This story really has nothing to do with politics, but it’s so amazing that I felt it was worth mentioning. A woman who had been blind for 25 years suddenly regained her eye sight when she woke up at a hospital after suffering a heart attack.

I first read about the story at Dewaine Cooper’s blog, who reported that the Drudge Report had the story from the U.K. Telegraph.

Isn’t that incredible? Blind since 1979 , and she regains her eye sight at age 74—after suffering a heart attack!

Since 1979, Joyce Urch had lived in a world of shadows and near-darkness, but was astonished to find her sight restored when she came round after being resuscitated.

Doctors have been unable to explain what happened, but Mrs Urch, 74, was happy yesterday to put it down to a “miracle”.

She said: “When I first came round I just opened my eyes and shouted, ‘I can see, I can see.’ When I looked in the mirror I said, ‘Oh.’ I said to [her husband] Eric, ‘You’ve got older haven’t you?’ But I thought, ‘I’m old myself, my husband must be too.’

“The first time you look in the mirror you look at yourself and think, ‘Is that really me?’ But a lot of things have changed.”

Mrs Urch had been unable to see her five children properly since they were young adults and, for the first time, was able to look at her 12 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. She said that despite suffering from glaucoma, doctors did not think this was why her sight went, although they were unable to pinpoint the reason.

Two news items have popped up in the last day or so, and both involve our (largely ignored) problems on the Mexico/U.S. border.

First, the Mexican government announced yesterday that it would be distributing over 70,000 maps to potential illegal immigrants gathering near the U.S. border. The maps illustrate where, for example, highways and water stations exist in Arizona. They also warn Mexicans where not to go in Arizona.

But don’t worry—none of this will promote illegal immigration into the U.S.!

The National Human Rights Commission, a government-funded agency with independent powers, denied that the maps—similar to a comic-style guide booklet Mexico distributed last year—would encourage illegal immigration.

``We are not trying in any way to encourage or promote migration,’’ said Mauricio Farah, one of the commission’s national inspectors. ``The only thing we are trying to do is warn them of the risks they face and where to get water, so they don’t die.’‘

I like what Mark Krikorian—executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies—had to say:

``What’s next? Are they going to buy them bus tickets to Chicago?’‘

In another slightly-related incident, a standoff in Texas between the U.S. border patrol and Mexican smugglers has drawn a fair amount of attention despite the national media’s virtual cover-up of the story.

A West Texas standoff along the Rio Grande between U.S. law enforcement officers and heavily armed Mexican drug smugglers in military-style clothing prompted congressional demands Tuesday for an international investigation and a call for deployment of U.S. troops to the border.

The incident, which occurred Monday on U.S. soil at an isolated river crossing about 50 miles east of El Paso, is the latest involving armed incursions along the U.S. border with Mexico.

And it comes less than a week after Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff called a California newspaper’s account of such border incursions “overblown.”

The incident Monday involved an encounter between two Hudspeth County Sheriff’s Department deputies and three Department of Public Safety troopers and 10 heavily armed drug smugglers at an area about 50 miles down the river from El Paso.

Let’s see if President Bush will actually do something about the border now.

La Shawn Barber and Michelle Malkin both have done quite a bit of blogging about the subject.

A new Pentagon report says that the U.S. Army has become a “thin green line” that is in danger of breaking if no help comes soon.

How thin, how dangerous, and how soon?

It is likely, the study says, that the army literally won’t be able to outlast the insurgency in Iraq:

Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Army officer who wrote the report under a Pentagon contract, concluded that the Army cannot sustain the pace of troop deployments to Iraq long enough to break the back of the insurgency. He also suggested that the Pentagon’s decision, announced in December, to begin reducing the force in Iraq this year was driven in part by a realization that the Army was overextended.

Interestingly enough, on Monday Army Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno asserted that U.S. forces must prepare for a long war spanning a minimum of two decades:

“This generation of servicemembers will be in what we’re calling the Long War,” the general said. “Our estimate is that for at least the next 20 years, part of our focus will be on how do we deal with the extremist networks that will continue to threaten the United States and its allies.”

“The Passion of Kanye West.” That’s the headline of the most recent issue of Rolling Stone magazine, which features a picture of the 27-year old rapper posing as Jesus on the cross—crown of thorns and all.

You can read the (short) AP article about it here, and you can see a picture of the magazine cover here.

West defended his “brash attitude” by saying:

In America, they want you to accomplish these great feats, to pull off these David Copperfield-type stunts. You want me to be great, but you don’t ever want me to say I’m great?

Wow, what a shining example of humbleness and modesty for our society to follow! One wonders what Jesus would think of a statement like that.

In the past, West has accused George Bush of not caring about black people, and like most rappers’ “music,” his songs are full of swearing and other inappropiate material.

La Shawn Barber has been covering the topic as well.

The Vatican continued its shift away from the Biblical account of creation yesterday, as the Vatican newspaper ran an article criticizing the “intelligent design” theory as not being science and not belonging in school classrooms:

Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, laid out the scientific rationale for Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, saying that in the scientific world, biological evolution “represents the interpretative key of the history of life on Earth.”

He lamented that certain American “creationists” had brought the debate back to the “dogmatic” 1800s, and said their arguments weren’t science but ideology.

In the past decades or so, the Vatican and the pope have made various statements increasingly critical of a literal interpretation of Scripture’s creation account (in one Catholic friend’s words, “the Bible is not meant to be a science textbook”); and more and more supportive of evolution—albeit, “thiestic evolution”.

Is the Catholic Church caving in on one of the most important problems facing Christians today, or are they doing the right thing?

Readers might also be interested in checking out VirtueBlog’s thread on the idea of voting for pro-choice candidates. There has been quite a bit of interesting discussion and interesting comments!

Michelle Malkin has the fascinating story of 11-year old Haleigh Poutre. Last year, Haleigh was allegedly burned and beaten almost to death by her stepfather. She remained in a coma, kept alive by a feeding tube and ventilator, “virtually brain dead” and in a persistent vegitative state.

The Massachusetts Department of Social Services wanted to remove the girl’s feeding tube and let her die, as did her mother—a woman who was earlier deemed unfit to take care of Haleigh. The only person who wanted Haleigh kept on the feeding tube and ventilator was, ironically, her stepdad—the man who would be facing murder charges if the girl died.

On January 17, the state supreme court ruled against Haleight’s stepdad in a decision that would allow the girl’s feeding tube to be removed and her to die.

But has a miracle happened?

A day after the state’s highest court ruled that the Department of Social Services could withdraw life support from a brain-damaged girl, the agency said yesterday that Haleigh Poutre might be emerging from her vegetative state.

DSS also said it has no immediate plans to remove her feeding tube.

‘’There has been a change in her condition,” said a DSS spokeswoman, Denise Monteiro. ‘’The vegetative state may not be a total vegetative state.”

Monteiro said Haleigh is breathing on her own, without the ventilator she has depended on for four months. Monteiro also said that doctors at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield elicited responses from Haleigh during tests performed yesterday.

As Malkin wrote:

This is a huge story, a wake-up call to “right-to-die” ideologues who recklessly put such unlimited trust in the medical profession and Nanny State. The same government bureaucrats and doctors who had conclusively deemed the 11-year-old girl “hopeless” and her vegetative state “irreversible” now tell us she is responding to stimuli and breathing on her own.

Our newest issue of Virtue Magazine will be coming out this Saturday, and with it a number of articles you won’t want to miss!

In “To Lose Or Not To Lose,” Sarah Meholick examines the war in Iraq and explains why America must stay the course in the war on terror. Theresa Moss takes a look at the possibility of a woman being elected president of the United States, Sam Ashwood continues his series on World War II, and Lita Harman takes a look at our current tax system and the benefits of having a flat tax.

Also in this issue:

Is President Bush a social conservative?
Christian Soldiers: Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson
Martin Luther King’s greatest speech
Samuel Alito
Senators who talk too much
And more!

Make sure you check out our latest issue of Virtue Magazine this Saturday!

Most readers have probably already heard about New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin’s controversial comments on Martin Luther King Day. One of the comments that provoked a lot of protest among conservatives was his comments about the racial identity of New Orleans:

“It’s time for us to come together. It’s time for us to rebuild New Orleans — the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans,” the mayor said. “This city will be a majority African American city. It’s the way God wants it to be. You can’t have New Orleans no other way. It wouldn’t be New Orleans.”

Now Nagin has come up with a half-hearted Clinton-esque apology, complete with one of the most ridiculous clarifications I have ever heard. Here is his “apology”:

“I apologize to any resident in this city that may have been offended,” he said. “That was not my intention. If I could take anything back, I thought the Uptown comment was inappropriate. If any people are working hard to rebuild this city, it’s the people Uptown.”

“Unfortunately, everything I say today is scrutinized to the nth degree,” he said. “It was Martin Luther King’s birthday. I thought it was appropriate to address some of the concerns and frustrations I’m hearing from the African-American community.”

And here is Nagin’s “clarification” of his original comment about the chocolate:

He said he had not meant that it should be an all-black metropolis, asking: “How do you make chocolate?

“You take dark chocolate, you mix it with white milk, and it becomes a delicious drink. That is the chocolate I am talking about,” he told CNN.

I don’t think it’s an understatement to say this is about the dumbest thing Nagin could have possibly said in this situation.

There’s an interesting report in yesterday’s U.K. Observer about a new study that indicates pregnancy makes women smarter:

It is a time of sleep deprivation, constant tiredness and a regular inability to carry out even the simplest task. But now scientists have discovered – after experimenting on the California deer mouse, laboratory rats, and humans – that pregnancy also confers startling benefits: it actually boosts brainpower.

During pregnancy, learning and memory skills improve dramatically, say researchers, reversing the popular myth that it is a time of dumbing down. Key brain areas also alter in size; changes that can persist for decades. Far from transforming mothers into weakened emotional wrecks who lose car keys and drop in IQ, it turns out having children makes them cleverer. It’s just hard to spot thanks to all that lost sleep.

The rest of the article is quite interesting, and I highly recommend that you take the time to read it.

Now compare the benefits of having kids with the “benefits” of having an abortion.

For some reason, I doubt we’re going to see either of these studies ever mentioned by NOW, NARAL, Planned Parenthood, et al.

Would you ever vote for a pro-choice candidate? That’s the question Spunky Jr. recently asked on her blog:

The next 2 years will be interesting ones. There are many other people who think that Rudy Guliani, John McCain, and a few others are going to run [for the Republicans]. Of course, on the Democrat ticket, Hillary Clinton is most likely going to run (of course I could wrong, but that seems most likely). I’m not sure what to make of all this.

What do you think about all this? If the Republicans put up a pro-choice candidate or someone who was for gay marriage, would you vote for them?

The question has sparked an interesting discussion. Answers have varied from Yes, if it’s the better of two bad choices, to No, never.

Other aspects of the same issue have also been discussed, including whether a person would ever vote for the Constitution Party, which is strongly pro-life and strongly conservative in every aspect, but as of now has virtually no chance of winning a national election. Some would never vote for the Constitution Party—even if the Republican candidate were pro-abortion—because they feel they would be “wasting” their vote. Others feel principle is more important and that their concience would not allow them to vote for a pro-abortion candidate, even if they would be wasting their vote.

Interestingly enough, some have said they have problems with the Constitution Party because it opposes the war in Iraq. But what if you had to choose between a pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage Republican candidate who supported the war and a pro-life, pro-traditional marriage Constitutional Party candidate who opposed the war? In order to make this interesting, let’s say the Constitutional Party candidate and the Republican candidate are running in a dead heat at the polls.

Whom do you vote for?

One other exceptionally interesting exchange happened on the thread, as Bryce wrote that his research “would suggest that Bush was a ‘pro-choice candidate’.”

One person responded back with:

With all due respect, Bryce, President Bush is not pro-choice. He has said multiple times that life begins at conception. I don’t know what else you want from him. It’s not exactly as if an amendment to the constitution would pass in the Senate.

The timing could not be better on this, as our next issue of Virtue Magazine (coming out in six days!) will be containing a lengthy, in depth look at precisely that question—is President Bush truly pro-life and how strong of a pro-life candidate is he? It will be an article that most people will probably be interested, and if I am not mistaken, it will generate quite a bit of feedback.