With Glenn Beck and stirred-up Americans on the loose, Obama sticks his head in the sand, where he thinks better, observes ostrichologist Ethel C. Fenig of American Thinker University.
"The speaker of the House wants to know how opponents of the Ground Zero mosque are being funded," states an editorial in Investors Business Daily. "When Americans can be investigated for their opinions, our republic has arrived at a dangerous place."
Every day brings yet another example of why American who respect both our national and creaturely identities must resist and overcome the growing authoritarianism entrenched in Washington, D.C.
"Harry Reid has never heard of Marco Rubio," states the headline above comments by W. James Antle III at American Spectator.
I suppose this means the two have never met. Well, they ought to, if only to fill in a few gaps in Reid's education and life experience.
Antle's comments speak, of course, to Reid's instantly infamous utterance that he just doesn't know how anyone of "Hispanic heritage could be a Republican." This, from a grown man. A U.S. senator. The utterance is an embarrassment.
Well, Harry needs to meet Marco, who is -- as many people seem to know -- the GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate, from Florida. A son of Cuban immigrants.
To help things along, here's Marco's website, which Harry may not know about. It's on the internet, another item about which Harry not know of or heard of.
I'm doing my best as a community facilitator to help Reid understand how Rubio could be Republicanio.
Now I've never met Senior Rubio, and I wouldn't ever want to profile, but he sure does look like a human being of "Hispanic heritage." My unscientific guess is that about 99% of my soccer-playing amigos share a somewhat similar background.
I might add that I do see how a person of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican (something along the lines of perferring the liberating Constitution over against the enfebbling divide-and-conquer racism and groupism that now animates, apparently, the like of Harry Reid and the Democrat Party).
I might also add that maybe a person of Hispanic heritage could be tired of Obama reaching into brown Hispanic wallets, making it all-that-much harder for the "little guy" to run a small business. That, at least, is what my auto mechanic from Puerto Rico tells me.
Here's a wild prediction: Marco Rubio, Republican, of Hispanic heritage, will vote Republican in the November elections! And he will vote specifically for himself, Republican!
It really is time that Harry met Marco (on a plane, maybe, as in When Harry Met Sally). In any case, a lot of Americans have met this son of Cuban exiles. Americans of all sorts of heritages. And they seem to like the guy and the Republic for which he stands.
"Republic." I wonder if Reid has ever heard of that.
I Know It's a Longshot, But: If you've heard that there are no black human beings in the Tea Party movement, or that the Tea Party movement is a front for the KKK, Nazi Party, or Aryan Nashun, this news conference held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., may provide a helpful corrective.
I note the August 4 press gathering on the possibility that video of this newsworthy event may not see much air time on the formerly mainstream media. Call it a hunch.
And here's a slide show of the Tea Party Express News conference, featured on the website of the National Press Club.
Related
There Is No Media Double Standard
Racism! Racism! Racism! And Oh by the Way: Racism!
"Yesterday's federal court decision to enjoin enforcement of the Arizona immigration law is the latest example of a virtually unchecked renegade federal government waging war against the states and against the liberties of its citizens," writes David Limbaugh.
"We've seen that Obama will exercise any power he can get away with, from strong-arming secured creditors and favoring unions as he gobbled up automakers to making a mockery of due process with his Oval Office shakedown of BP. But he might have reached a new low with his assaults on the sovereignty of the people of Arizona."
In December 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and sent the USS Arizona to the bottom. In July 2010, the Imperial Forces of Barack Obama attacked the State of Arizona and sent the U.S. Constitution to the bottom. Will it stay there, or rise to victory over this anti-American attack from within?
Related
Arizona's Constitutional Authority to Declare War
Half of Americans Reject Obama's Immigration Lawsuit
Hey, Obama, Show Us Your Papers
Fact: Obama on Illegals Fails His Oath of Office
"Any possible shred of doubt remaining in anybody's mind about former Senate GOP leader Trent Lott's true allegiance have now been definitively removed," writes Mark Tapscott at the Washington Examiner. "Lott is a paid tool of the Washington Establishment who hates the Tea Party and all other insurgents who have had it with politics-as-usual."
"'We don't need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples. As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them,' Lott told The Washington Post in an incredibly revealing story," says Tapscott, who is editor of the editorial page at the Examiner.
Why target Jim DeMint? Because, Tapscott continues, "Sen. Jim DeMint . . . is the South Carolina conservative Republican who last year formed the Senate Conservatives Fund to back precisely the kind of insurgent conservative Senate candidates most feared by the Lotts of the world."
As Tapscott sees it, "Lott's quote points to the all-too-familiar GOP-losers mentality that GOP officials can just go on as it did in the years before they lost their congressional majorities in the Senate and House, talking the talk of limited government without having to actually walk the walk with their votes."
For a solution to the problem of strategic Republican weakness in the face of challenges to the very essence of the American experiment in freedom and dignity, please see "How the New Resistance Can Win the Culture War."
"Republican Sharron Angle says her campaign to unseat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in Nevada is 'a calling' from God and that her faith is helping her endure a fiercely competitive race in which Democrats have depicted her as a conservative extremist," reports AP.
The extremists here, of course, are those who reject the mainstream American concept that our polity is based on a Creator who a) has made each us of equal worth and significance (ontological equality) and b) has endowed humanity with "certain unalienable rights," among them "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (please see the Declaration of Independence).
Nothing could be more mainstream American, therefore, than that public servants live in community with their Creator and with our fellow man, and then appreciate public service as a particular calling within that overarching, liberating, and humane vision.
America would be much improved if people we sent to Washington understood they are creatures of God and not of a materialistic secular state, or of impersonal nature, social classes, victim groups, or any other of the various divisive splinterings that seem so at home in certain political circles -- and yet so alien to who we are in our enduring national identity.
Sharron Angle appears to be a person who embraces that general humane calling to live in community with our Creator and then to respond with specifity to her particular life situation. Therefore, she campaigns to unseat Harry Reid, a man who seems significantly alienated from the American experiment.
That, and not ahistorical allegations of "conservative extremism," perhaps goes far in explaining the ire her work raises among secularized elites rather accustomed to imposing their extreme ideological agenda upon America unopposed. That Angle has a real shot at defeating the incumbent Reid only adds fuel to the ire.
Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich says he's considering running for president in 2012 and expects to make a decision by early next year.
In an interview Monday with The Associated Press, Gingrich predicted a Republican would defeat Democratic President Barack Obama in 2012. He called Obama a "disaster" who would go down as the worst president in modern times.
Because "Obama's Arizona Suit Is 'Toxic'," says Frontpagemag.com.
"Politico reports that Sarah Palin’s fundraising group 'steps into the big leagues' by raising $866,000 in the second quarter -- the highest amount since SarahPAC was formed in January 2009," notes Barbara Hollingsworth at Beltway Confidential.
"Palin’s aggressive fundraising, and her recent endorsement of a number of winning conservative women candidates in recent primaries, means the top Republican 'mama grizzly' can’t be ruled out as a presidential candidate in 2012," Hollingsworth concludes.
Related
Sarah Palin "Mama Grizzlies" Video Neglects Vital Point
Doug Brady writes at Conservatives4Palin:
On June 22nd, incumbent Congressman Bob Inglis (RINO-SC) lost his primary runoff election to Trey Gowdy by more than 40 points.
The AP, evidently, was traumatized by Inglis' loss and has consequently decided to blame it on their favorite nemesis, Governor Palin (since when has the AP ever cared about the misfortune of a Republican, even a RINO?).
Apparently Inglis took issue with Governor Palin's metaphoric use of the term death panels as an inevitable result of the rationing contained in Obamacare.
Despite the fact that the accuracy of Governor Palin's contention has since been confirmed by liberals such as Paul Krugman and Peter Orszag, the AP is still trying to make the claim that her analogy was a sinister plot to unfairly turn public opinion against Obamacare.
"A new video from Sarah Palin's political action committee invokes the power of 'common-sense conservative women' as she urges 'mama grizzlies' to let the nation hear them roar," reports Newsmax.
This video is well-crafted, inspiring, and strong in its appeal to women to stand up and resist the Washington-centric attack upon their "cubs."
But something vital is underemphasized. Only one image in this video gets to the heart of what really is at stake politically in this moment in history. "Mama Grizzlies" offers only brief footage in which we see a woman holding a sign that reads: "Moms Opposed to Mandates! Unconstitutional!"
This neglect is unfortunate. For the Constitution (as written) is at the center of the struggle today and where we must stand politically and culturally for freedom against a voracious regime. Furthermore, if you examine history, you see that the liberating balance between "form and freedom" (as Francis Schaeffer would describe it) expressed in the Constitution is rather uncommon sense.
The mistake of extremists such as Obama and the Democrats, and the mistake of double-minded Republicans, is at the crucial point of turning away from the Founders' liberating Constitutional vision protecting an American republic declared independent on the basis of real and verifiable information about the Creator, humanity, and the origin and basis of unalienable rights. This vision-for-freedom includes our responsibilities as citizens "created equal" to hold elected officials accountable and keep government within its proper sphere so that freedom is not devoured by federal bureaucrats "here to help."
Yes, women should rise up, and are rising up, to protect their cubs. But on what basis are they to be motivated, and what content is true enough, and therefore strong enough, to carry them through the ups and downs of electoral politics, the ebb and flow of emotion, the rise and fall of energy to keep fighting the good fight?
Palin, at times, has provided the more complete solution -- that of common sense Constitutional conservatism -- so that what is "conserved" is not just "tradition," the past, "the way we did it before," and so on.
What especially needs to be "conserved" is the fire of revolution based on who we are in our enduring American identity as citizens of resistance and in our enduring human identity as creatures of resistance, both of which are expressed in the Declaration of Independence and in the U.S. Constitution.
Words matter. Even one word matters. Constitution is one of them. Words can be weapons of truth for freedom or tools of propaganda for manipulation and slavery.
If "mama grizzlies" want to protect their cubs from a devouring out-of-control federal government that will attack again and again, the best defense is to rise up with Constitution in hand. The Constitution, and the vision for which it stands, is death to government tyranny.
Go for the jugular, mama grizzlies. Show the kids how it's done.
Related
Palin Speaks in Asia: The Challenge for "Common-Sense Conservatism"
From Going Rogue to Going Constitutional
Columnist Michael Barone writes at Beltway Confidential:
I’m attending the Aspen Ideas Festival run by the Aspen Institute and the Atlantic Monthly in (where else?) Aspen, and I note that enthusiasm for Barack Obama and his administration seems to be conspicuously missing. Lloyd Grove has a pungent account in The Daily Beast titled "The Elite turn against Obama," based on speeches by Niall Ferguson and my former boss at U.S. News Mort Zuckerman on economic policy.
All of this turning away from Obama leads Barone to "wonder whether the Aspen Institute folks might have wanted to invite Sarah Palin, at least to ask her the question, 'How’s that hopey changey thing working for you?'"
Disturbing Behavior: "It is becoming increasingly clear that, when it comes to illegal immigration, the Obama Administration has a disturbingly cavalier approach to what the law requires," Kris Kobach writes at Human Events.
And then surround himself with wise and Godly advisers instead of unwise and "God-hating" appointees who don't seem to appreciate the cruelty and disaster that history knows as socialism, says Curtis Lovelace.
It's hard to enjoy the "blessings of liberty" if you are relationally and politically alienated from the One who gives the blessings.
. . . Different brothers from the same ideological mother?
How can this be? After all, the chief law enforcement officer of the United States assured the American people less than one week ago that our "southern border is more secure today than at any time in the past 20 years," notes IBD in "Shootout at El Paso City Hall."
But that was teleprompter happytalk disconnected from reality.
With each passing day, it becomes more and more clear: The Obama White House has become an impediment to the lives and liberties of Americans in Texas, not to mention in Arizona and in all the border States.
Weakness at the border is not unrelated to weakness in Washington. Physical violence spilling over from Mexico into our land is not unrelated to constitutional violence spilling over from Washington into our land.
The lesson seems clear: Americans who remember who they are as creatures of resistance in their national heritage and in our human identity must rise up to throw off the oppressor -- whether he be across the border in Mexico or across the border in D.C.
It's 120 days until election day Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2010.
Yesterday we celebrated our independence from an alien power imposing its will upon America. In this November we do so again. And there is no artificial timetable for withdrawal from the field of battle, Mr. Oppressor. Let freedom ring.
W. James Antle III writes at American Spectator:
A Constitution that means whatever the government says it means is not a living document. It is a dead letter. And the situational constitutionalism practiced by both parties, often with public approval, has helped kill it.
Related
Grounds to Reject Elena Kagan Nomination to Supreme Court
No Constitution, No Peace
Obama Stands With Tyrants
"We are not the extreme," says a South Carolina Tea Partier. "We are the voters."
Nice. But it misses the strategic point.
The strategic point is that what is "mainstream" and what is "extreme" is not decided by counting noses or by being a voter. Or a bunch of voters.
This question is decided by who stands in continuity with the definining mainstream of American dignity and liberty under God, as set forth in the Declaration and U.S. Constitution.
To the degree that a Lindsey Graham stands outside of that mainstream, to that degree he is an extremist.
In this sense you can wear a coat and tie, occupy high office, have a nice hair cut, speak in soft tones, count many noses in your support, and yet still be an extremist out of touch with who we are as Americans and out of touch with who we are as beings "created equal" and endowed by our Creator with "certain unalienable rights."
As C-SPAN viewing indicates, sometimes the most insidious extremists are decked out in Brooks Brothers suits.
Clueless in Washington: "The problem with the Tea Party," says Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, "I think it’s just unsustainable because they can never come up with a coherent vision for governing the country. It will die out."
Mr. Graham couldn't be more wrong. And if he wants to reconnect with the Declarational and Constitutional mainstream of American thought and liberty -- which is what the Tea Party is reaching for -- he might want to avail himself of "How the New Resistance Can Win the Culture War."
The big news in VPville is that police in Portland have re-opened the Al Gore sex case.
This is despite assurances and Latin footnotes from Mr. Gore and his lawyers, back in 2007, that the settled scientific consensus clearly states, as all enlightened people know, that the accusations of "that woman" massage therapist Molly Hagerty are "completely false" -- just as everyone knows today that Mr. Gore's claims about global warming are completely true.
Meanwhile, one wonders: How long will it be, should the facts of the case decide against Mr. Gore and the settled science regarding the "sex poodle's" possible pildipherings, before apologists from the Daily Kos, ACLU, and the Obama White House discover that behind it all stands the all-powerful, ever-present, and always-responsible figure of George Bush?
The needed scapegoat recipe is well established: If Bush hadn't messed up the world's air conditioning system, Al Gore would not have had to sacrifice his life and his wife to save the planet. And that cute little girl in the hotel would never have caught his eye.
The lesson for leftist organizers is clear: Police may be looking at Gore, but Bush should be on trial.
Hat tip: Beltway Confidential
"Unless freedom-loving people wake up now, their children will wake up to discover that they are living under Sharia law," writes Michael Youssef, founder of Church of the Apostles in Atlanta, Ga.
"I'm not going to pretend to a faith I don't feel," says Julia Gillard. But she has "great respect for religion," according to the UK Telegraph.
Three quick points:
1) Faith, at least "trust" placed in our Creator, is a matter of facts, not of feeling. The resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, for example, is not a feeling. It is either a fact of history or it is not. If it is a fact of history, a reasonable person acts in accordance with that fact; an unreasonable person does not.
2) If the prime minister does not "believe in God," why does she "respect religion"? If a particular "religious" truth claim is false (for example, an assertion that the Easter Bunny is God), why respect it? If a relgious assertion is false, one might hold respect for the misinformed "believer," but "religious" truth claims are the same as any other truth claim. Those which are true ought to be affirmed, and those which are not true ought not to be affirmed.
3) Finally, the epistemology of the Creator as set forth in the information given in the Biblical data rejects the concept that "faith" is merely a private experience in which people can pretty much "believe" whatever they want and feel good about it. That's not faith, it's nonsense. Biblical "faith" is not about a privatized a way of knowing but rather a fact-based way of trusting -- it's a decision of the whole person based on good and sufficient evidence (as Francis Schaeffer often said) that certain propositions about God, man, and the universe are true.
Gillard gets high marks for her lack of pretense. But based on what we have in this report in the Telegraph, what she rejects has little to do with real Christianity, for what she thinks she rejects is already equally rejected, and even more profoundly rejected, by Christianity itself.
The real thing -- holistic commitment based on knowable truth -- so that people might live lives of community with their Creator and fellow man -- has always been much more rigorous and reality oriented that what sometimes passes for "faith" these days.
As for me and my house of free-thinkers, we too have great respect -- for truth.
Related
"Religion Very Harmful to People," by Udo Middelmann
You see, folks, it's OK to learn the lessons of history, lest you repeat the failures of the past -- unless, of course, learning the lessons of the fascist past casts the actions of the Democrat present in a somewhat unfortunate light.
And so, don't you know, there are a couple of people in this country who, yet again, find fault with something Sarah Palin has said or done.
All of which means, according to Palin-haters, is that neither Sarah Palin nor anyone like her ought ever to be President of the United States, etc.
Or could it be that the column in question is too close for comfort?
File under "Secret Talks, Unilateral Action":
The Obama administration has been holding behind-the-scenes talks to determine whether the Department of Homeland Security can unilaterally grant legal status on a mass basis to illegal immigrants, a former Bush administration official who spoke with at least three people involved in those talks told FoxNews.com.
The Obama people will not "confirm or deny the claim," reports Fox News.
Meanwhile, consider: When it comes to "getting things done" in Washington, D.C., sometimes Congress, and to be honest, the U.S. Constitution, can be such a distraction. Oh, the frustrations of Chairman Obama. The work of imposing a community organizer's extremist agenda is never done.
"Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) promoted an article on Wednesday on his official Twitter account by a writer who backed his criticism of the government's handling of BP," reports The Hill.
Perhaps also of interest to Barton could be this: "Bless Joe Barton, Good-Bye GOP."
As information in this report from CNSNews.com reveals, the hapless White House occupant currently known as Barack Obama continues to impose his private, intolerant, and intellectually vapid morality upon a people created in the image of God and a society formed and founded upon the basis of liberating norms rooted in verifiable information from the Creator.
Fortunately, "We the People" have the unalienable right and responsibility from our true Creator to protect our families and therefore to remove from office any fool or screwball who says in his heart and expresses in his policy the anti-American "anti-value" that preaches the death of the God of the Founders and Declaration.
And by the way, that "We the People" includes you, Reverend. And if you're a mega-preacher hiding your lamp under a mega-pulpit in a mega-church, think of it this way: Love thy neighbor.
We are under extremist assault from within, America, by a president and an ethos that reject the Creator's glorious structural norms for family life, not to mention the other "blessings of liberty." Our only hope is to repel this internal assault upon the enduring American mainstream and to replace it with the only known and verified vision-for-freedom and dignity under God available to man.
The Obama regime is a manmade, self-imposed disaster of epic proportion. We need to get in there and clean it up.
Saving the family environment is an ongoing mandate commissioned by Heaven. Obama may not like it, but don't worry. He's just the hired help. He serves at our pleasure.
Deborah B. Sloan writes at American Thinker:
There is no greater injustice than punishment of a man for doing something good, and no more loathsome cowardice than when those responsible for defending good sacrifice their cause to accommodate an uncompromising evil. But this type of betrayal is not uncommon for the Republican leadership, and it happened again last week in Congress.
Thursday's House committee hearings with BP CEO Tony Hayward consisted mostly of the empty political grandstanding one would expect from this type of proceedings, characterized by Mark Levin as Soviet-style show trials.
There was an exception, however, when Representative Joe Barton spoke out against the Obama regime for extorting $20 billion from BP -- without due process -- to be distributed by an Obama appointee as compensation no only to Gulf residents harmed by the oil leak, but also those left unemployed by Obama's moratorium by fiat on all offshore drilling operations.
This was not to say that the Gulf residents shouldn't be compensated, but that the manner in which the funds were expropriated is reprehensible, and it is outrageous for the government to force a private corporation to finance a moratorium imposed by the president.
Update: See also, "Bless Joe Barton, Good-Bye GOP," published at The Pearcey Report.
Alex Pappas at The Daily Caller:
Is Nikki Haley’s primary run-off opponent in the South Carolina gubernatorial race subtly using her religious background to try to alienate the Indian-American candidate born with the name “Nimrata Randhawa” from conservative voters?
Her opponent, Rep. Gresham Barrett, has been vocal about his deep Christian faith. Haley -- although a baptized Methodist -- was raised by Sikh parents, but converted to Christianity when she was 24.
One well-known Republican in the state thinks so, noting that Barrett’s last campaign commercial was about his faith. “You’re running for governor, not pastor,” the Republican said dismissively of Barrett.
Phillip Bowers, co-chairman of Barrett’s campaign, circulated an e-mail Friday afternoon suggesting Haley has lied about her religion. “There are lots of contradictions to her story. It’s not my place to question her faith, but I do question her honesty. If anyone finds the truth, please let me know,” said Bowers, in an email obtained by The Daily Caller.
A few quick points:
1. There is nothing untoward in evaluating a person's religion. If religion is important to a candidate for office, and if religion influences a candidate, then it seems proper to ask questions about the religion of a candidate. Of course, the questions ought to be relevant and not just a matter of: "Oh, my, she has a different religion."
2. Saying someone is "running for governor, not pastor" is no excuse for not having to answer questions about one's religion. Presumably, one's religious views are held in good faith because one thinks them true and applicable to the real world. Otherwise, why bother? But if this is so, go ahead and answer questions that are relevant to the job for which your are applying, whether it be governor or dog catcher.
3. Not your place to "question her faith"? Nonsense. All "faiths" should be open to question and possible falsification, if you wish their application to the real world. These faiths include faith in science, government, education, various ideologies, political passions, wooly activism, and so on. And, of course, religion.
If you are a human being, you therefore question, for questioning is part of the equipment the Creator has endowed upon each of us to protect us from nonsense masquerading as true science, healthy politics, sound religion, and "I'm from Washington and I'm here to help."
"The Tea Party Express is targeting Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) in the Republican primary, backing Joe Miller, a lawyer from Fairbanks," Jason Pye writes at United Liberty.
Among Joe Miller's supporters: Sarah Palin.
. . . Trails his GOP opponent, notes the following at the American Spectator:
A new poll from the conservative Civitas Institute gives a snapshot of the political ramifications of U.S. Rep. Bob Etheridge’s roughhousing ways.
The survey of 400 registered North Carolina voters in Etheridge’s district found his Republican opponent, Renee Ellmers, leading 39 percent to 38 percent. Those are remarkable numbers given the dynamics of the district. Democrats outnumber Republicans two-to-one in voter registration, and Etheridge won re-election in 2008 by a hefty 67 percent.
That person would be Alvin Greene, the surprise winner in the "South Carolina Democratic senatorial primary."
. . . "To push" his "liberal agenda." Upshot: "More pain to bear" by the people.
Jonathan Strong at The Daily Caller lays out "five more ways Obama's healthcare law boosts unions."
In the so-called "America" Obama is trying to re-create in his image, it pays to have organized friends in high places.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. More at "Talk Is Cheap."
Bush. Just like a Louisiana congressman informed member of the formerly mainstream media Chris Matthews.
"Jerry Brown's campaign for California governor continues to suffer fallout from off-the-cuff comments he made to a radio reporter comparing Republican Meg Whitman's messaging to Nazi propaganda."
Apparently, abortion now is so cultish, so "personal" that scientific empirical information cannot be allowed to protect what is a Constitutional and Creator-given ethical fact of life: the unalienable right to life.
For comment, let us turn to Jim Morrison, The Doors, Riders on the Storm:
If you give this man a ride, Sweet family will die
Shame on Charlie Crist, enabler of raw fascist, state-delegated power, a barbarian looking for a home in the U.S. Senate. This isn't "personal," it's fascist.
Dignified and informed voters of Florida, created in the image of God, might want to know come November: "If you give this man a ride, Sweet family will die."
. . . "When the problems go away."
Geert Wilders' "Freedom Party nearly tripled its representation in the Dutch parliament in Wednesday's elections," reports the UK Telegraph.
It's now 16-plus months into the reign of Barack Hussein Obama, and the topic of conversation among one writer's "friends and associates in London" concerns Obama's "incompetence and narcissism, and the danger he poses to the United States and its allies in Europe."
In a Newsmax report on how the "Palin Factor Was Crucial to GOP Victories" of yesterday, political strategist Ed Gillespie holds forth:
She’s got a lot of common sense. She connects with people’s everyday concerns about the direction of our government, the state of our economy, and the nature of our society today. She’s willing to shake things up. She’s willing to take a stand.
I think she is misunderstood by much of the media and political elite -- and well understood by rank-and-file voters.
Why? La Shawn Barber at Michelle Malkin's website notes that the current Fla. guv and U.S. Senate candidate has to decide -- this week -- whether to sign a bill that requires 1st-trimester pregnant women in Florida to view an ultrasound of their child, or hear a description of such a child, before they decide to go ahead and kill that thing.
Exceptions are allowed for "rape, incest, or domestic violence" -- circumstances of conception that babies generally are not able to control and therefore, one might think, fairness and justice suggest they not suffer the inordinate penalty of capital punishment by dismemberment or other ACLU-approved methods of social justice.
Killing people because of the circumstances of their conception sounds a lot like class warfare, doesn't it? And the "little guy" in the oppressed class seems to be getting the short end of the stick.
Instead of "suffer the little children to come unto me" (Mk 10:14), it's "suffer the little children."
In any case, Crist has a senate election to win against pro-life GOPer Marco Rubio. Does a guilty conscience bleed when it dreams?
. . . at liberal gabfest.
"Ignoring the facts is one of the liberals' favorite tactics, because their agenda is not motivated by any facts at all," writes Herman Cain at WorldNetDaily. "Their agenda is totally politically motivated for the purpose of concentrating more power to government rather than the people."
Or put it this way: Operationally speaking, liberalism has "escaped from reason," to borrow a phrase made famous by thinker Francis Schaeffer (see his book Escape From Reason; for a fuller treatment, see Nancy Pearcey's Total Truth).
That is to say, liberalism in both its tactics and philosophical approach has become a political "faith" in the poor sense (and unbiblical sense) of the word faith (for a corrective, go here).
Instead of liberating people to "test everything" -- which is part of the Creator's inbuilt protection against religious, scientific, and political snakeoil -- liberalism instead pushes its "religious" agenda against fact per se and pounds the pulpit with greater ferocity when inconvenient facts raise their challenging heads.
True believers and stubborn sceptics are therefore supposed to click their heels and salute "settled science," turn tail and run in fear from unsubstantiated charges of "racism!," and genuflect before the new and improved manmade "civil right" consensus of the week, so that transgendered lesbian ablinoes can visit their inter-species canine spouses while sick in a San Fran hospital for kitty kats.
In contrast stands the reasonableness, wholeness, facticity, and humanity of the Founding worldview, rooted in verifiable information from a real and knowable Creator who gives the blessings of liberty and inalienable rights so that any person and nation who acts upon that information can experience excellence and exceptionalism even in this less than perfect world.
It's amazing what human beings can accomplish when they read the directions.
With an eye on that big party tent permanently parked at the Obama White House, even as din of desperation and disaster from the Gulf of Mexico occasionally interrupts yet another evening's song and dance with the stars, Stuart Schwartz at American Thinker suggests Barack Obama is simply doing what the Prince of Chicago is known for doing best, baby: party, party, party.
Lloyd Marcus of the Tea Party Express offers up "Prepare for war" Malik Zulu Shabazz, chairman of the New Black Panther Party, as a case in point.
Michelle Oddis writes at Human Events:
At a time when President Obama’s relationship with the military is already on shaky ground, his decision to take a vacation with his family in Chicago rather than pay his Memorial Day respects at Arlington National Cemetery further proves his apathy toward our armed forces, according to some veterans.
"The President seems to demonstrate almost weekly just how, at least to me, little he cares about this country and our history and our heritage," retired Marine Lt. Col. Orson Swindle told HUMAN EVENTS.
"He seems almost to resent it, which is the most mind-boggling thing in the world, because without a country like America Barack Obama could not be President. He seems to dislike our institutions . . . and that’s a sad, sad thing," said Swindle, a decorated Vietnam prisoner of war and Sen. John McCain’s cellmate in Hanoi.
AP reports:
Forced to disclose backstage political bargaining, President Barack Obama's embarrassed White House said on Friday it had enlisted Bill Clinton to try to ease Rep. Joe Sestak out of Pennsylvania's Senate primary with a job offer.
Nothing wrong with that, the White House said. Oh, yes, there was, Republicans countered.
At Newsmax:
Kneeling to pick up tar balls on an oil-fouled beach and listening to "heartbreaking stories" of loss, President Barack Obama personally confronted the spreading damage wrought by the crude gushing into the Gulf of Mexico -- and the bitter anger that's rising onshore. . . .
Early in the morning in advance of the president's arrival, hundreds of workers clad in white jumpsuits and rubber gloves hit the beaches to dig oily debris from the sand and haul it off. Workers refused to say who hired them, telling a reporter they were told to keep quiet or lose their jobs.
"I think that I have the mainstream record,” said Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Sharron Angle, who is "running in a tough GOP primary to take on Democratic Sen. Harry Reid," reports The Daily Caller.
The most important "mainstream," of course, is not merely that of where the current majority of any particular group of people stand, be they Americans, Germans, Italians, or Russians, and so on. As history shows, some "majorities" and some "mainstreams" are toxic and not worthy of human consumption.
For the question of freedom over against tyranny, so well framed by author and radio talk show host Mark Levin, the crucial point is whether one's politics reside within the defining and liberating center of the American mainstream -- that is, within the vision-for-freedom as set forth in the Declaration of Independence (as written, not merely "living") and in the U.S. Constitution (again, as written, and not merely "living").
It is in this sense that the Tea Party phenomenon, as an expression of a New American Resistance, may be part of a movement that "can win the culture war" against the forces of secularism, oppression, and indignity.
Any senatorial candidate, therefore, who affirms in philosophy, principle, politics, and practice the historic and defining American mainstream merits serious consideration.
On this view, an extremist such as Sen. Harry Reid would need to find a new day job. The sooner the better.
A GOP candidate "in rural Idaho faced an eve-of-election accusation of plagiarising a famous speech by his ideological foe President Barack Obama," reports the UK Telegraph.
These kinds of unethical practices, if true, damage Vaughn Ward as a political figure, and they harm those who, like Sarah Palin, have supported him.
You might say midterm House Democrat freshmen are running for their political lives -- away from El Presidente Obama, according to a report at Newsmax.
England football star David Beckham said "he was 'humbled' by the bravery of British troops on a surprise visit to Afghanistan," reports the UK Telegraph.
According to the Telegraph, Beckham said:
"I have nothing but admiration for these young men and women and it makes me very proud to be British.
"I've wanted to visit Afghanistan for a long time and I hope that in some small way it helps remind everyone at home what an amazing job they are doing out here in very difficult conditions. I feel very humble."
His comments, and a photo of him testing a heavy machine gun, place him in stark contrast to "Hanoi Jane" Fonda, who was photographed posing happily on a Communist anti-aircraft gun used to down U.S. pilots during the Vietnam War.
Here is a YouTube video explaining in strong language how avowed socialist Jane Fonda earned the name, and may be forever remembered in history as, Hanoi Jane.
Barack's strategery? "Ride the wave of anti-incumbency," writes Carol Lee at Politico.
Before Obama & Co. head very far down that road, they may want to avail themselves of Larry Elder's "It's Not 'Anti-Incumbency,' But 'Anti-Liberalism'."
The AP quotes Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs: "I have not heard anything from the [White House] political shop that would lead me to believe anything other than our continued support."
Furthermore, writes Larry Elder in a column on the recent elections, Newsweek may spout, "We're all socialists now," but American voters say, "No . . . . We are not."
"As Mexican President Felipe Calderon ripped Arizona's new law clamping down on illegal immigrants in front of Congress on Thursday, Democrats and White House officials rose to their feet to cheer," according to a report at FoxNews.com.
Among those reportedly applauding the president of Mexico were "Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Janet Napolitano -- two officials who have confessed to not even reading the law."
It is of little surprise that this performance "isn't sitting well with officials from states along the border."
It seems that dashing self-described Vietnam war veteran Richard Blumenthal (otherwise known as the attorney general of Connecticut) "may have helped organize a Toys for Tots drive as a member of the Marine Corps Reserve, according to the New York Times," writes George Neumayr at American Spectator.
"This task, among other stateside ones, became in Blumenthal's telling over the years 'service in Vietnam.' He says now that he simply misspoke -- that he meant to say he served 'during' the Vietnam war, not 'in' the Vietnam war."
"Oops!"
Said the lawyer.
After being presented with the videotape.
A friend of mine once asked whether a certain famous household name would "lie through his teeth" about a certain matter -- the pretended authorship of a book that would help his PR image as a great Christian intellect, for example.
Well, given the design of the human body, there really isn't much of an alternative. One could try smoke signals, I suppose. But this may upset the rhythm of an awards dinner, religious conference, or Capitol Hill press event.
The physiological fact is that most lying requires a "lying through one's teeth." And sometimes, unfortunately, a bigger audience and a bigger lie make for a more effective "lying through one's teeth."
This technique is not quite a trade secret known to assorted conmen in politics, science, religion, journalism, and bus terminals.
In fact, the next time you want to see that kind of practice on display, simply watch a member of the federal government swear allegiance to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution. No one is saying everyone who takes the oath these days is lying, but one might not be in the wrong to conclude that the truth-tellers in this instance are in the minority.
What's the answer?
For a good start, try this: "Test everything." That is, practice a healthy and humane skepticism rooted in truth about who we are as imperfect creatures (by choice) nevertheless striving for wholeness and perfection because we are, after all, still created in the image of God.
We are broken, yes, but not destroyed. Marred, yes, but not pieces of junk to discard.
And so, in politics, religion, ministry, science, schooling, and car sales: Test everything. Examine what is said and what is done. Do not accept anything "on faith" -- that is, on the basis of that weakened, nonbiblical concept of "faith" acceptable to the ACLU and privatized religious circles today. Instead, maintain your critical distance and follow the evidence wherever it leads.
Testing everything is essential to who you are as a human being, created in the image of God -- a God, by the way, who is a verifiable public figure who puts a premium on human brain power and freedom of thought.
And so also, a proper critical distance is essential to living freely and with dignity in what is now a broken world. As you may have noticed, it is a world full of imperfect people, some of whom want to control every aspect of your lives and don't mind applying requisite doses of propaganda, violence, and oppression to get the job done.
By way of contrast, in their Judeo-Christian realism, rooted in history, the Founders understood the fallibility of man. And certainly we should understand that nothing magical happens just because a guy or gal with a smile, honest eyes, and a great handshake occupies the White House, sits on Capitol Hill, stands behind a pulpit, carries a Ph.D. around, wears a white coat, or has "written" 27 books.
"Test everything" won't guarantee perfection in an imperfect world, but it will open the door to what thinker Francis Schaeffer called "substantial healing" in our daily lives, including our political lives.
In the struggle against those who "lie through their teeth" to advance their agendas, a critical distance that leads to substantial healing in human freedom beats magical thinking every time.
It's one of the "blessings of liberty" from the One who gives the blessings that the federal government does not have and, therefore, can never ever give. This is one way you know, for all of the pie-in-the-sky promises of a secular Heaven on earth of "equality," the government is not God and nobody's Savior.
One could say or suggest otherwise, but that would be to lie through one's teeth.
"The Pentagon’s 'Don't ask, don't tell' policy will be nothing but a memory by year's end, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) declared Wednesday," reports The Hill.
Roll the Videotape: In this Fox News interview, we learn that Assistant Secretary of State Philip Crowley joins Obama administration standouts Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano in criticizing the Arizona immigration law that they have not read (or reviewed "in detail," as Napolitano nuances it).
"What's going on here?" asks the Fox interviewer.
Indeed, what is going on? How would you describe the Obama administration?
a) Amateur Hour -- Think, keystone politicians
b) Ideology Hour -- That is, an aggressive political machine devoted to imposing its message instead of serving the American people on the basis of the rule of law (as written, and read). Let us be clear: Taking time to read the "misguided" Arizona immigration law simply distracts Obama's lockstep army from the political need of the moment to push America in whatever direction demanded by their great leader.
c) Radical Hour -- That is, an extremist movement demonstrating what it means to live under a "living" Constitution with "living" law, rejecting the defining and enduring American mainstream as set forth by the Declaration (as written) and U.S. Constitution (as written), and replacing the good rules for freedom with the bad rules for statism, secularism, and enslavement to greed, power, and control snarling out of Washington, D.C.
The choice for Americans who prefer freedom and dignity over against unfreedom and indignity becomes clearer not just with each passing day, but with each passing interview with members of this sad joke of an arbitrary and dangerous regime currently occupying the White House.
The November elections are beginning to look more and more like D-Day, June 6, 1944 -- a days of days when Allied forces hit the beaches to begin liberating a continent from the bootheel of oppression and darkness.
What's more important, asks Lloyd Marcus, the color of your skin, the color of Obama's skin, or your commitment to Christ?
That's the word from CBS's Bob Schieffer, of the formerly mainstream media.
This cartoon by Michael Ramirez spotlights why the services of the attorney general of the United States are no longer required and Mr. Eric Holder has "got to go."
It would be nice to have government in Washington that read, respected, and obeyed the laws of this land, as written -- beginning with, let us say, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.
This is what good public servants are supposed to do.
Bad public servants, however, have not the time for such trifling. Bad public servants view the Declaration and Constitution as distractions.
This is why not only Mr. Holder but also the entire unconstitutional Obama regime has got to go.
The American people must uproot this regressive weed and replace it with the Tree of Liberty once again planted in the soil of freedom.
In "Mystery of Barack Obama Continues," Steve Baldwin writes at the Western Center for Journalism:
Everywhere one looks into Obama’s background, we find sealed records, scrubbed websites, altered documents, deception and unanswered questions.
Can anyone imagine for a second if John McCain or George Bush had blocked access to his school, medical, and birth records? It would have been headlines but as with everything else concerning Obama, the media has given him a pass on this.
Of all these marvels, the latest mystery and probably most perplexing is that of Obama’s social security number. It appears that Obama has multiple identities in term of possessing numerous social security numbers. . . .
All told, there are 49 addresses and 16 different Social Security numbers listed for a person whose name is spelled “Barack Obama.” In some cases, the middle initial “H” is listed.
If you were to expand the search to include closely related names such as: “Barac,” “Barak,” and “Barrack” Obama, you would find more than a dozen additional addresses and Social Security numbers. . . .
[T]he one Social Security number Obama most frequently used, the one beginning with 042, is a number issued in Connecticut sometime during 1976-1977, yet there is no record of Obama ever living or working in Connecticut. Indeed, during this time period Obama would have been 15-16 years old and living in Hawaii at the time.
Hat Tip: Lynn Campbell
"The Rev. Franklin Graham, who last month was officially 'dis-invited' by the Army to speak at a National Day of Prayer ceremony at the Pentagon for statements he made about Islam, said he will not back down in preaching the Gospel as he sees it," reports CNSNews.com.
"'We’re living in a time where we cannot compromise, we cannot back up, we cannot retreat,' Graham said Wednesday during a live Webcast from the Washington, D.C. offices of the Family Research Council," according to CNSNews.
Related
Prayer at the Pentagon
Franklin Graham: Obama "Giving Islam a Pass," Warns of Persecution
"The question has to be asked, now that a second YouTube video has surfaced in which Michelle Obama refers to her husband as 'a Kenyan'," writes Thomas Lifson at American Thinker.
"Virgil Goode has joined the Constitution Party," writes W. James Antle III at American Spectator.
Obama's moral relativism, says Star Parker, places him at odds with the "whole unique idea of American government." And it leads to a "political arbitrariness in which our lives and property are up for grabs."
Venerating even the great Ronald Reagan will not fix what ails America, argues John W. Truslow III at American Thinker, because the "current political structure is broken." And "if the construction of the political system remains the same, then the outputs of that system will remain the same."
Therefore, Truslow writes, fixing what's broken requires more than a "three-part preoccupation with establishing a permanent majority, the cult of personality (including the veneration of President Reagan), and dubious tactics to secure required ends."
This preoccupation, he writes, "is a postmodern perversion of conservatism," and it distracts "from the core values that make conservatives critical to the sustainability of society."
"The latest wobbler is Rep. Mike Castle of Delaware," writes W. James Antle III at American Spectator, who is joining "fellow Republican wobbler Mark Kirk" to run for the Senate.
Democrat Rep. Barney Frank may not run again, according to radio talk show host Laura Ingraham.
Speaking on her show moments ago, Ingraham says the word from a source deep in local Massachusetts politics is that Frank is eyeing retirement from office and is seeking a position at a bank.
Democratic Congressman Bart Stupak of Michigan tells The Associated Press he'll retire from Congress rather than seek a 10th term this year.
Stupak has drawn stinging criticism from opponents of the recently enacted health care overhaul after leading a bloc of anti-abortion Democrats whose last-minute support was crucial to its approval by the House.
In "Republicans Against Repeal," W. James Antle, III, writes at American Spectator:
Well, that didn't take long. After Democratic supermajorities rammed through their health care bill, Republicans were full of sound and fury about how this injustice will not stand. Even John McCain was on board, telling a television interviewer, "Outside the Beltway the American people are very angry and they don't like it and we are going to try to repeal this."
But in the GOP, cooler heads always prevail. What these Republican heads want to cool down is the campaign to repeal the health care takeover. Reports the Associated Press: "Top Republicans are increasingly worried that GOP candidates this fall might be burned by a fire that's roaring through the conservative base: demand for the repeal of President Barack Obama's new health care law."
Among those top Republicans are Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who "initially unfurled the 'repeal and replace' banner, only to quickly make an exception for the 'non-controversial stuff'," and "was later seen pouring cold water on the idea entirely."
Mr. Cornyn, anything in Obamacare not authorized by the U.S. Constitution is wielded by the hand of tyranny and is by definition controversial.
Then there's the defeatist remark of Sen. Bob Corker of Tenn.: "It's just not going to happen."
Mr. Corker, repeal and replace is "not going happen" only if people such as you volunteer to surrender to the forces of imposition and unfreedom. If you listen to America per se, you will learn what what's "not going to happen" is preemptive surrender to Washington-centric tyranny.
And don't forget former braveheart Rep. Mark Kirk, "who bravely vowed to 'lead the effort' to repeal the bill. Now he glumly tells a local newspaper, 'Well, we lost'."
Mr. Kirk, there's a difference between "we lost," and being a loser. Buck up, man. Get in the fight. Or else go find a pasture and nibble on federally supplied grass for the rest of your life.
This is why a movement such as the Tea Party -- the "New Resistance" -- must prevail over the impractical "pragmatic" philosophy of those, including "top Republicans," who seem inadequately committed to the rules for freedom, as expressed in the Declaration and Constitution.
"What the New Resistance senses is that neither the single-minded secularism of the Democrats nor the double-minded imbalance of the Republicans is an adequate foundation for freedom, whether we are talking about July 1776, March 2010 or 100 years from now," I wrote in "How the New Resistance Can Win the Culture War."
For the Republican Party, this hour is another "Time for Choosing."
America today is faced with a threat to her existence that is perhaps more significant than any external attack by military forces from abroad since our Founding, including the devastation of Pearl Harbor and the cruel terror of 9/11.
In this our time of choosing, the GOP must either embrace the vision-for-freedom that energizes the enduring American mainstream, or not be surprized that freedom-loving Americans do not follow you over the cliff into oblivion, Kool-Aid land, disintegration, and the wrong side of human freedom and dignity under God.
My hope is that Republicans wake up to reaffirm who they are in their national identity and who they are in their human identity: Human beings created to resist evil, to fight for good, to demand justice, and to live exceptionally whole lives against any tyranny upon the mind and body and life of man.
And after Republicans wake up, they can share with Democrats the wisdom of not jumping off the cliff.
"Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s home state of Nevada is expected today to join 15 other states that have filed suit to challenge the constitutionality of Obamacare," writes Connie Hair at Human Events.
Easter Sunday marks the "day Christians believe Jesus Christ was resurrected from the dead, and 78 percent of Americans share that belief," according to a new Rasmussen poll, as reported by Newsmax yesterday.
This is positive news, but perhaps not entirely so. Because "belief" today is a very weak sister of the concrete and wholistic spiritual strength required of the human being at all times, but especially so in a day such as ours, so harmed by the impact of secularism upon the modern world.
Note: The information we have from eyewitnesses is that the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is not a matter of private faith but of public fact. It is based on empirical evidence, not on private hopes and dreams. And it is part of a public orientation that has positive and humane implications for all of life, including media, science, politics, creativity, and fulfilling personal relationships.
Merely private hopes and dreams belong to pie-in-the-sky secularists such as Barack Obama, who is running around the country using emotionalism and sales gimmicks to sell (or otherwise impose) the old-time religion of socialist political mythology to the American people. Free-thinkers "red and yellow, black and white" -- all of them created in the image of God -- demand evidence and are willing to follow the evidence wherever it might lead. Even if Marx, Engels, Rev. Wright, and Preacher Obama are offended.
In stark contrast to cults of politics is the realism of the information we have from eyewitnesses of the empirically empty tomb and the empiricaly available Man from Nazareth who was alive at point A, dead as a doornail at point B, and alive again at point C. None of this is a matter of the privatized, nonbiblical, and inhumane concept of "faith" expected so much in politics, in extremist religion, and in other expressions of the secular kneejerk believism so prevalent in big city anti-existence today.
The fact of the empirical resurrection in space and time challenges every mere belief system, no matter how large its mailing list -- or how mighty the star power of its A-List celebrity lineup. That kind of fact is superior to groundless religiousity which neverthess is an effective tool politicians employ to win friends, manipulate enemies, "heal" nations, and overthrow governments.
If 78% of Americans ever affirm and live by the resurrection as the fact of history that it is, the various regimes of pretend messiahs setting up shop in Washington, D.C., will be done with. There is but one fact-based risen Messiah, and despite what extremist fundraising letters and formerly mainstream media outlets tell you, he does not live in the White House. A manger in Bethlehem is more his style, and besides, the White House is too small in spirit.
Life lived in community with God and neighbor has little use for the merely religious, for the hardshell secularist afraid to let the faithful think for themselves outside the peer-approved political box, or for other pretenders walking to and fro, seeking whom they might devour in our moment of history.
That's what the real Resurrection is all about: The space-time facticity of life after death. Something physically shocking yet biologically reasonable as an effect the Creator and originator of life would be able to pull off because he has the power of animating being within himself.
This scandalizes the dogma of the secularist, who when not imposing his private religion upon society is counting the number of atoms dancing atop the tip of meaninglessness. Better to grab ahold of the empirically verifiable Nazarene alive from the dead, if you too would live free and think whole.
Related
Christmas Spirit in the Dirt
How the New Resistance Can Win the Culture War
Dan Weil writes at Newsmax:
Rush Limbaugh is striking back at President Barack Obama.
On Friday, the nation's top-rated radio host hit back at Obama, saying the president isn’t telling the truth and doesn't have the support of the American people.
The controversy started Thursday, when Obama used an interview with CBS' Harry Smith to level a broadside at Limbaugh and Fox News host Glenn Beck.Smith asked Obama if he is “aware of the level of enmity that crosses the airwaves and that people have made part of their daily conversation" about him, including being called a Nazi and socialist.
Obama shot back, "Well, I think that when you listen to Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, it's pretty apparent, and it's troublesome, but keep in mind that there have been periods in American history where this kind of vitriol comes out."
Timing Is Everything: Anybody noticing that "incivility" news has suddenly racheted up lately, just in time to change the subject away from Obamacare tyranny?
How would you answer the question below?
The most pernicious anti-Americanism today originates in which of the following?
a) Ahmadinejad's Iran
b) Chavez's Venezuela
c) Obama's White House
Jeannie DeAngelis observes at American Thinker that Barack Obama in seeking the presidency "disguised" himself as a "herald of unanimity," but the man in the flesh in office reveals himself as a despiser of resistance to his agenda to "fundamentally transform" America.
Obama ascended to office upon a pledge to "enforce a new tone in politics," DeAngelis writes, but "the president instead infused life into the political arena with unprecedented cynicism and unmatched condescension."
DeAngelis concludes, "The president of the 'United' States has instigated a new level of partisansip and breathed dissension into a political fight poised to extend far beyond the arena where blood sport was once safely confined."
Lesson of the day: Obama comes not to heal, but to conquer. He has to, for his worldview is in essential alienation from that of the mainstream mission statement of the United States as set forth in the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution, which Obama has taken an oath to uphold.
Talk of bi-partisanship and healing is pleasant. But it is a distraction from what truly animates this politician and is a diversion from understanding the fundamentally un-American, inhumane, and unfree direction in which he is trying to force our nation to follow, against the Constitution, against the presidential oath of office, and against the consent of "We the People."
America per se resists this alien imposition, and no one should be suprised that this resistance Obama "the healer" hates. Talk of bipartisanship and healing is the hype that lets the enemy inside the gates.
"The week after passing landmark healthcare reform and handing President Barack Obama an important victory, members of the U.S. Congress returned to their home districts for a recess to face constituents and justify their votes after the bruising legislative battle," reports Reuters.
"While Obama made flying visits across the country to tout the new legislation," the Reuters story continues, "a number of key Democrats, who led the charge for healthcare reform, seemed to keep a low profile and are doing little to beat the drum."
Secularized liberal theologians such as Obama's "Red" Rev. Jim Wallis not only misread the Bible, they don't need it.
Except perhaps as a book of emotional "value symbols" to be mined, proof-texted, and manipulated to baptise the political agendas of Marx, Alinsky, and Obama.
Just like liberal ideological corruption does with the "living" U.S. Constitution.
In contrast to verifiable and wholistic information from the real Creator, theirs is a secularized, bifurcated religiousity of snake oil bottled as "social justice."
It finds a home in what Francis Schaeffer described as the "upper story," a construct of human consciousness where "faith" and meaning are affirmed but blindly so, because they are alienated from facts, reason, and history (the "lower story").
Secularists -- religious or otherwise -- locked up inside the "upper story" are therefore estranged from experiencing the unitary wholeness of what it means to be an integrated human being. Perhaps this is one reason they are so frustrated by life.
There are well-meaning people, some of them very bright, who end up situated in the "upper story" inadvertantly. But it is also a home to sneering fanatics and ideologues in media, government, politics, and Hollywood -- the opiate of pseudo-intellectuals at war with "nature and nature's God."
Both classes of people must be loved. But in addition to love, the second class of people must also be resisted. For they are dangerous.
Religious fantacism combined with political fanaticism sometimes does not end well.
Related
Christmas Spirit in the Dirt
How the New Resistance Can Win the Culture War
As Obamacare "reform" demonstrates, the Obama government is on the wrong side of the facts, reason, the Declaration, and the Constitution.
This suggests a few basic questions:
* Why give this White House and its enablers the benefit of the doubt?
* Why give it and its enablers any credibility whatsoever?
* Why assume that it and its enablers are dealing with the American people in a way that is honest and straightforward on a whole host of issues -- from the Tea Party to abortion to taxes to national defense?
These questions go to the heart of living free for any people who would keep government in its place as a public servant instead of out of place a public enemy.
By its own behavior, by its own incendiary rhetoric, by its own policies, by its own philosophy of control, by its own hatred of things Constitutional and Declarational -- the Obama administration dares the American people to rise up, resist, improvise, and overcome.
The history of the world is replete with evidence for why "We the People" people should not place our faith in "It the Government." Especially in government that sets itself up as deity, as an idol to which we are now forced, by arbitrary "law" -- just like the U.S. Constitution does not say -- to bring our tithes and offerings and taxes and sweat and children.
This idol, we are told, loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.
It promises milk and honey.
All you have to do is fall down and worship.
All you have to do is prostitute your time, sacrifice your humanity, and sell your soul. And by the way, signing away the future of your children to feed government greed here and now is also part of the deal.
In return, all power is yours. In return, all ability to transform, redeem, equalize, and heal America is yours. Finally, you can be proud. You can be as God.
Yes. We can refuse. And face fines. And face jail time. And who knows what we shall face in the future if we anger this capricious idol and its cult of followers?
The house of Obama is a fundamentally dishonest regime that has broken faith with the American people in our national identity and in our human identity.
But what if Obama is sincere? Then he embraces the policies of a fool. If he is not sincere, he expresses the philosophy of a tryant.
Meanwhile, we live as aliens in a strange land, as partisans for liberty in occupied territory.
Surely, there is a better way than government on high. A way not at war with the freedom and dignity of man created in the image of God.
The realism of the Founders helped them understand the difference between trusting in God, a Creator who gives the blessings of liberty, and trusting in government, a creature which takes them away.
The result? A City on a Hill.
Perfection? Far from it.
And yet still: A City on a Hill. With the people of the world drawn to her gates, clamoring to get inside.
If in this generation we forget that lesson of freedom in history, we can forget seeing freedom in the the history of the next.
Surely, there is a better way.
Speaking of militas, is it not rather suspicious that both Rush and Mark were away from their microphones during the timeframe of the raid on that militia group with suspected members in Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio? MSNBC might want to know.
And why the media blackout on the possible connections between Levin and Limbaugh and these militia groups? Very suspicious. All the writers at Huffington Post might like to know.
There is, of course, an eerie lack of evidence regarding any such connections (or regarding incendiary spitting on tyrannical Congressmen, for that matter, but that's a different line of linguistic smear), so clearly Congress must investigate. Comrade Waxman and Marxine Waters stand ready to speak truth to powerlessness.
Meanwhile, Christian Sarah Palin has some explaining to do. All too soon after her incendiary post on her Facebook page, and then her Tea Party talk in Nevada about freedom -- right in Harry Reid's backyard (talk about a provocation! He's a senator!) -- news emerges that a mere 2,000 or so miles away, the FBI stopped wild-eyed militia hillbillies "preparing for battle with the anti-Christ" just in the nick of time.
With drama like this, we may not miss "24." And clearly, more importantly, with all this dot-connecting, we know exactly who the bad guys are.
"Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin had some harsh words for her detractors in the health care debate with a thinly veiled, March Madness-themed Facebook post in which she declared, 'never retreat, instead RELOAD!'" reports Newsmax.
And, of course, the usual suspects are in a tizzy. And right on schedule. Day in and day out.
Here's what's really happening: Democrats and mediacrats are doing their best to shut up, demonize, and destroy this strong American woman. And, by implication, to shut up the millions upon millions of freedom-loving Americans that her refusal to bow before the enfeebling Washington-centric status quo represents. And also, by implication, to destroy ("transform") that "vision-for-freedom" that her great refusal to submit to this gang of bullies also represents.
She's effective, she's not backing down, and she affirms the fundamentals of American freedom as enshrined in the Declaration and Constitution. And we can't have that!
These Palin-haters despise real freedom -- rooted in a Creator who gives the "blessings of liberty" -- but they cannot, at this time, actually come out and say so. Not because they don't believe the collectivist gospel and and have drunk deeply from the socialist Kool-Aid, but because the American public alerted to the real designs of these tyrants would rise up to throw the horse and rider into the sea.
But yes, this expressed concern about hate, about "ugly politics," and about "incendiary rhetoric" is utter hypocrisy.
But it's worse than that: The "masters" of media and Washington couldn't care less about a matter so trifling as "hypocrisy" or "double standards." That's the old, defeatist way of thinking. These radicals have evolved!
What we're really seeing in attacks on Palin, the Tea Party, and so on, is a consistent strategy of oppression, of which charges of "ugliness," "hate," and "incendiary rhetoric" are but tools to impose a "transformed," radicalized dark will-to-power upon the people of the United States.
These tools are wielded as weapons in an attempt to get you and me and our families to play by the rules of radicals who prefer a cakewalk to imposing control over our lives rather than face public exposure and opposition for their anti-American and inhumane march through our country.
And speaking of hate, I would reiterate what I've said on Facebook and Twitter: "Notice that so much of what Obama says and does is an expression of hatred for the Declaration and Constitution."
And speaking of ugly, he mars and scars the Constitution. And speaking of incendiary, he sets the Declaration to flames.
And oh how he sneers and scolds when the people resist the destruction of liberty. My, how silly we are, clinging to our Constitution and Declaration, clinging to our freedom and to "nature and nature's God."
But it's not just Obama, it's also his co-abusers and his co-enforcers in injustice in Hollywood, media, the academy, and so-called "social justice" religionists. For these too, so much of what they say and do is an expression of hatred for the Declaration and Constitution.
This you tyrants should know: Sarah Palin's crossover dribble is the least of your worries. Team America is taking the floor.
Obama and the Democrats have already shown they are willing to kill others as part of their agenda -- that is a real-world lesson of abortion in America. In many respects, what hinders them is not morality, but fear of a political and moral backlash.
If these Jacobin ideologues of inhumanity are willing to kill "the least of these" (which itself has been justified by a decades-long propaganda campaign), it is wise to consider that even more propaganda, and as much violence as they think they can get away with in the present social climate, is a real possibility.
Just because these folks are in government, wear suits and ties, and are surrounded by the pomp of office, it does not necessarily follow that they are good people, sincere people.
But note, even sincere people can be co-opted by evil. And if you are going to co-opt freedom, it's very important to appear sincere.
As a matter of principle, freedom-minded people should question authority and question those in authority, no matter who they are.
Neither trust in God nor trust in government is meant to be a blind leap into the dark. That's for cults, whether political, religious, or scientific.
"Test everything," one the other hand, is utterly Biblical, humane, and central to who we are as Americans and as human beings. It is one of the blessings and responsibilities of liberty called for by the Creator.
Related
"Ugly Turn" in Healthcare Debate
The Evil Religious Presidents Do
How the New Resistance Can Win the Culture War
"A new survey shows a political 'maelstrom' brewing in the U.S. that threatens not only Democrats in power but Republicans who have the tag 'incumbent' attached to their name," reports WorldNetDaily.
Not only must the "bums" be thrown out of office, but more importantly, the unconstitutional and anti-Declarational philosophy of the bums must be thrown out with them as well.
These must be replaced by people of tested character who do not just reject the "rules for radicals" but who also self-consciously affirm the rules of freedom and the liberating "vision-for-freedom" that grounds the American Experiment, as set forth in the founding documents and in the founding worldview.
The following is from a column published today at WorldNetDaily:
Despite what has been reported in the formerly mainstream media, the New Resistance in America – the tea parties, the town halls, protests on Capitol Hill and so on – is to be welcomed and not cast aside as "extreme." The "angry mobs" and "unruly crowds" are actually signs of health, sanity and hope.
What these uppity folk are telling us is that, despite years of miseducation and inattention, millions of ordinary people have not forgotten who they are as Americans. Even more, this resistance suggests that significant numbers of Americans may be on a path to rediscovering something rather exceptional.
By "exceptional" is meant not just who they are in their national identity, but who they are as creatures of resistance, hardwired that way by the Creator himself. And to the degree that this New Resistance succeeds, to that degree prospects are increased for victory in the cultural and political war for human freedom and human dignity.
This column is based on a presentation I gave near Charleston, S.C., at Awakening 2010 earlier this year, edited here for publication.
* March 27, 2010, Update: For related content from November 2009, please see "What Is Mainstream America?"
From CNSNews.com:
In a preview of his book Conservative Victory—Defeating Obama’s Radical Agenda, due to be released Monday, Sean Hannity said of the policies President Barack Obama has been pursuing: “If you look up the dictionary definition of socialism, this is it.”
Here is the full quote from Hannity:
Obama is a socialist. If you take over banks, if you take over car companies, if you take over financial institutions, the way that he has--now the health care system. If you're going to use every crooked deal that you can come up with to get a bill like that passed--most recently the health care bill--that is by definition, if you look up the dictionary definition of socialism, this is it.
Hannity made his observation during a video interview with Terry Jeffrey, editor in chief of CNSNews.com.
The Left "has declared war on the American people," writes Ann Kane at American Thinker. "How will we respond?"
As Churchill did in his day (don't miss Kane's full quote from the man) in defiance of fascist aggressors against freedom? Or as Obama and the Demofascist aggressors against freedom today would have us respond?
Kane reminds us that "Obama removed a bust of Churchill from the White House upon his arrival last year, and sent it back to England whence it came."
Surely, this Atlantic rearranging is an accident of history, some in the collaborationist media might suggest.
On the other hand, a bust of Churchill is not the kind of real-world reminder you want around in the midst of a blitzkrieg against freedom in America.
Speaking of sending things away, where can we send Obama?
Conn Carroll writes at The Foundry, the blog of the Heritage Foundation:
Another day, two new polls showing the American people are strongly against the health care plan President Barack Obama will sign into law today.
According to CNN, 59% of Americans oppose President Obama’s plan.
And according to CBS News, 48% of Americans oppose the plan (with 33% in strong opposition) compared to only 37% who support it (with only 13% in strong support).
Digging deeper into the CBS poll, we find that 76% of Americans disapprove of how Congress is handling its job on health care, 46% think Congress has spent too much time on health care, and 49% believe the rules and procedures used in Congress to get the current health care bill passed have been mostly unfair.
But the leftist majorities in Congress just do not care what the American people think.
"There’s no fixing the government health care takeover Democrats forced through on Sunday," writes GOP Senator Jim DeMint in USAToday. "It must be repealed."
Symptoms of the Disease: "After telling Americans in 2008 that they would lower spending, taxes and insurance premiums, Democrats passed a bill that breaks every promise. Using secret deals, kickbacks and carve-outs, Democratic leaders jammed through legislation to control more than one-sixth of the nation’s economy."
The problem? "The plan will explode the national debt, raise $569.2 billion in new taxes" and it will "force taxpayers to fund abortions."
But here is the heart of the matter: Obamacare imposes "impose unconstitutional mandates on every American."
Unconstitutional. Folks, you cannot enjoy the blessings of freedom if you violate the rules of freedom, which is what Obama and the Democrats have done in trying to throw the Constitution and Declaration down the rathole of history.
America, we have a choice: Either we repeal this legislation and send it back to the darkness and nothingness from which it came.
Or we allow that darkness to remain, to fester, and to envelop our land, turning the home of the free and the brave into a wasteland of the enslaved and the timid, bowing in supine submission before the cruel pretend messiah of Obama's ugly, spiritualized secular state.
We know where the Founders stand. We know where the Creator stands. The question is: Where do we stand? What will we do?
If the GOP, in the face of Obamacare tyranny, is unwilling to commit principially, strategically, and tactically, with rigor and purity, to limited constitutional, Declarational government -- including unalienable rights as blessings from a real Creator (just like the Declaration affirms) -- then someone should shoot it and put it out of its misery.
America has work to do to tear herself free of the chains of Obama and the Democrats. A people yearning for a rebirth of freedom and dignity can no longer afford to be weighted down by half-hearted schemers who have sold out to the secularist, power-greedy Washington-centric establishment.
The stakes are too high, the moment to precarious, the cost to dear, to leave the work of freedom to hypocrites or opportunists.
This is your challenge, GOP: Get focused, get in the fight, or get out of the way.
This YouTube video explains "the process Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats are using to take away your healthcare," states Sarah Palin's Facebook page.
Frank Turek writes at Townhall:
If the President is not going to insist that the Constitution must be followed -- including that pesky little clause that bills must be approved by a vote in both houses of Congress -- then he is not fulfilling his oath to "support and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic."
And if Obama doesn't care whether the Constitution's rules for freedom are followed, well, he might be an example of what the Founders had in mind when warning future generations of Americans about "enemies foreign and domestic."
Turek concludes: "To President Obama, the process is not important, only the end result. I have to ask, would the President feel the same way about impeachment?"
"So it begins. In 2009, for the first time in its history, the people of the United States placed the White House in the hands of a man and a political faction that openly reject the premises of constitutional self-government," writes Alan Keyes at WorldNetDaily.
"Doing oneself in is illegal in the United States," writes Robert Knight at Townhall. "But Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barack Obama are egging on the House to approve a 'self-executing' rule that would kill the nation’s health-care system by suffocating it under the big hand of government."
By seeking to impose socialized healthcare upon the American people, Barack Obama is playing with fire. He undermines the U.S. Constitution and makes a mockery of the Declaration, and in so doing, he undermines the legal basis for the Presidency per se and the legal basis for keeping him, or any president, in office, except by raw power. The Founding documents condemn him, but in rejecting them, he condemns himself.
There is a way out for him, but he'd have to convert his thinking to what is the defining constitutional and Declarational mainstream of America -- that of limited government, unalienable rights, and human liberty, all under God, the Creator. This is something no secular statist, as a secular statist, can do.
The Obama prescription must be rejected. But more than this, the evil empire of modern secular liberalism must also be rejected, in every way, shape, manner, and form. That's very much entailed in what the Founders did in pledging their "sacred honor" to struggle for a polity rooted in actionable information from a publicly verifiable Creator.
If we today want to keep, protect, and defend this Republic, their example is a constant reminder of the potential cost of intellectual and practical freedom and dignity under God.
Freedom is never cheap, but slavery always costs too much.
David Kupelian, author of How Evil Works, explains at WorldNetDaily the radical madness behind the Obama method.
Peter Ferrara writes at American Spectator:
When Ben Franklin first emerged from the Constitutional Convention, he was asked by a passerby, "What government have you given us?" Franklin replied, "A Republic, if you can keep it."
For 220 years, until last year, we did keep it. America was a democratic constitutional republic, governed by the rule of law, a beacon of liberty to the entire world. But no more. After just one year of Barack Obama's fundamental change, aided by the far left House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from San Francisco, and the easily confused Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, America has been transformed from a Constitutional Republic into a Banana Republic.
It is true that Obama is desperately trying to impose an unconstitutional, anti-Declarational, and anti-American vision upon our country. But he has not yet succeeded. Even if the Frankenstate known as Obamacare is signed into law, it does not follow that he will have succeeded.
Americans who understand who they are and what that means will resist. "We the People," under God, define America the free -- not secular elites and their abusive minions.
The path before us is one of two destinies: One of peace, liberty, and justice for all under the rule of law, unalienable rights, and the blessings of liberty from the Creator who gives the blessings.
Or there is this other destiny: One of no peace, no liberty, and no justice under the rule of elites, relativistic "rights," and the impositions of arbitrary power from a Washington-centric establishment that will look after its own.
Before Americans today is a choice: The way of Franklin or the way of the other guy.
Blessed is the country that walks in paths of freedom.
Jim Meyers reports at Newmax:
Mitt Romney has a simple answer when asked if former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is qualified to run for president: “Sure she is.”
"Many of the same news organizations and research groups today dismissing concerns about Barack Obama's constitutional eligibility were far more eager to cover the issue when Republican presidential candidate John McCain was the subject," writes Jerome Corsi at WorldNetDaily.
"An archive search shows the question of McCain's birth certificate and his eligibility to be president was actively pursued by Democratic Party activists and the mainstream media in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election," Corsi continues, "despite the ridicule now heaped upon those questioning Obama's qualifications under Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution."
Matthew Gilbert at Boston.com says Palin was "playful," and the clip he provides makes the point.
Here Politico compares (with clips) Palin on Leno with Romney on Letterman (who appeared with Letterman last night), calling the counter-programming an "epic battle of late-night hosts and prospective 2012 Republican presidential candidates."
Also with clips, Mark Memmott at NPR says both Palin and Romney "got in some good lines."
Who won the ratings battle? At TV by the Numbers, the headline over Robert Seidman's report declares, "Leno Crushes Letterman in Return."
"On the eve of the Obama administration's most aggressive push yet to pass a national health care plan, a 50-year-old audio recording of Ronald Reagan speaking out against 'socialized medicine' has become a huge YouTube sensation," reports Fox News.
"Nearly 1 million viewers have watched the video, in which the late president, speaking before he became California governor, warns that government intervention in the health care system creates a slippery slope." Here's the video.
"Sure, I'd be glad to try to help him," McCain told The Hill.
Hat tip: Robert Stacy McCain
"Liberty Counsel is representing Christian Educators Association International (CEAI) in a lawsuit against the Santa Rosa County School District after a federal judge denied CEAI's request to overturn a consent decree requiring faculty and staff to stop expressing their faith in public schools," reports Bill Bumpas at OneNewsNow.
This federal judge apparently understands neither the U.S. Constitution nor the concrete, public nature of Christian "faith."
Nothing in the Constitution, Declaration, or Bill of Rights gives a local school the power or authority to tell teachers and students to shut up and sit down when it comes to matters of the free exercise of the Christian faith. The 1st Amendment places limits on the Congress, not on the people. It's high time Congress, courts, and schools listen to not just "we the people" but to "we the people" endowed by our Creator with "certain unalienable rights," etc., etc.
Moreover, nothing in the data of the verifiable information we have in the Bible reduces "faith" to subjective feelings and private prayer closets from which there is no escape. What we have instead is a logically coherent worldview rooted in history, verified in space and time, and able to be practiced in the real world. The God of the Bible is very much a public figure, and those who affirm living in liberating community with our Creator get to do that everywhere, even in the schools.
Biblical "faith" is a matter of wholistic trust based on good and sufficient reasons, not a matter of private epistemology pushed aside and hidden away in some corner. We as individuals and communities ought to resist and reject this regressive pie-in-the-sky secularism imposed by judges foisting their private agendas upon the clear meaning of the texts of the founding documents.
Related
Michele Bachmann on Jesus and Public Policy
What Is "Mainstream" America?
The attendance of an openly homosexual group at CPAC 2010 helped Ron Paul win the presidential straw poll, writes Lisa Fabrizio at American Spectator.
"But far from anointing Ron Paul as their presidential nominee of choice," she explains, "the most indicative effect of including gays was this result from the poll: while the great majority of respondents named reducing the size of government as the most important goal of conservatism, only nine per cent cited the promotion of 'traditional values.' Scary stuff when you realize that the former is impossible without the latter for our particular constitutional republic."
Fabrizio cautions: "A smaller government that is not based on the moral underpinnings of our founders would have been just as repulsive to them as a larger one that is. As John Adams said, "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. . . . Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other."
Read the rest of "The Perils of Progress," by Lisa Fabrizio.
These three speeches make strategic points relative to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and human freedom and dignity in America:
1) The speech by retired Army Lt. Col. Allen West, a candidate for Florida's 22nd congressional district
2) The speech (Part 1, Part 2) by Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina
3) The speech by Marco Rubio, who is running for a U.S. Senate seat in Florida
"Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) told a standing-room-only crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Thursday that Democrats in Congress and the White House are the inspiration for a revolution that he and fellow conservatives hope is sweeping the nation ahead of the 2010 mid-term elections," reports CNSNews.com.
"When asked yesterday whether she agreed or disagreed with one of the world’s top climate-change scientists that there had been no statistically significant global warming over the last fifteen years, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Administrator Jane Lubchenco would only say 'that it is inappropriate to look at any particular short period of time to discern the long-term trend'," reports CNSNews.com.
Here is video from Eyeblast.tv.
The Tea Party movement has thrown statists into "full crisis mode," writes Phil Boehmke at American Thinker.
"Now comes news" that Clintonistas are plotting "a new clandestine attack against" this dire threat to big secular unconstitutional, anti-Declarational government.
"There he goes again," begins an editorial at the Washington Examiner. "In the latest Economic Report of the President, Obama repeats his claim that the $787 billion economic stimulus program 'has saved or created roughly two million jobs so far.'
"Administration officials stopped saying that last year after journalists and think tankers across the political spectrum examined the supporting data posted on the official recovery.gov Web site and found it full of factual holes."
Dick Morris and Eileen McGann write at Newsmax:
Enter Coats. Exit Bayh. Bye, bye, Bayh!
The first time Evan Bayh gets a serious race for re-election, he quits!
The Scott Brown victory is still rippling through the House and the Senate, causing retirements among committed, dedicated, long-term liberal Democrats. Seeing voter anger, they are heading for the hills.
If present trends continue, will new GOP faces on the Hill signal a real shift toward the constitutional republic so brilliantly designed by the Founding Fathers?
Or does this indicate a momentary surge of "voter anger" to be followed by rearranging the deck chairs on the U.S.S. Titanic?
Fred Lucas reports at CNSNews.com:
The nation's top conservative leaders will gather Wednesday at Collingwood in Alexandria, Va. -- a property that was once the site of George Washington’s River Farm -- to sign a document organizers are calling the Mount Vernon Statement. It is designed to signal that a united and resurgent conservative movement is declaring philosophical war against the big government and moral relativism advanced by the nation’s liberal cultural, academic and political establishments.
The statement emphatically says no to the type of "change" pushed by political leaders who ignore the Constitution's limits on government power.
"In recent decades, America’s principles have been undermined and redefined in our culture, our universities and our politics," says an excerpt from the statement. "The self-evident truths of 1776 have been supplanted by the notion that no such truths exist. The federal government today ignores the limits of the Constitution, which is increasingly dismissed as obsolete and irrelevant." . . .
Related
Palin and the Constitution
National Tea Party Convention as Cultural-Political Earthquake
Secularist Washington-Centrism Is Un-American
Noel Sheppard writes at Newsbusters:
"With the coldest winter ever recorded, with snow setting record levels up and down the coast, the Nobel committee should take the Nobel Prize back," [Donald] Trump recently told members of his Westchester, New York, country club, according to the New York Post.
Referencing the Post, Sheppard notes that "the crowd of 500 stood and applauded. I guess there weren't any liberal media members there."
"Veteran political analyst Dick Morris tells Newsmax that the Republicans’ chances of retaking the Senate this year are 'very bright' -- and even a GOP capture of the House is 'very doable'," reports Jim Meyers at Newsmax. "Morris also said Sarah Palin is now the 'most popular' Republican and has White House ambitions for 2012."
"Watching Sarah Palin's speech to the Tea Party National Convention last [Saturday] in Nashville on PJTV, it was clear that she has a rapport and comfort with the Tea Partiers that is unmatched among politicians at the national level," writes Mark Tapscott at the Washington Examiner.
Related
National Tea Party Convention as Cultural-Political Earthquake
From Going Rogue to Going Constitutional
"While Barack Obama remains obsessed with George W. Bush, Sarah Palin hardly acknowledged his existence in Nashville at the Tea Party convention," writes C. Edmund Wright at American Thinker. "Her back to the future vision for America skipped right over all the Bush years and went back to the principles of Ronald Reagan."
C-SPAN 1 has scheduled live coverage today of Joseph Farah and Angela McGlowen at 9 p.m. eastern.
Also, PJTV is providing "live wall-to-wall coverage, Friday and Saturday" (registration is required, but it's free).
"House Minority Leader John Boehner (R.-Ohio) said [yesterday] that Harry Knox, who serves on President Barack Obama’s faith-based advisory council, appears to be an 'anti-Catholic bigot' and should resign as a White House adviser," reports CNSNews.com.
"Earlier this week," CNSNews continues, "Knox said he stood by a statement he made last year that Pope Benedict XVI is 'hurting people in the name of Jesus' because the pope does not support promoting the use of condoms as a means to stem the spread of HIV."
This Is Good:
I thought long and hard about my participation in this weekend's event. At the end of the day, my decision came down to this: It's important to keep faith with people who put a little bit of their faith in you. Everyone attending this event is a soldier in the cause. Some of them will be driving hundreds of miles to Nashville. I made a commitment to them to be there, and I am going to honor it.
But participation won't be limited to those in Nashville who have a ticket. It's much bigger than that. Because the Tea Party movement is spread out across the country — with no central offices or annual events — this is an opportunity to connect with like-minded folks. Yes, there will be speeches given in a room in Nashville. But we'll also be speaking with thousands of Americans watching online at twitter.com/SarahPalinUSA, or through various news outlets. And the conversation will continue on my Facebook page.
This Is Even Better:
My only goal is to support the grassroots activists who are fighting for responsible, limited government — and our Constitution. In that spirit, any compensation for my appearance will go right back to the cause. [emphasis added]
Read all of Palin's "Why I'm Speaking Tea Party Convention."
Illinois GOP Gubernational Primary Today: "Holy mackerel!" said Republican gubernatorial hopeful Adam Andrzejewski after being told yesterday he'd been endorsed by Rush Limbaugh.
"Adam Andrzejewski refers to his opponents in the Illinois Republican primary as 'the Redcoats,' while calling his own grassroots campaign for governor 'the ragtag army'," writes Robert Stacy McCain at American Spectator.
"Revolutionary War metaphors come easily for Andrzejewski, whose showing Tuesday in Illinois will provide an early test of the ability of Tea Party activists to deliver votes in Republican primaries during this year's mid-term campaign."
From the Washington Times:
Mr. Obama came to Washington promising a new tone, an end to bitter partisanship, a new openness and frankness with the American people.
But transparency was obscured, partisan lines hardened, and the White House became an ivory tower of arrogance.
As Mr. Obama steps to the podium to give his State of the Union address tonight after a year in office, the man who stood above the world has crashed back down to Earth.
"Stovall Witte, who worked as U.S. Rep. Henry Brown's first chief of staff before taking a position at Charleston Southern University, said Friday he is entering the increasingly crowded race for the 1st District seat Brown has held," reports SunNews.com. "Witte said he is resigning his position as the university's vice president for advancement and marketing to concentrate full time on the race."
When asked his opinion on the current Congress, Witte replied: "Stop the madness. We have people who seem not to realize we're at war. We have people who don't seem to care that they're passing laws that aren't in line with the Constitution. And then we're spending all of our children's money."
"It's not every day that a Nobel Prize winner becomes involved in a U.S. election, but Lech Walesa -- famed for his Cold War leadership of the Solidarity movement in Poland -- will be campaigning this week for a GOP gubernatorial candidate in Illinois," writes Robert Stacy McCain at American Spectator.
GOP gubernatorial hopeful Adam Andrzejewski is "seeking the seat previously held by impeached Democrat Rod Blagojevich and currently held by Pat Quinn," McCain continues. Andrzejewski is "backed by many Tea Party activists and has never previously held elective office -- a point in his favor, according to Walesa."
"Arkansas Democratic Rep. Marion Berry plans to announce Monday that he won't seek re-election this fall, people who have spoken to Berry told The Associated Press."
From Real Clear Politics: "President Obama uses two teleprompters while speaking to students at a school in Falls Church, Virginia."
Hat tip: Neil Russo
Report Back to the Front Lines: "It is now time to return, emboldened and better equipped, to where the battle for America is the fiercest, and reengage the tooth-and-nail struggle to prevent the Obama administration from fulfilling its all-encompassing visions of statism," writes Miguel A. Guanipa at American Thinker.
On the radio: "I'll treat you like a lady," said Sen. Specter. "So act like one."
"I battle against Obama for the cause of constitutional liberty," writes Alan Keyes. "But it makes no sense to get so caught up in the battle that we forget the cause. There's no harm in rejoicing in Obama's Massachusetts setback, so long as we remember that when two of our opponents fight, it's better for us if neither gains strength from the victory."
Yesterday in a column titled Olbermann vs. America, what I wrote regarding Keith Olbermann's unfortunate response to the stunning Scott Brown victory included a challenge to Sarah Palin:
Yesterday's vote in Massachusetts is a vote against estrangement from our national and creaturely identities. Yesterday stems the tide against freedom, and for that we give thanks.
But strategic victory and a strategic initiative await a critical mass of Americans who insist on returning homeward (and thus forward) to the Founding Vision -- the Declaration, the Constitution, etc. -- where a real Creator and not the pretend god of the secular state is recognized as the center of gravity of human freedom.
I have said and written many good things about the views of Sarah Palin, but it should be pointed out that her heartfelt affirmation of a "commonsense, independent agenda" may not be enough to meet the strategic challenge of our moment in history. For "commonsense" could have made you a slave in Athens, eaten by lions in Rome, headless in France 1793-94, "verboten" in Deutschland, and frozen in the workers' paradise.
So I am happy to report that last night on Fox in an interview with Sean Hannity, the former governor of Alaska did in fact bring the Constitution to the fore. Here's how the interview concluded:
Hannity: If you had to look into the Gov. Palin's crystal ball for 2010, what do you see happening? Do you see this continuing? Do you see the Republicans taking over Congress? Do they have a shot at the Senate?
Palin: I do. I have a lot of optimism for some takeover of just commonsense conservatives being elected and being reelected to make sure that we have a sound agenda and sound policies to get our country back on the right track.
I see that the momentum is on the commonsense and constitutional conservative side, and that this provide[s] a whole lot of optimism for all the country.
It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of the Declaration, Constitution, and Bill of Rights to recovering America as a country that embraces freedom and dignity under God, as opposed to unfreedom and indignity under the heel of some kind of coercive, impositional state that in practice, in effect, seeks to replace the Creator.
Clearly, the Founding Fathers would have understood this emphasis. Just as clearly, Sarah Palin and the Republican Party would do themselves well to articulate and practice that self-same vision. Idolatry, including the idolatry of the secular state, makes for bad politics.
"U.S. President Barack Obama suffered a painful defeat in Massachusetts on Tuesday," writes Charles Hawley at Der Spiegel. "With mid-term elections looming, it means that Obama will have to fundamentally re-think his political course. German commentators say it is the end of hope."
"Fueled by Scott Brown's stunning 'Massachusetts Miracle,' the New York political scene is buzzing with talk of a movement to draft Larry Kudlow to challenge liberal New York Sen. Chuck Schumer," reports David Patten at Newsmax.
In many ways what you are seeing in Keith Olbermann's performance (Olbermann Renews "Teabagging" Attack on Scott Brown) is what American government and society would look like if secularist "liberalism" -- a worldview that rejects the Founding concept of a Creator who is the source of unalienable rights (and human reason and empirical data, by the way) -- wins the day.
That kind of secularism, if logically extended and lived upon, results in the abolition of unalienable rights, rational discourse, and the appeal to evidence. You will hear talk of "living Constitutions" and "values," but really all that's left is the inhumane application of raw power -- in the womb, the workplace, and the White House.
It is a recipe for America as wasteland.
For a Pretend Creator (i.e., a federal state) is not strong enough to carry the weight of rights, reason, and evidence. That kind of "god" will be crushed, and all that depends upon that kind of pretension will be crushed with it, including those who try to build a free society upon it.
Yesterday's vote in Massachusetts is a vote against estrangement from our national and creaturely identities. Yesterday stems the tide against freedom, and for that we give thanks.
But strategic victory and a strategic initiative await a critical mass of Americans who insist on returning homeward (and thus forward) to the Founding Vision -- the Declaration, the Constitution, etc. -- where a real Creator and not the pretend god of the secular state is recognized as the center of gravity of human freedom.
I have said and written many good things about the views of Sarah Palin, but it should be pointed out that her heartfelt affirmation of a "commonsense, independent agenda" may not be enough to meet the strategic challenge of our moment in history. For "commonsense" could have made you a slave in Athens, eaten by lions in Rome, headless in France 1793-94, "verboten" in Deutschland, and frozen in the workers' paradise.
And perhaps rather surprisingly (ask King George), you could say that what the Founders gave us was actually uncommonsense, given the history of humanity in this hard world.
Yes: Extremely uncommon is the vision of the Declaration and content of the Constitution. Sadly, these brilliant documents do not keep us from making mistakes; happily, they do give us a basis for correcting them.
In contrast to secularists past and present, the Founding Vision gives a fixed point that liberates -- with a real Creator as the basis for real unalienable rights. Having a secure foundation is a good thing, because without a fixed point, talk of progress has no meaning.
I hope no one concludes from this a calling to hate an anchor on MSNBC, however heated or misguided the debate might be. The point is not hate, but love. Love of freedom and all the Blessings of Liberty from the One who gives the blessings, for everyone. This too is uncommonsense.
In a story titled "Shock Poll Victory Leaves Obama Reeling," Ros Krasny of Reuters reports, "U.S. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said he would welcome [Scott] Brown to the Senate as soon as he received the paperwork from Massachusetts officials."
Katie O'Malley writes at Human Events: "Call them Tea Partiers, grassroots activists, or any number of coarse and insulting smears from the likes of Keith Olbermann, their power and impact can not be denied after this stunning victory."
"From Pittsfield to Framingham, North Andover to Dorchester, the candidates for US Senate made a last dash across the state yesterday, issuing their final pitches to voters ahead of a special election today that has drawn the eyes of the nation," reports Boston.com
Speaking of "final pitches," here's this confident toss from Republican underdog but now leading in several polls Scott Brown to Barack Obama:
Let me just tell you something, Mr. President. You can criticize my record. . . . But don’t ever start criticizing my truck . . . . 'Cause in a few months, I’m gonna pack up that truck and drive it right down to Washington.
That would be impolite in certain toney circles, but Larry Thornberry at American Spectator ignores peer pressure and forges ahead.
According to the Telegraph, the top 3 "most influential" conservatives in the U.S., in order of rank, are 1) Dick Cheney, 2) Rush Limbaugh, and 3) Matt Drudge.
Awakening Has Started: "For the longest time, average Americans were in a political stupor," writes Harold Witkov at American Thinker. "But not anymore."
What's happening? "In the past year," Witkov continues, "across this great nation of ours, an awakening has started. Individual Americans, by the droves, are experiencieng their own political eureka moments and transforming into conservatives."
"The Democrats have gone into ’sheer panic’ mode over Martha Coakley’s campaign in Massachusetts," writes Erick Erickson at Red State.
"If Scott Brown keeps Coakley down to a narrow victory -- never mind Brown winning in a state that really does not like Republicans -- it will send shockwaves throughout Washington, D.C., and probably expedite a wave of retirements and party flipping," Erickson concludes.
"Anybody who thinks the threats of a socialistic health overhaul and big government haven't sparked a popular uprising need only look one place: Teddy Kennedy's Massachusetts," states an editorial at Investor's Business Daily.
From CNSNews.com:
The niece of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has denounced racially charged comments Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) made about Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign.
The new book Game Change (Harper) about the 2008 presidential race states that Reid “believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama -- a ‘light-skinned’ African American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,’ as he later put it privately.”
Democratic leaders have defended Reid, as have black activists such as Rev. Al Sharpton, but Dr. Alveda King, the niece of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., views the controversy differently.
“I don’t care who said it,” she told CNSNews.com. “It doesn’t matter to me. It’s still wrong. It’s outrageous to say that we are going to let a man have a position because he is light-skinned and he uses a Negro dialect when it is convenient.
"The Crist campaign says it is not true, but the writing is on the wall," says Erick Erickson.
From the Washington Times:
A founder of the 'tea party' movement said Wednesday he had a warning for Republican state leaders: Back conservative candidates or else other states will suffer the same backlash that toppled Florida's Republican Party chairman this week.
"We are turning our guns on anyone who doesn't support constitutional conservative candidates," Dale Robertson, who operates TeaParty.org out of Houston and helped start the movement nearly two years ago.
Republican Party Chairman Michael S. Steele offers a simple explanation for why the GOP all too often lost touch with typical Americans after the Ronald Reagan era: "We screwed up," he claims in a new book offering a blueprint for the party's resurgence.
That "we" includes the last two Republican presidents and the most recent Republican candidate for president.
The name of the book is Right Now: A 12-Step Program for Defeating the Obama Agenda.
"72 hours after the Christmas Day terrorist attack on Northwest Flight 253, Barack Obama finally checked in with the American people -- while still on vacation in Hawaii," writes J.C. Arenas at American Thinker.
"Will millions of anxious eyes fixated on television screen, the president emerged onto the tubes with an unpresidential look that suggested he had just finished a nightclub scene with Eva Mendes from the sequel to Hitch."
What Is Obama Really Up To? Our children cannot live in freedom if this insane recklessness is not stopped," David Limbaugh writes. "It's not about the economy, stupid! It's about the survival of this great nation."
"Conservative challenger Marco Rubio has surged into a dead heat in his Florida Senate campaign against establishment-backed Charlie Crist in a primary battle that is the first major test of the growing power of the "tea party" movement," writes Donald Lambro at the Washington Times.
"Allen West hasn't changed his core message since falling short in a run for Congress last year," reports Art Moore at WorldNetDaily, "but with the political winds now at his back, the retired Army officer's passionately delivered emphasis on constitutional principles of liberty, fiscal responsibility, strong national defense and free-market solutions is attracting an audience well beyond Florida's 22nd district."
Watch: "A video of his rally cry to the party base in preparation for a 2010 run has drawn more than 1.2 million views on YouTube.com," saysMoore at WND.
Related
Wanted: Politics of Conviction, Declaration, Constitution
From "Going Rogue" to Going Constitutional
What Is "Mainstream" America?
"Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s favorability rating is up 4 percentage points since October -- placing her within 9 percentage points of President Barack Obama -- according to a new Gallup poll out Thursday," reports Andy Barr at Politico. "While Palin’s numbers have ticked up of late, Obama’s have remained stagnant after a drop in approval and favorability this summer."
Two Camps: "Most people involved in public affairs fall into two grand schools," writes Bruce Walker at American Thinker. "Some believe that America is a unique nation, a nation built upon extraordinary and good moral values, and a country which is a microcosm of what the world should be. These people need not be Americans. Churchill, for example, was an unabashed admirer of America."
Anti-American Animus: "Other people believe that America is simply a very arrogant country," Walker continues, "a nation inhabited with bumpkins who believe too much in God, and because of its religious faith and confidence, the antithesis of what the world should be. This animus flourishes outside America, but it also has a strong camp following in America."
Where Is Obama? "Barack Obama is decidely in the second camp, Walker asserts. "He is an 'America denier'."
"Republicans' exchange over the prospect of man-made global warming goes another round as Palin responds to the California governor's assertion that her recent statements are an effort to gain publicity," reports a story at Foxnews.com.
"Why is Governor Schwarzenegger pushing for the same sorts of policies in Copenhagen that have helped drive his state into record deficits and unemployment?," Sarah Palin asked at 9:36 pm yesterday on her Facebook page.
"Perhaps he will recall that I live in our nation’s only Arctic state and that I was among the first governors to create a sub-cabinet to deal specifically with climate change," the former governor of Alaska continues.
"While I and all Alaskans witness the impacts of changes in weather patterns firsthand, I have repeatedly said that we can’t primarily blame man’s activities for those changes. And while I did look for practical responses to those changes, what I didn’t do was hamstring Alaska’s job creators with burdensome regulations so that I could act 'greener than thou' when talking to reporters," Palin concludes.
In this clip from Copenhagen, see Academy Award winner "We're not doing interviews right now" Al Gore score a touchdown for ignorance, hubris, and blind faith.
"Climategate just confirms what has long been obvious to those paying attention and living in the real world," writes Peter Ferrara at American Spectator. "Global warming never had anything to do with science. It was all about power and money."
But power for what? "The UN saw it as a grand opportunity to expand its powers into a world government, and, in fact, is still breathlessly pursing this undemocratic, neo-fascist nightmare in Copenhagen. That explains the IPCC's hopelessly bad science. Other world governments saw it as a tremendous opportunity to expand their power and control, and so joined in encouraging the Grand Hoax."
Why did the international Left and media join in the hoax? "The worldwide Left and media fellow travelers (imagining themselves as 'liberals') who philosophically, and quite naively, favor such centralized government control as a means to do 'good,' joined in perpetuating the scientific hoax as well."
What did Green extremists hope to achieve? "Environmentalist extremist groups saw it as the chance for the final victory in gaining control over all private business, and hopefully achieving the ultimate environmentalist dream in repealing the Industrial Revolution. Michael Crichton's State of Fear is now revealed as the ultimate sourcebook for understanding these environmentalist organizations."
Dave Welch writes at WorldNetDaily:
I would like to take a point of personal privilege (to use parliamentary terms) and address the pastors of Houston, of Texas and of the nation on what happened last Saturday in our runoff election for mayor and several city council positions. . . . I will let the victor speak for herself on the nature of the outcome:
"This election has changed the world for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community. . . . just as it is about transforming the lives of all Houstonians for the better."
So stated Annise Parker, lesbian mayor-elect of Houston, Texas, after 54 percent of the 16 percent of voters who cared enough to show up declared that her private moral life and radical agenda to redefine family was irrelevant. Eighty-four percent didn't care enough.
Here's part of the problem, as Welch sees it: "Liberals have mastered the art of building a farm team and winning by starting at the bottom and running to the top. Conservatives notoriously have the 'King Complex' that municipal districts, school boards and city councils are below us, and start at the top without either experience or political capital."
Do we see a "King Complex" among Christians? That this may be the case, to some degree, seems evident if we simply replace the word King with the word Celebrity.
If I were the Devil, I could think of few better strategies than to get Christians to put just about all of their eggs into a few celebrity baskets. A few big names, a few big organizations, with lots of well-meaning people sending in their checks because:
* Big Name so and so has access to the White House -- But maybe that explains why we heard little to nothing about the growth of un-Constitutional government, spending, etc., from the "spiritual" giant of the hour, during that President's administration. You see, that kind of Biblical critique on behalf of limited government might cut down on White House access and hurt a PR fundraising machine that really needs "I was talking with the President the other day . . ." Sometimes, it seems, "speaking truth to power" works best when directed toward targets of great fundraising opportunity.
* Big Name so and so is a great worldview thinker/writer -- But then, it turns out, he, she, or the machine is rather dependent upon ghostwriters, researchers, radio script writers, column writers -- "authoring" work that becomes "his" after the "name" inserts a few well-placed phrases into the text or simply asserts ownership of other people's ideas (You're On Staff!). In such a system it is often imperative to keep staff harried and busy -- and well-paid, if at all possible -- lest they begin to think about the deceptiveness of what they're doing and consider how the Lordship of Christ might apply even to methods of ministry.
* Big Name says, "It's not about me" -- This is the He's-So-Smart-and-Humble Factor, which as Karl Rove and Vince Flynn in one of his Mitch Rapp novels note means it precisely is about the person in question. The energy, the PR, the image, the fundraising, the website, the biography, the praise from others, etc., etc., in some organizations seem absolutely to be "all about" the Big Name. A name sometimes created through ghosted columns and books, etc., creating alliances aka fiefdoms to mutually support and guard eachothers' backs, and so on. But behind the scenes running over people who truly speak against a secularism that all too often has co-opted much of the good that many well-meaning regular people hope to accomplish.
These are just a few observations based on our experience before and during our time here in the Washington, D.C., area.
My hope: Help protect those who follow -- many of whom care deeply about worldview and political engagement -- from being fed into a religious machine. And maybe to save you 10 or 20 years of energy poured into an activism of questionable strategic and spiritual value, if verifiable Scripture is your guide and if you appreciate the centrality of applying the liberating Lordship of Christ across the whole of life, including political life and including one's methods of ministry in the midst of cultural engagement.
This seems key: Just as politics is downstream from culture, culture in general is downstream from Chrisitan culture in particular. And to the degree that Christian culture or ministry might be darkened by "aping the world" (as Francis Schaeffer so emphasized), to that degree we perhaps should not be surprised at the darkness around us. Perhaps we -- you and I and our methods of ministry -- are part of the darkness.
But if that is true, there is hope. We know where to begin in the humanity of truly loving our neighbor. We begin by looking in the mirror. If we can deal honestly with that, then maybe the culture and the politics will begin to line up as well.
That may seem like a long way to fix Houston, but it's the shortest route I know of.
Related
Francis Schaeffer: A Student's Appreciation of a Distinctive Approach
Francis Schaeffer: "The Central Problem of Our Age"
Obama gets a "D" for Delusional -- and that's "an understatement," writes David Limbaugh.
While GOP big-wigs prefer another round of golf, the Tea Party people are reading the Constitution. And they are "determined to save America," writes Richard Viguerie at American Thinker.
"Republican Party leaders would be unwise to try to co-opt, sideline or defeat" the Tea Party Movement. "Perhaps they should welcome the new leadership into the Party as their single most important survival tactic."
Related
Rasmussen: Tea Party More Popular Than Republican Party
Laura Ingraham: Code Red Rally Dec. 15, U.S. Capitol
Palin Now as Popular as Obama
Question Politicized Authority: "Without trustworthy science and with so much at stake, Americans should be wary about what comes out of this politicized conference," writes Sarah Palin in a column at the Washington Post.
"The president should boycott Copenhagen," concludes the author of Going Rogue.
"Obama is playing the Republican establishment like a fiddle," writes Pedro Primavera at American Thinker.
Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) "said Tuesday he is going to attend the Copenhagen conference on climate change to inform world leaders that despite any promises made by President Obama, no new laws will be passed in the United States until the 'scientific fascism' ends," reports Fox News.
Baby I'm Amazed: New "approval/dispproval" polling data from CNN and Gallup show Palin and Obama virtually tied.
CNN shows Palin at 46% favorable, 46% unfavorable.
Gallup shows Obama at 47% approve, 46% disapprove.
"Given the Obamamedia's unparalleled trashing of Palin and their sycophantic support of the One," notes William Tate at American Thinker, "these new numbers -- even if temporary -- bespeak two important points": the "waning influence of the legacy media" and the appeal of Palin "to a substantial portion of the public."
A Review of a Reviewer: One wonders, on the basis of this article, if it's OK with famed film reviewer Roger Ebert to affirm that human beings possess "unalienable rights" because they are endowed as such by the Creator (see the Declaration of Independence).
Especially if such an affirmation is rooted in history, reason, and empirical data and answers the basic philosophic questions of life in ways far superior -- including ways far politically superior for those who think human freedom and dignity are good things -- to materialism, atheism, pantheism, existentialism, Hollywoodism, and various other kinds of secularist mysticisms (such as New Ageism) in vogue now and again.
I am no doubt among the millions of Americans who have enjoyed Ebert's film reviews. But on the question of the relation of Judeo-Christian thoughtforms to politics and government, I as a free-thinking human being suggest Ebert may be sincere but sincerely wrong.
Related
Christianity Is a Science-Starter, Not a Science-Stopper
Christmas Spirit in the Dirt
Fireproof: Reel Rebel Upsets Tinseltown Stereotypes
Secularist Washington-Centrism Un-American
Hat tip: Big Hollywood
Clear and Present Danger: "A new report is raising alarms that the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network, a homosexual advocacy organization founded by Kevin Jennings, now head of the U.S. Office of Safe Schools for the Obama administration, is recommending XXX-rated sex writings for children as young as preschoolers," reports WorldNetDaily.
This revealing interview (posted with 5 video clips) at the blog of CBN White House correspondent David Brody indicates that Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota occupies the historic mainstream of the American experiment in liberty.
For Bachmann, as for the Founders, God is a public figure, and as such we have from the Creator verifiable information essential to a political culture that favors freedom and dignity over liberal statism, secular impositions, and ill-grounded faith in socialist "values" (a weak post-modern substitute for ethical facts).
For a discussion of such a reality-oriented approach in relation to Christmas, see "Christmas Spirit in the Dirt."
Oscar Cooked? Hollywood screenwriters Roger Simon and Lionel Chetwynd say Al Gore "should be stripped of his Oscar in light of the global warming questions raised by leaked e-mails out of a British research center," reports Fox News.
Meanwhile, Gore has "just canceled a lecture he was supposed to deliver" at the big climate conference in Copenhagen next week, says Fox.
Viguerie Names Names: "I am talking about Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader John Boehner, and the leading architect of Republican endorsed socialist-statism, former Bush White House political advisor Karl Rove. These 'leaders' have consistently abandoned constitutional principles of limited government in favor of socialist-statist programs, all in the name of 'winning'."
My View: This is a critical moment for the Republican Party. Now is the time to choose.
Will the GOP embrace and advance the Declaration of Independence (as written) and the U.S. Constitution (as written)?
Or will it sell freedom and unalienable rights endowed by our Creator to the highest or slickest bidder in the game of incremental enablement of defeat?
The Founders had to choose and stand by that choice.
The "Re-Founders" of today equally must choose: Do we advance the God-given wonder of form and freedom under limited goverment? Or do we surrender to unfreedom and crushing oppression under an unlimited state?
Hat tip: Stacy McCain
Snooty liberals misjudge her, the McCain campaign couldn't handle her, and "we know from Palin's book tour she has a base," writes Christopher Chantrill at American Thinker. "She's a force of nature. But what comes next?"
Thought Renegade Mark Steyn Offers Peerless Advice for the Climate Cultist: "Look for the peer-reviewed label! And then just believe whatever it is they tell you."
The first National Tea Party Convention in Nashville next February, with Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann among the speakers, has the makings of being a huge event -- and that may be a gross understatement.
For if the American people dig down deep to the Declarational and Constitutional bedrock of this country -- down to unalienable rights and the living, knowable, and verifiable Creator who is the basis and energizer of those rights -- we may well be on the edge of a cultural-political earthquake of freedom and liberty not seen since the Founding Era and the days of 1776.
But here's one of my primary concerns: That a political machine (either "left" or "right," with its attendant "leadership") or a religious machine (either "left" or "right," with its attendant celebrity "leadership") may find a way to co-opt what up to now appears to be a genuine cultural movement animated by a return to Declaration foundations.
That would be a tragedy, with another generation lost and another 20-30 years of Big Activism and Big Namism but so little effectiveness against the secularist usurpation. An America tipping toward tyranny may not be able to afford much more of that.
Update, Feb. 8, 2010: Please note that Michele Bachmann did not speak at the event. Here is a January 20 statement announcing that Palin will join Bachmann on the campaign trail.
Related
From Going Rogue to Going Constitutional
What Is "Mainstream" America?
Francis Schaeffer: "The Central Problem of Our Age"
Art Imitating Politics: "One of the persistent American misunderstandings is that Thanksgiving is about celebrating abundance," writes Chris Stirewalt at Washington Examiner. "Norman Rockwell helped the myth along as much as anyone."
Related
Michelangelo, Schaeffer, and the Kingdom of Washington
Tourist Attacks Mona Lisa
6-Year-Old Exhibits Painting
Controversy Over "Michelangelo" Sculpture
New Van Gogh Show
Angelina Jolie as the Virgin Mary
"Advocates and sympathetic politicians claiming that man-made global warming from uses of carbon-based energy sources mandates international controls on economically prosperous nations were already worried that their victory is slipping," writes John McLaughlin at American Thinker.
"Now another blow has been struck against 'basic science' used to support their case."
"The New Left takeover and sweeping Obama madness is leaving it no other choice." -- American Spectator
Cal Thomas writes:
Great horrors don't begin in gas chambers, killing fields, or forced famines. They begin when there is a philosophical shift in a nation's leadership about the value of human life. Novelist Walker Percy examined the underlying philosophy that led to the Holocaust and wrote: "In a word, certain consequences, perhaps unforeseen, follow upon the acceptance of the principle of the destruction of human life for what may appear to be the most admirable social reasons."
In our day, the consequences of government seizure of one-sixth of our economy and government's ability to decide how we run our lives (it won't stop with health care) are foreseen. They are just being ignored in our continued pursuit of personal peace, affluence and political power.
Opinion polls show a majority of Americans reject this health care "reform" bill. They think haste may waste them in the end. It doesn't matter. Like members of a cult, whatever the leader says, goes. The facts be damned. The crowd from the '60s will "seize the time," in the words of Black Panther radical Bobby Seale, thus sealing our doom as a unique and wonderful nation.
Welcome to the U.S.S.A., the United Socialist States of America.
Two comments:
1) This column deserves a broad readership. It would be super if Rush, Hannity, Levin, Laura, and others were to feature it and comment upon it on their radio shows. If you agree, contact them via Facebook, Twitter, etc., etc.
2) The day is late, but not over. And the battle for freedom is far from over. We can push back against the U.S.S.A. There is no reason a nation of intelligent, creative, and noble Americans created in the image of God has to sit by and watch barbarians impose tyranny upon this "sweet land of liberty." It's all in the Declaration of Independence, folks. Read it, pray it, act it.
"I Think I'll Delete the File" -- Regarding revelations from hacked emails at Britain's Climate Research Unit (University of East Anglia), a column at RedState asks, "How Does Knowledge Accumulate When the Scientists All Lie?"
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was on the Hannity radio show earlier today, discussing the un-constitutional power grab otherwise known as Obamacare, Pelosicare, and Harrycare.
Guess what? Neither Hannity or McConnell mentioned the U.S. Constitution. Not one time.
Sean Hannity asked no questions about the constitutionality of the attempted federal takeover of healthcare. And the senator offered no constitutional arguments against this attempted usurpation of authority.
Perhaps this was an oversight. Or you may think I'm being too lenient.
No, I'm not trying to beat these guys over the head. But I am trying to alert those of us who care about freedom to what is at the heart of the issue, and what must be attended to, if constitutional government is to survive in what we now know as the United States.
Meanwhile, thank you CNSNews, which unlike the collaborationist press, has been doing a terrific service by raising these kinds of questions to legislators on Capitol Hill.
And thank you Richard Viguerie, who in the Washington Times today warned, "Republican leaders are approaching the 2010 and 2012 elections believing they can win by being slightly less abusive and contemptuous of the Constitution than the Obama-Pelosi Democrats."
A "less abusive and contemptuous" approach is what helped bring us to the present critical moment in our nation's history. And a good case can be made that continuing that approach will only take America over the edge and into the abyss of tryanny.
As a mainstream American, I see no reason to accept a strategy that loses our freedom on Friday instead of on Wednesday. Better to fight for it and win it today, now, and keep it all week long -- and then for months, years, decades, and centuries to come.
We had to struggle to win constitutional liberty in the first place. We probably shouldn't be too surprised if we have to fight to keep it.
So let's keep our eye on the ball. Whether we're on the radio or off. Or whether we're talking to a senator or to the folks who make America work.
Freedom is at stake and the day is late. Make every opportunity count.
If You Want the Rebellion to Succeed: "The release of Sarah Palin's book Going Rogue (HarperCollins, 2009) has brought out not only the Palin bashers, but also, of course, has increased chatter about whether she will be the Republican presidential nominee in 2012," writes Richard Viguerie in the Washington Times.
"What's missing so far in the 'professional' chatter -- which ranges from the snide and petty to the more substantive about her future -- is whether she or any other potential candidate has grasped what conservative newspaper editor Seth Lipsky describes so astutely as America's 'constitutional moment'."
Related
What Is "Mainstream" America?
Palin on Obamacare Flubbing the Point?
Hey Rove and O'Reilly: Wise Up on Constitution, Healthcare
Obamacare Authoritarian and Unconstitutional
Senator Admits: "No Place in Constitution That Says Healthcare"
Pearcey Accepts Obama Healthcare Proposal
"She’s clearly laying the groundwork for her own White House run," writes Alan Dowd at Frontpagemag.com.
"Billy Graham said it was an honor having Palin in his home to join his family for dinner and that they took the opportunity to pray together," reports AP.
"I, like many people, have been impressed with her strong commitment to her faith, to family and love of country," AP quotes Graham as saying in a statement. "I appreciated hearing her speak of her own spiritual journey and her life in Alaska."
Malevolent Strategy Targets Constitutional Government: "It's time to cast aside all remaining doubt," writes James Simspon at American Thinker. "President Obama is not trying to lead America forward to recovery, propserity, and strength. Quite the opposite, in fact."
Damaging Revelations: "Officials at a key global warming research center in the United Kingdom have authenticated a series of e-mails and other documents apparently taken from their computer system by a hacker, but they cannot explain what scientists in internal exchanges meant by references to a 'trick' that would 'hide the decline' of global temperatures nor by instructions to delete contrary data," reports WorldNetDaily.
Author James Delingpole writes in a London Telegraph column the most damaging revelations indicate climate-change scientists may have "manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause."
"The computerized voting machines used by many voters in the 23rd district had a computer virus -- tainting the results, not just from those machines known to have been infected, but casting doubt on the accuracy of counts retrieved from any of the machines," reports Nathan Barker in The Gouverneur Times.
Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman is "raising funds for a possible legal challenge to the results and requesting that the Boards of Election hand-count every vote," reports Barker. "On Tuesday, he 'unconceded' the race. In light of the current concerns over the accuracy of the machine-counted votes, Hoffman may now have a legitimate reason to contest the election results."
Hat tip: Robert Stacy McCain
Responding to CNSNews, Pelosi said:
Well, let’s see, how many years has it been? Nine, eight years. Let’s worry about capturing Bin Laden and not worry about your, your question.
One wonders if she gave the same advice to Atty. Gen. Eric Holder, who just yesterday seemed rather unprepared for a similar line of questioning from Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
And in yet another diplomatic coup, "President Obama has had to swallow the medicine," says the UK Independent.
"Palin is a threat because she symbolizes decency in a country that has been taken hostage by moral degenerates," writes Bob Weir at American Thinker. "If she isn't stopped, this country might end up reclaiming some of the values that made us the envy of the world."
True enough, lack of decency is a huge problem in America today, but deeper still is the liberal and secularist rejection of the Founders' worldview, which gives an adequate philosophic basis to provide what thinker Francis Schaeffer calls "form and freedom" in government, even in a world full of imperfect people.
What Palin increasingly represents, and what distinguishes the American experiment in human history, is not just a commitment to certain "values," but rather a commitment to certain facts, including ethical facts (as opposed to mere subjective "values").
That is to say, when the Founders purposely built the American experiment in liberty upon the Creator and not the State, they were not being "religious" in the modern or Obamaesque sense of the word (either cut off from facts or used as political window dressing for a secularist action agenda).
The Founders were applying concepts rooted in information from our Creator as that information applies to life in this world. And by building intellectually and politically upon the base of the Creator, what is given to us in the Declaration of Independence is a wonder of the world, something not found in Greek democracy, the Roman Empire, or the French Revolution.
In contrast to the secularist Democratic Party and elements within the Republican Party, Sarah Palin moves instinctively within the American mainstream of the Founders' worldview. And the degree to which that liberating worldview comes to expression in her politics (and that of others), to that degree her presence is a dire threat to liberalism and its attempt to redefine American society upon the slavish god-substitute of the secular state.
The Founders' worldview of freedom is a constant terror to the forces of tyranny. That is why Sarah Palin, and any like her -- including the millions of Americans who reject the rise of "compassionate" and egalitarian totalitarianism in America today -- must be demonized and destroyed. If she and they live, tyranny dies.
"House Republicans say they'll make Democrats feel the political heat for President Obama's decision to try Sept. 11 attack plotters in U.S. civilian courts by trying to force a vote on a bill to block those trials," reports the Washington Times.
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R.-Ohio) "and other opponents say the terrorists don't deserve the same rights as U.S. citizens, and worry that holding civilian trials signals a return to the 1990s when the threat from al Qaeda was treated as a criminal matter, not a war," says the Times.
"They also argue that sensitive intelligence information could be revealed in court trials and that the accused could use the trials as a propaganda exercise."
Zeroing in Again on Ground Zero: "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and four others accused in the attacks will be put on criminal trial in New York, Attorney General Eric Holder is expected to announce later Friday," writes Evan Perez in the Wall Street Journal.
"This is insane," alerts Erick Erickson at Red State. "There have been reports in the past month about another potential terrorist attack disrupted in New York City. Bringing these high profile terrorist leaders to New York will just put a target on New York again."
If that doesn't get your attention, there's this from Erick of Red State: "The White House is going to subject these terrorists to criminal trials in civilian courts. They will get all the due process rights of citizens in court and potentially will be able to get access to material evidence in a civilian court that could reveal intelligence we’d prefer them not to have."
The Point: An American president is creating a scenario whereby a) terrorists may be able to blow a huge hole in American intelligence, and b) terrorists have additional motivation to blow another huge hole in NYC, thereby granting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a glorious send-off to virgin territory.
The gods of terror must be smiling.
Bad Ideas, Bad Consequences: "President Obama's new Homeland Security doctrine has taken our country from being that world's strongest and most intimidating superpower to a weak and vulnerable nation being singled out by every terrorist organization in the world," writes Neil Braithwaite at American Thinker.
"And make no mistake: Whether homegrown or international, these terrorists want America destroyed at any cost. The Obama administration's Homeland Security doctrine has become no more than a politically correct welcome mat for every Muslim jihadist on the planet."
Related
Morris: Obama Handcuffs Terror Probers
Gov. of Alamo State: Obama "Hell-Bent" on Turning America Into Socialist Country
Maybe It's Time to Ask: Has Obama Declared War on America?
The Evil Religious Presidents Do
Anti-Muslim Backlash, My Foot
Or Is That a Forbidden Question? One begins to wonder about the direction in which he moves, insofar as Mr. Obama's policies stand in stark contrast to the Constitution, the Declaration, and the Bill of Rights. And insofar as he and his regime seem more concerned with not offending terrorists than with defeating terror and defending the American people.
Based on his language, his behavior, his history, and his policies, you begin to wonder whether Obama really stands for America and her high ideals. Or whether he sees limited government and individual liberty under God as obstacles to be overcome, enemies to be defeated, distractions on the path to a greater, new, and brighter America of which he and his wife can finally be proud.
Says Gov. Rick Perry: "It’s time to make tea parties twice as big as what they were . . . . I think it’s time for us to stand up and say to Washington, D.C. that we are no longer going to accept that kind of stuff sitting down and being quiet."
Former Clinton Adviser Dick Morris Tells Newsmax: The Obama White House is "deliberately mischaracterizing" the Fort Hood terror attack.
"We're witnessing the fruits of Obama's failures in the war on terror," says Morris.
"That's precisely why he doesn't want it to be called a terrorist act. He doesn't want us to realize that he is responsible, at least on his watch, for the first attack on our soil since 9/11."
"I had a great conversation with Oprah today," Sarah Palin writes on her Facebook page. "We taped the show for Monday, Nov. 16th, and enjoyed it so much that we went way over on time."
Erick Erickson at RedState: "Let me be clear to the conservative movement and the organizations participating in the health care debate: the fight over health care is about freedom, not your ridiculous little scorecards."
We Are Taking Names: "As expected, the House of Representatives under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi passed the bill that would take away your personal options on health care and make it the business of the U.S. government," writes Joseph Farah at WorldNetDaily.
"But don't get mad. Get even," he says.
"Some 220 members of the House are now, politically speaking, dead men walking. They have placed targets on their backs for the 2010 midterm elections. They have given the American people a year to plan retribution. And the planning should begin immediately."
Speaking of taking names, don't forget that lone Republican -- Joseph "Benedict" Cao of New Orleans -- who sided with Pelosi, Obama, and the Democrats against the Constitution.
But not to honor Ronald Reagan ("Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall"). Obama does manage to use the video to talk about himself.
Dan Riehl checked the president's schedule.
The Plot Thickens: "Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged shooter in yesterday's massacre at Fort Hood, played a homeland security advisory role in President Barack Obama's transition into the White House, according to a key university policy institute document," reports Jerome Corsi at WorldNetDaily.
Hat tip: Bill Langhorst
There's Mainstream Today: "As Tuesday's elections showed, support for limited government remains a mainstream position," writes Quin Hillyer at American Spectator. This is the socio-political mainstream, and it can vary with time and place.
And There's Mainstream Forever: As the Declaration, Constitution, and Bill of Rights show, support for limited government under God is the mainstream American position. This is the foundational, enduring meaning of the American mainstream, and it liberates across time and place precisely because its meaning is secure.
To the degree that a president or political party advocates a vision or policy outside of the abiding meaning of the American mainstream, to that degree a president or party is moving away from the genius of the American experiment.
At present, the liberal Democratic Party is outside of the socio-political mainstream and far outside of -- and even against -- the enduring American mainstream. Thus its extremism on both accounts. Thus its increasing embrace of tyranny, from the womb to the marketplace, against speech and family, and on and on.
The Republican Party is a house divided and for this reason totters. Party elites seek the sociological mainstream but reject the enduring American mainstream. Even with bombast, they speak weakly and carry a small stick.
The hope of America is that the mainstream of today embraces the mainstream that endures. That happened once and lasted a while. Maybe it can happen again.
* March 27, 2010, Update: For a treatment of this topic in light of the tea parties, town halls, and so on, please see, "How the New Resistance Can Win the Culture War," published at WorldNetDaily.
Time to Wise Up: "GOP Chairman Michael Steele is criticizing Sarah Palin and Tim Pawlenty today for daring to endorse Doug Hoffman," writes Erick Erickson at RedState. "We will remember that."
Too Real for Tinseltown: "If a Hollywood producer were casting for the role of a revolutionary hero, no talent agent would send Doug Hoffman to the audition," writes Stacy McCain at American Spectator.
"Yet the Hoffman congressional campaign has ignited a revolution within the Republican Party, the results of which are already being felt."
Meanwhile, this from a Conservative Party official, "in a celebratory mood, laughing as he yelled into his cell phone: 'Guess who will not be representing the 23rd District? Dede Scozzafava!'"
Yesterday, voters in Maine rejected "gay" marriage by a 53%-47% margin (with 87% of precincts reporting). What follows is a press statement from Matt Barber, who is director of cultural affairs with Liberty Counsel and Liberty Alliance Action:
There’s good news and bad news here. The good news is that even in one of the most liberal States in the Union, Maine, the people have once again rejected the ridiculous and oxymoronic notion of "same-sex marriage." The momentum has again shifted -- hopefully for good this time -- in favor of protecting legitimate marriage.
A counterfeit is a counterfeit. An orange is an orange no matter how much you want it to be a turnip. This isn’t about "marriage." It’s about hurting and broken people desperately seeking affirmation of an objectively deviant lifestyle. One that, even in their heart of hearts, they know to be a dead end.
As for the militant "No on 1" homosexual activists? I’m reminded of spoiled children dressing up and playing house, refusing to come in when mom calls for dinner.
Here’s the bad news. The margin of victory could have been greater. Many behind the "Yes on 1" campaign, rather than simply telling the truth, chose the Neville Chamberlain approach. They merely circled the wagons around the word "marriage," even suggesting that "domestic partnerships" ("gay marriages" by another name) are acceptable.
This makes no sense. If that’s a viable compromise, then why not simply allow "gay" duos the word "marriage"? It’s an incongruity that demands an explanation.
This is an historic battle for the minds and souls of our children -- for our very culture. The mealy-mouthed approach must end. This is not just about "marriage." It has everything to do with forced affirmation of homosexuality -- under penalty of law.
Indeed everyone who fought hard to defend marriage in Maine is to be congratulated, but if it weren’t for a brave group of truth tellers -- Paul Madore, Peter LaBarbera and Brian Camenker -- who came to Maine in the final hour to hold a press conference and address the pink elephant in the room -- homosexual deviancy and the radical "gay" agenda -- counterfeit marriage might have prevailed.
Related
Big Victory for Traditional Marriage in Maine
Homosexuality "Not a Civil Right"
Obama "Safe Schools" Chief Praised Child-Sex Promoter
Betraying Christ: Obama Affirms Perverted Sex
Obama: Homosexual Relationships "Just as Real and Admirable" as Heterosexual Marriage
The Evil Religious Presidents Do
"Faggot" Easy to Defend: Surprising Help From Secular America
No McDonald's Today
Rosie O'Donnell's Oppressive Coat
"Terrorists can only kill some of us," writes Joseph Farah at WorldNetDaily. "But unconstitutional legislation that corrupts the very soul of America can kill our spirit. It can kill the rule of law. It can kill the notion that the will of the people is pre-eminent, not the will of some vaunted elite."
From the Field: A person, unnamed, who voted in Virginia today describes his experience:
I park the car and am on the way in to vote. A lady outside asks if I want a Democratic voting lineup.
"No, thanks. I think I'm good."
Down the sidewalk and then on my left I begin to walk past another lady. She asks if I want a copy of the Republican lineup.
"No. I'm good."
I walk into the voting area. Very few people are in line. Two I think are in line are just talking to each other. More poll workers than people voting.
I walk up to the alphabetically appropriate table. "Do you have an ID?" says a woman in a chair as she manages a book of names and addresses laid out in front of her.
"Yes. Here you go."
"Can you state your full name?"
That done, she gives me a card that says I am authorized to vote. I take the card to a worker and he gives me a piece of plastic to put in the voting machine.
There are four Republicans and four Democrats on the ballot.
I vote for Republican Bob McDonnell. Not for Deeds the Democrat. And I vote for the three other Republicans.
Barack Obama is not on the ballot. But every single vote against members of his party is a vote against him.
That's four votes against Obama. And against that for which he stands.
And I feel it. My own little tea party. I can't wait until 2012.
I walk out of the elementary school and feel a freer man.
I talk with the Republican poll lady. She says the crowd has been steady all day.
On the way to the car I talk with the Democatic poll lady. She is positioned a good 30 feet away from everybody else. All by herself.
"Why are you way over here by yourself?" I ask.
She says something that I don't quit hear. But then she talks clearly about how the separation is a way to avoid the flu. I cannot tell if she is joking.
Many have already voted today. But the polls are still open, and we await final results from Virginia, New Jersey, and NY23.
Mr. Obama, of course, is not on the ballot. But I wonder how many Americans voted against him anyway.
NY23, NJ, VA: That's what the collaborationist state-owned media would have you believe, says Erick Erickson at Red State. But "the facts speak for themselves."
From the National Education Association: Saul Alinsky an "inspiration to anyone contemplating action in their community! And to every organizer!" (emphasis in original)
Hat tip: American Thinker
Knife in Back: "The first poll published in the wake of Scozzafava's withdrawal showed Hoffman with a commanding lead over the Democrat, Owens," writes Stacy McCain at American Spectator.
"Even if Hoffman wins big in tomorrow's election, however, the consequences of the Republican Party's blunders in this campaign are likely to be felt far away from upstate New York," McCain concludes.
"A yawning chasm of alienation between the GOP establishment and the party's grassroots has been exposed."
Related
Halloween Bombshell: Scozzafava Quits, Reports Say She'll Support Hoffman
Palin Reacts to Scozzafava Bombshell
Bachmann: "It's All Up to Hoffman Now"
NY23: Reinforcements Rally to Hoffman
NY23: Amazing Surge of Doug Hoffman
Palin, Pawlenty Endorsing NY's Hoffman, Trouble for Newt
Wanted: Politics of Conviction, Declaration, Constitution
America has an essence, writes Bookworm at American Thinker, and "that essence is liberty."
Two words need to be added. Thus: "That essence is liberty" under God. This added content makes all the difference in the world, both to the Founders and to our generation as well. For without the Creator, there is no sufficient intellectual and ontological foundation for liberty as essence or existence.
Neither liberty nor essence pops into existence out of nothingness. The reason the Preamble to the Constitution can speak of the "blessings of liberty" is because there is a Creator who is there and who is the Source and Giver of the blessings.
Meanwhile, Bookworm concludes: "It's reasonable to state that because the overwhelming number of Barack Obama's desires and actions are anthithetical to America's essence, he is in fact anti-American."
Related
Home Depot Fires Man for Wearing "Under God" Pin: Video
Extremists Fear Resistance
Video and Transcript: Chris Wallace interviews Rush Limbaugh on "Fox News Sunday."
Send Help: "The polls all show that Hoffman's message of fiscal responsibility and conservatism are resonating strongly with the voters in that district," writes Michele Bachmann on her website. "I am very hopeful that they will send him across the finish line in first place Tuesday night."
Related
Halloween Bombshell: Scozzafava Quits, Reports Say She'll Support Hoffman
Palin Reacts to Scozzafava Bombshell
NY23: Reinforcements Rally to Hoffman
NY23: Amazing Surge of Doug Hoffman
Palin, Pawlenty Endorsing NY's Hoffman, Trouble for Newt
Wanted: Politics of Conviction, Declaration, Constitution
"A Time to Unite": "We need candidates like Doug more than ever."
Related
Halloween Bombshell: Scozzafava Quits, Reports Say She'll Support Hoffman
Bachmann: "It's All Up to Hoffman Now"
NY23: Reinforcements Rally to Hoffman
NY23: Amazing Surge of Doug Hoffman
Palin, Pawlenty Endorsing NY's Hoffman, Trouble for Newt
Wanted: Politics of Conviction, Declaration, Constitution
Political Shock Heard 'Round the Country: Liberal GOP candidate Dede Scozzafava has quit the race for the 23rd congressional district of New York. "The hand-picked choice of the New York state GOP in the key 23rd District special election . . . reportedly will throw her support to Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman," reports Stacy McCain.
Here's some reaction:
Michelle Malkin: "Hey, GOP elites: Can you hear Conservatives NOW?!"
Christian-Science Monitor: "Disaffected conservatives surging across the US."
Gingrich: Hoffman the "only alternative."
Maggie's Notebook: "RNC wastes $900,000 on Scozzafava."
Michael Steele: "Effective immediately, the RNC will endorse and support the conservative candidate in the race, Doug Hoffman. Doug’s campaign will receive the financial backing of the RNC, and get-out-the-vote efforts to defeat Bill Owens on Tuesday," reports the LATimes.
Related
NY23: Reinforcements Rally to Hoffman
NY23: The Amazing Surge of Doug Hoffman
Palin, Pawlenty Endorsing NY's Hoffman, Trouble for Newt
Wanted: Politics of Conviction, Declaration, Constitution
Capitol Hill Control vs. American Constitution: "This is socialized medicine, and this is, as I said, the crown jewel of socialism -- what Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid have wanted from the very beginning," said congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota last night on Hannity. Here's video from her appearance.
It is crucial that Bachmann and others continue to drive home that point that what the Democrats are doing violates the Constitution of the United States.
That, along with a similar emphasis on moving forward on the basis of Declaration content, is crucial to reforming and refounding this nation so that her inhabitants can once again breathe the air of freedom and dignity in community with God and man.
Related
Obamacare Authoritarian and Unconstitutional
Palin on Obamacare Flubbing the Point?
Hey Rove, O'Reilly: Wise Up on Constitution, Healthcare
Kill, Baby, Kill: "Page 110 of H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act, authorizes a new government health insurance program to pay for all elective abortions," reports OneNewsNow.
Take My Congressman, Please: "A group of angry Florida voters has launched the Web site MyCongressmanIsNuts.com in a drive to oust Democrat Rep. Alan Grayson, the outspoken congressman who grabbed national headlines earlier this month by calling an adviser to the Fed chairman a 'K Street whore'," reports the Washington Times.
Fair and Balanced Peacepipe? "Numerous sources are reporting a meeting occurred Wednesday between high-ranking officials at the White House and the Fox News Channel to try and reach an end to hostilities between the Administration and the nation's leading cable news network," writes Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters.
"With Fox's ratings soaring as a result of the incursion, and the White House looking more and more foolish, one has to wonder what the Adminstration could have offered to make this deal possible."
From Erick the Redstate: "15 prominent conservative leaders are out today joining RedState in making NY-23’s race between Doug Hoffman and the two leftists running against him a hill to die on for the conservative movement."
The Usual Suspects: "Everyone from Ed Meese to Al Regnery to Tom Winter and Tony Perkins signed a letter from the National Conservative Campaign Fund (PDF) urging conservatives to rally to Hoffman over Scozzafava," says Erick.
Not Standing Up: Huckabee and Romney.
What's Needed? A Politics of Conviction, Declaration, Constitution.
In response to "Rush Limbaugh Livid: GOP Has Death Wish" comes this set of comments from Facebook. The GOP might want to listen in.
* Kita: "I say let the current GOP die and a new improved REAL GOP take its place."
* Roy: "I am thoroughly disgusted and dissafected by both major political parties. Neither really represents the interests of the people, just their OWN best interests. I think that Ronald Regan was probably the last TRUE republican."
* Wayne: "Instead of a GOP (Grand Old Party), how about a GNP (Great New Party)?"
* Rick Pearcey: "As far as I can tell, neither party does anything close to what the Founders did: Articulate and practice a politics of conviction rooted in the Declaration (as written) and Constitution (as written).
"Without such a principial foundation the slide slower (GOP) or faster (Democrats) into Washington-centric slavery, the first-fruits of which we already taste, will continue apace against inadequate, ill-prepared opposition.
"America awaits the arrival of at least one political party that will assert itself clearly and courageously as a voice of humane, Declarational, and Constitutional resistance to the current, ongoing collapse of freedom."
Here is my page on Facebook. Read "Rush Limbaugh Livid" here.
Rick Moran at American Thinker discusses Rocco Landesman, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Landesman recently gave a speech "that is so syrupy sweet with Obama worship it activates the gag reflex," writes Moran.
An explicit email published at Big Hollywood blasts HBO and cable star Larry David for "gross contempt" against Christ and Christians.
"There is a strong sense among observers" that congressional candidate Doug Hoffman "may be on the verge of one of the biggest political upsets of recent years," writes Robert Stacy McCain at American Spectator.
"Obama's war against the network is about much more than Fox News," writes David Limbaugh. "It is about his and his fellow liberals' intolerance for political dissent and their war on political criticism from any corner." Read this commentary.
When it comes to applying what clearly are the fact-based truth-claims of the Creator to the whole of life, including public life and political life, many, many pastors are simply AWOL, says Dave Welch in "Where Are All the Godly Men?" at WorldNetDaily. Welch is founder of the U.S. Pastor Council.
The wimpy "nice" pastor who nevertheless does not lead needs to become a thing of the past, replaced by those who are fully engaged in being salt and light here and now. Unless, as Welch observes, you don't mind putting up with a "church and country" that are in "spiritual, moral, cultural and political disarray."
Read "Where Are All the Godly Men?," by Dave Welch.
Sarah Palin endorsed Doug Hoffman of NY's 23rd congressional district last Thursday.
And now, "with the news [yesterday] that Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty has endorsed Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman in the three-way congressional race in upstate New York's 23rd District, . . . the pressure is on former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to follow suit," writes Robert Stacy McCain at American Spectator.
"However, Red State's Erick Erickson is laying down an ultimatum to any Republican who wants grassroots conservative support for a 2012 presidential bid," McCain continues.
"Erickson says Romney and Huckabee have until noon Wednesday to endorse Hoffman or . . . well, or else."
Last night night on Greta, Newt Gingrich blasted conservatives and argued for Hoffman's Republican opponent, even though, says Gingrich, "No question, on social policy, she's a liberal Republican."
My view: Gingrich is making a tactical error that may reflect flawed strategic thinking. What is needed is at least one political party where Conservative principle is the clear basis. Years of giving into "pragmatic" politics have enabled the present ongoing Constitutional crisis we now face in the United States.
Even more foundational is the need for a clear voice based on a clear commitment -- on the issues, tactics, strategies, and principles -- to Declarational and Constitutional norms and content.
This still has yet to come to the fore with sufficient strength and articulation, but it seems absolutely needed if America is have any sufficient answer to either the fast road to tyranny (the Democratic Party) or the somewhat slower road (squishy Republicanism).
Meanwhile, Stacy McCain is probably right: "Guess that means Erickson has already scratched Newt Gingrich off his 2012 list."
"The face of Sarah Palin -- goddess edition -- could soon loom over Highway 101 near San Carlos, Calif., showcased on a 14-by-48-foot billboard that touts her political prowess," writes Jennifer Harper at the Washington Times.
Related
Culture Shock: Palin Thriving, Propering, Winning
Sarah Palin Facebook: 875,000+ and What That Means
Rush: Media Fear Sarah Palin
Anti-Palin Media, Hong Kong, and the Decline of Journalism
Watch, listen, laugh, learn, share. AlfonZo Rachel does it again. Here.
Related
Infidel Rush Limbaugh Challenges the Gods of Race
How to Have a Race War
Rush Limbaugh: The Race Card, Football, and Me
Racism! Racism! And Oh by the Way: Racism!
"In George Orwell's novel 1984, Newspeak refers to language designed by a totalitarian regime to control thought and make subversive speech impossible," writes Janet Levy at American Thinker.
"It destroyed words with prohibited meanings so that heretical thoughts couldn't be expressed. A form of censorship, Newspeak employed euphemisms and words deliberately opposite the reality they described."
From "man-caused disasters" (terrorism) to "a woman's right to choose" (the taking of human life) to the "Defense of Marriage Act" (forcing same-sex "marriage" on all states), Levy takes us on an examination of "Newspeak at work" today.
Read "Welcome to the World of Newspeak," by Janet Levy.
From Jeff Poor at Newsbusters:
By now, the cat is out of the bag -- President Barack Obama and his administration are no fans of the Fox News Channel and have been all too eager to wear that sentiment as a badge of honor.
However, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer identified the vigor with which the Obama administration has attacked Fox. He explained on the Fox News Oct. 20 broadcast of "Special Report with Bret Baier" that it's different than just fighting back; this is an effort to destroy the cable news channel.
"Look, it's one thing for the government, the administration to attack opponents, institutions, media," Krauthammer said. "It is another to go out to try and delegitimize them and destroy them."
Related
Glenn Beck Compares Criticism of Fox News to Jews During Holocaust
Tyranny Watch: White House vs. Fox News
"Mainstream" Press and the Treason of the Journalists
What About Obama, Mussolini, and the Unmentionable Herr Hitler?
The Evil Religious Presidents Do
Fascism Is Back
"The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) has adopted a new pro-liberalized immigration stance that is creating ripples among its conservative membership," writes Mark Tooley at American Spectator.
"Although NAE had touted its board's supposedly unanimous backing, at least one prominent NAE member, the Salvation Army, has apparently already disavowed it."
What's going on? The AmSpec kicker puts it like this: "The National Association of Evangelicals moves in the direction of the National Council of Churches."
Members of the Presbyterian Church in America may want to take note:
Another prominent NAE member, the 340,00 member Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), issued a statement, more defensively, but also asserting that NAE does not speak for member churches. "The NAE Immigration Resolution of 2009 has not become the PCA position on immigration," insisted PCA Stated Clerk Roy Taylor, who also chairs the NAE's board. But he still affirmed his own support for it: "The NAE Immigration Resolution of 2009, in my view, is a biblically-based, theologically reflective, carefully balanced, concise document."
In his conclusion, Tooley notes that the National Council of Churches (NCC) "became mostly irrelevant when its Mainline Protestant voices stopped speaking for its churches and started speaking 'prophetically' to them. Similarly, the NCC moved beyond issues of Christian consensus to adopt more morally ambiguous, and ostensibly more fashionable, political causes du jour. This sad history should be familiar to evangelicals. But the NAE seems determined to repeat what has already been tried and failed."
"Mark Muller -- a husband, father, businessman, and football fanatic -- is giving up on the game he loves, he said, because the National Football League let him down," reports CNSNews.com.
"Muller, a fan of conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh, said he will never attend another NFL game, because the league did not stand up for Limbaugh when Limbaugh's recent attempt to purchase part of the St. Louis Rams’ franchise came under fire from critics."
Related
First They Came for Rush
Rush Limbaugh: The Race Card, Football, and Me
Racism! Racism! And Oh by the Way: Racism!
David Limbaugh: This Isn't About Rush
