I heard on Fox News this morning Ellen Ratner say that she was at the inaugural and was quaking in fear while listening to the President's speech. Now, I know, she's playing the person who says outrageous things for TV role, but it isn't isolated. I see the sentiment around. Some on the right say it made them feel uneasy. This notion that the United States stands for freedom and liberty, and that we hope it for everyone, and we'll sand by people seeking freedom.

Somehow, this is called radical. Whatever happened to Truth, Justice, and the American Way? Does anyone remember why we opposed the Soviet Union? Not just because they were a threat to us, but because they were bad people who did bad things to people. Remember this presidential bit I pointed out a while back?

One of those constructive forces is enhancement of individual human freedoms through the strengthening of democracy, and the fight against deprivation, torture, terrorism and the persecution of people throughout the world. The struggle for human rights overrides all differences of color, nation or language.

Those who hunger for freedom, who thirst for human dignity, and who suffer for the sake of justice -- they are the patriots of this cause.

I believe with all my heart that America must always stand for these basic human rights -- at home and abroad. That is both our history and our destiny.

In case you are wondering, that was President Carter, 24 years ago. Now, obviously, his reality has not lived up to his rhetoric. But even if it is only lip service, at least it is lip service to the right thing.

Or let's take the words of his successor, President Reagan:

believe we shall rise to the challenge. I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written. I believe this because the source of our strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual. And because it knows no limitation, it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow man. For in the words of Isaiah: "He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might He increased strength . . . But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary . . . "

Yes, change your world. One of our Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine, said, "We have it within our power to begin the world over again." We can do it, doing together what no one church could do by itself.

Obviously he was not just paying lip service.

And today I hear that the United States stands for freedom is radical, revolutionary - frightening. They said some of the same things back then, too. Reagan was a warmonger, he was going to get us all blown up? But who would have imagined in 1983 that we would defeat the Evil Empire?

Reagan did, for one.

Now, who believes we can defeat the Islamofascist threat?

And it is freaking cold. Weather.com says 15 - that seems about right. Have to bug out tomorrow am before the storm hits. Usually the train is unaffected.

Back up and running, it seems, and now the front page is blank - or will be until I finish this post. I had some issues a while back with a corrupted comments database and then some other things happened with a huge comment spam attack and the end result was that I could not do a site rebuild - and most of the comments were unaccessible.

So I finally got around to converting off of the file system to a database backend, and that cleared things up. But it took some doing.

And it has hosed my post numbering up, so that a lot of links aren't going to work anymore. Oh well. At least it isn't all gone.