all on older children. I’d like my daughter to be potty trained or nearly so by the time she’s two. Sizes from newborn through 2T would be best!

The Cool Site of the Day from Kim Komando is BibleMap.org. This is very useful! Just browse through the Bible and click on hyperlinked place names. The site uses GoogleMaps to show the place selected on satelite imagery. This is great for helping to bring biblical places into modern context!

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Tuesday night, Carolyn told me that Andrew asked what peace is. She had just finished singing “Silent Night” while putting him to bed, and Andrew caught the phrase, “sleep in heavenly peace.” Carolyn explained that peace is like when she tells him to calm down while he is upset. It’s rest and calm. As she left his room, she told him to sleep in heavenly peace. For the past two nights, Andrew has repeated the phrase at bedtime.

I’ve had to answer Andrew’s questions about how things work, but this is his first “deep” question that we’ve noticed. We’re waiting for “where did God come from?” and other imponderables.

Just eleven short months. Are you ready?

I sang “I want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” too much last month, so Carolyn threw this little gem into my stocking. In ten more months, she will be playing it on the radio again, and I’ll probably start singing it again!

Please read the entire article from the Oakland Tribune: Inside Bay Area - Legislature to debate spanking

Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, D-Mountain View, wants to outlaw spanking children up to 3 years old. If she succeeds, California would become the first state in the nation to explicitly ban parents from smacking their kids.

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The bill, which is still being drafted, will be written broadly, she added, prohibiting “any striking of a child, any corporal punishment, smacking, hitting, punching, any of that.” Lieber said it would be a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail or a fine up to$1,000, although a legal expert advising her on the proposal said first-time offenders likely only would have to attend parenting classes.

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But Lieber is optimistic that lawmakers will find her proposal hard to resist. For the record, she does not have children and says she was not slapped as a child. But she does have a cat named Snoop, which her veterinarian told her never to hit.

“And if you never hit a cat,” Lieber said, “you should never hit a kid.”

Yet another liberal attempt to pervade our lives with government and establish the religion of Humanism in this country. Much better than I can articulate, the Bible gives the command and the reason for spanking:

Proverbs 23

¹³Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die.

¹⁴Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell.

This thing about the cat really got me! As if owning a cat has much to do with proper child rearing! When I was growing up, our cat received its share of swats. In fact, it lived in mortal fear of my father’s slipper which, at a moment’s notice, was known to become a missile targeted at the cat’s backside.

The following is an excerpt from an email I just received from the Home School Legal Defense Association:

Last night, the U.S. Senate approved the Bennett amendment by a vote of 55-43. American citizens will remain free to organize and contact their congressional representatives without being forced to comply with federal regulation and oversight.

We have reports from Congress that your outpouring of calls made the difference.

Thank you so much for making the time and sacrifice to call your U.S. Senators asking them to support the Bennett Amendment to Senate Bill 1 (S. 1), the “Legislative Transparency and Accountability Act of 2007.”

The Bennett amendment removed section 220, the grassroots lobbying provision, from S. 1. Section 220 would have redefined lobbying to include “paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying.” Entities that engaged in grassroots lobbying would have had to comply with all federal lobbying disclosure laws, including registration with Congress and the filing of quarterly reports to Congress, or face serious consequences.

With the successful passage of the Bennett amendment, the Senate’s attempt to place federal control over virtually all grassroots lobbying activity has been defeated.

Immediately after the Bennett amendment passed, S. 1 was passed with amendments by a vote of 96-2.

HSLDA will continue to watch as this legislation goes to the House of Representatives. It is possible that a House version of this bill will again attempt to regulate grassroots lobbying. We will notify you if more calls are necessary.

The Bennett amendment would not have passed without the calls and support of you and millions of other concerned citizens. The senators who supported the amendment were very thankful for your calls and credited them with this victory.

I had wanted to post an entry on this important issue when I first heard about this egregious affront to free speech last week. This grassroots lobbying provision would have required churches, other organizations, and even websites (such as this blog) to register with Congress and fill out a bunch of paperwork before asking 500 or more of their members or readers to call Congress about an issue. Imagine me having to register with Congress just to exercise my right of free speech to get on this blog and tell my vast readership that they ought to call their representatives about an issue!

When HSLDA first told me about this, I called Senator Martinez. He voted for the Bennett Amendment to kill this provision, as I asked him to do. The phone at Senator Nelson’s office just rang and rang. He didn’t seem to care what I might have told him, and he voted to keep the grassroots lobbying provision. The margin of 55 to 43 by which the Bennett Amendment passed was far too slim for my comfort. Those who would slowly strip us of our rights in the name of “Legislative Accountability” lost this time, but we must be ever vigilant!