By Brian Dann

Yesterday President Obama made history.  No he didn’t solve the immigration problem or eliminate the national debt.  He didn’t bring peace to the Middle East or teach Sarah Palin the difference between Iran and Iraq.  Yesterday President Obama appeared on The View.  Ok, this may not be history on the level of the falling of the Berlin Wall, but none the less this was the first time that a sitting president has appeared on a daytime talk show.  I believe he was supposed to appear on Jerry Springer but they could not find anyone to claim that the president was their baby-daddy.  This obviously was a big honor for the ladies of The View and I am sure that the fact that Barbra Walters is the producer and a co-host was one of the reasons that the President chose this show over Kathy Lee and Hoda.  Of course being the type of show that it is I didn’t expect the questions to be as hard hitting as Meet the Press, but the ladies held there own.  Perhaps the most interesting part of the show was watching Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who thinks that Fox news really is “Fair and Balanced”, act perfectly giddy as President Obama strolled out onto the stage. (Didn’t she loose on Survivor?  How exactly do you make that transition from Survivor looser to talk show host along side Barbra Walters?  If losing is the requirement to success then I should be co-host of the Tonight Show by now.)  Watching Hasselbeck was like watching Sasha and Malia at a Justin Bieber concert. I was just waiting for her to yell out, “I love you Mr. President, Oh and by the way what about the Death Panels!” or ask him to produce his birth certificate.  Much to my disappointment, neither of those things happened.  She did ask a question, very respectfully, about “saved jobs”, or jobs that were not lost due to the Stimulus Package, that sounded like it was lifted straight from the transcripts of a Sean Hannity show, but as the President pointed out, he was sure that any person who’s job was saved due to the Stimulus Package was not upset about his administration talking about “Saved Jobs”. (BooYa Hasselbeck!)  By the way, before the President goes to bed each night do you think he asks Michelle if she would like to see his stimulus package?

It’s no secret that I am a supporter of President Obama but that does not mean I think he can do no wrong.  I believe that pouring more money and troops into Afghanistan is a mistake and we need to get out as soon as possible.  The money we are spending there could be much better spent rebuilding our own infrastructure, investing in clean energy, supporting our schools, and so on. But I believe that President Obama has made two huge mistakes in his presidency.  First,… (To read more Click Here)

By Brian Dann
I remember when I was in grade school, sex education was taught to us in fifth grade.  I believe that they spent about two hours on it and most of it consisted of badly animated movies of a very happy sperm swimming upstream to meet up with an equally happy egg only to join together and well you know what happens next.  The egg wakes up with a bad hangover only to look at the smiley sperm lying naked next to her and wonders how she got there and why her panties are around his neck.  Seriously, that is all we got.  There was no mention of love or marriage, foreplay or how the sperm got in there in the first place, and certainly no mention of any of the other creative ways that two people could express there undying lust for each other, although looking back on it, that would have been awesome!  But I was not that lucky, at least not as lucky as the fifth grade class that my oh so cute, blond and perky, twenty something wife taught during the first year of our marriage.  It was her first year teaching science to fourth and fifth graders and she was assigned the task of teaching the fifth graders sex ed.  The first thing I thought to my self was somewhere there is a group of fifth grade boys who can’t wait to get to science class!  Whereas I got two hours of “instruction” in this subject, her students received two weeks.  By the time she was done, each one of her students could name each position of the Kama Sutra and had memorized five pickup lines.  But seriously, her curriculum was very appropriate for the age of the students.  The parents had the option of having their child opt out of those lessons, and my wife pulled it off with the grace, style and professionalism that I knew that she was fully capable of.

Now let’s fast forward to today, and a sleepy little town called Helena, Montana.  Actually Helena, the capital of Montana, is not that little with a population of about 29,500 and home to such notables as Gary Cooper, the A-Teams Dirk Benedict, Liz Claiborne, and L. Ron Hubbard the founder of Scientology.  Helena is the type of place where you can stroll down its quiet streets that have retained the feel of the old west, and with a murder rate of zero for 2007 and 2008, feel safe while you admire the 18th century, gold rush architecture.  It is also a place that has turned the subject of sex education upside down and has created a national uproar that had not been seen since sex education was first introduced to our educational system in the 1970’s.  The Helena school board has put forth a proposition that would teach school children, as young as kindergarten, sex education using anatomical terms such as penis, vagina, breast, nipples, testicles, scrotum and uterus.  It would teach first graders about same-sex relationships, and would teach fifth graders that intercourse can not only be done vaginally, but also anally and orally.  That’s right.  It teaches fifth graders about blow jobs. Here is an actual excerpt from the proposal.  “Understand that sexual intercourse includes but is not limited to vaginal, oral, or anal penetration; using the penis, fingers, tongue or objects.” Objects?  What, are they going to bring in vibrators and dildos?  It’s interesting, talking to a ten year old on the internet about blow jobs is called a felony, but… (To read more Click Here)

By Brian Dann

I’d like you to ask yourself some questions, some real tough questions, and I‘d like you to be brutally honest with yourself.  After all, you are the only one who will know the answers.  Let’s get started.  First, how stressful is your marriage?  What percentage of the time do you spend fighting, bickering, and arguing, or what ever you want to call it?  And how are you as a parent?  Be honest.  What are your short comings as a parent?  Have you really done the best you can?  Have you given your kids all the love, patience and understanding that you are capable of?  Is there anything that you can see your children looking back at, twenty years from now, that you did or said, that they may say to themselves, during some therapy session, “My parents really messed me up with that one.”  Oh and by the way, if you can’t think of anything, believe me, there’s something.  And finally, what has contributed more to the success or failure of your family, the fact that you have a “traditional marriage”, and by that I mean a man married to a woman, or the decisions that you made as a parent and their effect on your children?  I don’t know what your answers are and frankly, I don’t care.  But what I do know is this.  How you parent has a much larger impact on the type of individual your child turns out to be then if your family is “traditional” or not. I have seen many a heterosexual married couple mess up there kids beyond belief.  I have seen kids scarred by divorce, had there lives ruined by physical and sexual abuse.  I have seen kids who all they want is time from mom and dad but instead are told that they are too busy, kids who crave some attention then act out because they simply can’t get it.  I have seen kids who turn to drugs, alcohol, who get pregnant at fourteen years old.  I have seen kids who whether they know it or not just want a loving family to be there for them. And I don’t care if you are gay, straight or bi, you all of an equal opportunity to mess up your kids lives.

According to traditional Christian belief, a marriage is made up of a man and woman who take certain vows and then are “married” in the eyes of g-d.  Add kids to this formula and supposedly you have a family.  And according to traditional Christian belief this is final and absolute.  There is no other form of marriage, or family.  It is precisely this final and absolute Christian definition of marriage that has been challenged in the last few years.

If you look up the word “family” on the internet you find the following definitions… (to read more click here)

By Brian Dann

With this Forth of July weekend coming up I think it’s time once again to celebrate the United States continued dominance through out the world, to remind ourselves that we are number one, and to never forget that the American dream lives in all of us!  Not only in this country do we have a constitution that promises us life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but also a promise of the right to keep and bear arms, the right to have the highest murder rate, involving guns, of all non-third world, higher income nations, a rate that is five times higher than Canada, and ten to forty-four times higher than other high income countries around the world.  According to the Brady Campaign, “in one year, guns murdered 17 people in Finland, 35 in Australia, 39 in England and Wales, 60 in Spain, 194 in Germany, 200 in Canada, and 9,484 in the United States.”  We’re number one!  Woo Hoo!  We should be so proud of our selves.  To anyone who says, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” I say DUH!  A gun lying on the ground with no one touching it is pretty harmless.  What a stupid argument.  I could say the same thing about a guitar string, but if I pick it up and wrap it around someone’s throat and pull it with all my strength, I could probably chop there head off, except that people actually use guns to kill other people, they rarely use guitar strings!

The fact is this.  There is a direct correlation between the number of guns owned per capita, to the number of deaths by firearm per capita. And guess who is number one on both lists, the United States.  For example, the United Kingdom with only 56 guns per 1000 people had only 39 gun related deaths for the entire year.  Canada with 315 guns per 1000 people had only 200 gun related deaths for the entire year.  But the United States with a staggering 900 guns per 1000 people had 9,484 gun related deaths.  You can make any argument you want but these are the numbers and the numbers tell the story.  Listen, I’m not saying that people shouldn’t have guns.  If you hunt, you should have the right to own a gun.  I have no desire to deny… (To read more Click Here)