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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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
"There's a whole lot of polarizing going on in Obama's America," writes Kyle-Anne Shiver at American Thinker. "Unity is out, apparently. Polarization is in. And Rush Limbaugh and Fox News are the new Bush."
"One blaring truth rears its ugly head to any open-minded person who takes a hard look at Barack Obama's personal and political history. His history is clear shot through with polarizing effects, both intentional and unintentional.
"One might almost say that Barack Obama was a born polarizer."
Related
Political Cult Watch: Obama's "Gay" Speech
Rush Limbaugh: The Race Card, Football, and Me
Racism! Racism! And Oh by the Way: Racism!
David Limbaugh: This Isn't About Rush
Bob Weir writes at American Thinker:
This latest imbroglio about Rush Limbaugh being ineligible to buy an NFL franchise, because of a couple of alleged racial comments he made over the span of his many decades on the radio, stands out as one of the phoniest canards ever foisted upon the American public.
The irony behind the spurious charge is that they come from two of the most incendiary provocateurs in the race-baiting business. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who give themselves the ludicrous title of Reverend, have the unmitigated gall to proclaim that Limbaugh is a polarizing figure in the country.
This from a couple of race hustlers who have been living large for decades with no visible means of support except for the "donations" the received from the corporations they've threatened with not so subtle methods of extortion.
Related
Rush Limbaugh: The Race Card, Football, and Me
Racism! Racism! And Oh by the Way: Racism!
David Limbaugh: This Isn't About Rush
How to Have a Race War
Question the Collaborationist Media
The secularist ACLU is "suing to take down a cross on a huge public swath of desert in Southern California," writes Ben Stein at American Spectator. Stein offers a few reasons the cross should stay.
To his reasons, let us add this: Nothing in the Declaration, the U.S. Constitution, nor the Bill of Rights forbids it. What is forbidden in the 1st Amendment is that Congress should make a law in this regard.
The atttempt to impose atheism and secularism upon American society represents a profound, ongoing Constitutional crisis and constitutes a threat to every individual inside our borders.
A free, dignified, and creative people under God, endowed by our Creator with "certain unalienable rights," would do well to rise up and throw off the shackles of this imposition.
Helping the oppressed citizens of the United States break free of this statist addiction to the pretend "God" substitute of the federal government -- exemplified by the negative spirituality of the Obama administration but also so easily given into by squishy Republicans -- is a surefire way to demonstrate respect for our true Creator, not to mention love of neighbor.
The alternative is tyranny, and that's not an alternative.
Related
Why We Revolt: Cheerleaders Violate Separation of Church and State?
Texas Chooses Science Over Secularist Dogma
What to Do With Enemies of the Constitution
"My critics would have you believe no conservative meets NFL 'standards'," says Rush Limbaugh in the Wall Street Journal.
"As I explained on my radio show," Limbaugh continues, "this spectacle is bigger than I am on several levels. There is a contempt in the news business, including the sportswriter community, for conservatives that reflects the blind hatred espoused by Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson.
"'Racism' is too often their sledgehammer. And it is being used to try to keep citizens who don't share the left's agenda from participating in the full array of opportunities this nation otherwise affords each of us. It was on display many years ago in an effort to smear Clarence Thomas with racist stereotypes and keep him off the Supreme Court. More recently, it was employed against patriotic citizens who attended town-hall meetings and tea-party protests.
"These intimidation tactics are working and spreading," Limbaugh concludes, "and they are a cancer on our society."Related
Racism! Racism! And Oh by the Way: Racism!
David Limbaugh: This Isn't About Rush
How to Have a Race War
Question the Collaborationist Media
"Bank of America Corp. Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Lewis won’t receive a salary or bonus for 2009, a decision based on advice from U.S. government pay supervisor Kenneth Feinberg," reports Bloomberg.com.
Hence, our "Claw Back" Question of the Day:
If the White House can claw back money from those who have earned it, can Americans claw back power from a president who has usurped it?
Related
David Limbaugh: The Real Crisis
National Obama Socialism
WorldNetDaily reports:
The man chosen by the Obama administration to head the Department of Education's Office of Safe Schools was an activist with the radical pro-homosexual organization Act Up, known for its aggressive badgering of those who don't support the homosexual lifestyle, according to a new report.
Mass Resistance, a pro-family organization in Massachusetts that has battled over homosexual agenda points there, has posted online a report and video documenting Kevin Jennings' participation in the extremist organization.
The video shows Jeff Davis, Jennings' "partner," addressing a banquet and saying of Jennings, "He was a member of Act Up. Act Up! So it's like -- you know -- here's a big gay activist. BIG gay activist!."
Here's the video.
Read the rest of "'Safe Schools' Chief Was Member of Radical Act Up" at WorldNetDaily.
Related
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
OneNewsNow reports:
Last month, the Orange County Board of Education voted unanimously (5-0) to oppose the creation of Harvey Milk Day. Dr. Alexandria Coronado, chairman of that board, says she is "absolutely furious" that the homosexual community is claiming that passage of the Harvey Milk bill is a civil rights victory.
"I think it just absolutely denigrates the entire civil rights movement. Homosexuality is not a civil right," Coronado emphasizes.
"I don't remember the last time that a homosexual person was forced to move out of their seat on a public bus, like Rosa Parks. And I don't remember the last time that a homosexual person or student . . . was forced to go to a segregated school, as in the case of Mendez v. Westminster, which took place right here in Orange County, California."
Related
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
"The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a U.S. non-profit Muslim activist group associated with Islamist terrorist groups such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, is reeling under new allegations of highly suspect activity," writes Connie Hair at Human Events.
"In a big presser yesterday, spurred by the release of a new book, Reps. Sue Myrick (R-N.C.), John Shadegg (R-Ariz.), Paul Broun (R-Ga.) and Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) yesterday asked federal officials to investigate the actions and non-profit status of the controversial group," Hair continues.
"The allegations are contained in a new book, Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld that’s Conspiring to Islamize America, by bestselling author Paul Sperry and veteran federal investigator and counter-terrorism specialist Paul David Gaubatz. The book says its information was obtained during a six-month undercover sting investigation and 12,000 pages of documentation including CAIR internal memos and emails."
Robert M. Goldberg at American Spectator shares 8 things Americans might want to know about the "America's Health Future Act," which passed out of the Senate Finance Committee yesterday.
The Act is supposed to be "good for you," Goldberg notes. But missing in a set of committee "talking points," he writes, is "any straight talk about how the bill drives up health care spending, rations care and will force people to wait longer for less time with fewer doctors. Call it the Senate Finance Committee's 'Snowe Job.'"
Related
Hey Rove and O'Reilly: Wise Up on Constitution, Healthcare
Why We Revolt: Show Me the Healthcare Bill
Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly discussed tonight on the "Factor" the non-read healthcare bill that passed a Senate committee today.
Do you know how many times the word "Constitution" passed their lips?
Zero times. Not once.
Is it not incumbent upon Congress and the White House to demonstrate chapter and verse where the U.S. Constitution authorizes the federal government to overhaul the U.S. healthcare industry?
And apart from such authorization is not such an imposition a form of tyranny?
I am willing to stand corrected, but is this not the crucial issue? Freedom. Constitutionality. Form and freedom under God.
Performances such as Rove's tonight suggest that he may be insufficiently aware of this principial imperative. Hence, by implication, the potential irrelevancy and end of the Republican Party as we know it. A death by a thousand pragmatic cuts -- unless it reemerges as a champion of Constitutional government rooted in Declarational norms.
Likewise, Bill O'Reilly -- whose journalism I appreciate -- does not seem to understand the ongoing Constitutional crisis that is represented by unending federal intrusions into the lives and upon the freedoms of the people, the states, and our individual liberties under God.
The crucial issue is freedom, not finances. Every tinhorn tyrant has a PR department willing to sell the positive and fair finances of the compassionate regime's latest agenda action point, be it healthcare, autobahns, or national respect among the nations of the world assembled at the UN.
But the Constitution is not optional, my friends. Not for the Founders. And not for those who would return America to freedom and dignity.
Here's a clue: If the Constitution, as written, is not at the heart of a political program, something is wrong, no matter what proponents might say about the finances or other putative benefits. Have you heard of bait?
"Give Me Healthcare or Give Me Death!"
Yes -- that's how ridiculous and alien to the American spirit and to the human spirit is this politically magnified crisis designed to separate American citizens from freedom, from self-government, from their wallets, and in the end, quality healthcare too. In return, the federal government gets to play God.
Millions of Americans, including the Tea Party people, increasingly understand this. And reject it. The Republicans, and some in the media, might want to wise up.
Related
O'Reilly, Letterman, and the Culture War
Why We Revolt: Show Me the Healthcare Bill
America is waking up. America is beginning to see. But see what?
To see that the Obama Administration is on the wrong side of the Declaration, the Constitution, on the wrong side of the American people as a body politic formed in resistance to tyranny. And finally, on the wrong side of the Creator himself, who endows each of us with "certain unalienable rights" by virtue of having been created in His image.
Even though we human beings are fully capable of shooting ourselves in the foot (what theologians call "sin"), we the people nevertheless are beings of great nobility, of great worth, of great significance, and great creativity.
And even though cracked and broken, we are not junk. The Creator did not waste his time and blood initiating a resistance movement and sending a Son to fight and to set things right. You don't do that for pieces of cosmic junk or meaningless particles of matter in an absurd universe. You do that for magnificient works of art, for irreplaceable, unrepeatable creations of eternal value.
We are shaped in the image of an infinite-personal God, and on that basis we resist any idol of governmental tryanny (or any other kind, including religious) that elevates itself to levels of Diety, such that now that hubris known as "Washington" sees itself as the creator of human rights.
This is idolatry plain and simple, ending in tryanny plain and simple. And by similar measure of plainness and simplicity, a humanity empowered by God our true Creator will resist. This is who we are. We are empowered, not condemned, to be free.
Thus the captives are set free: from slavery, from amoral capitalism, from class warfarism, from Washington-centrism, from rogue principalities and powers, and from "every form of tryanny over the mind of man," as a former President once put it.
Now comes a cry-baby administration unable to face up to a U.S. news group, in a world where dictators and terrorists can do more -- and have done more -- than hit back with a few tough questions or a few inconvenient facts. Now the Obama regime is targeting Fox News. And here is a video report.
Fox News isn't the problem. Fox News is a messenger. And there are more messengers on the way. Millions of them.
Hat tip: Randy's Right
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Send Media a Pink Slip
"Mainstream" Press and the Treason of the Journalists
Collaborationist Watch: The Slave Press
Question the Collaborationist Media
Anderson Cooper and the Crisis of Journalism
What About Obama, Mussolini, and the Unmentionable Herr Hitler?
The Evil Religious Presidents Do
Fascism Is Back
Here's the question:
Should Obama Appoint Homosexuals to Positions of Power to Impose the Homosexual Agenda?
-- Yes
-- No
-- Maybe
Vote Here (via Facebook).
Question: Who Is More Qualified to Be U.S. President?
A) A Nobel Prize Winner Who Shares the "Values" of the World
B) Any Natural Born American Who Affirms the U.S. Constitution (as written) and the Declaration of Independence (as written)
Take the poll here (via Facebook).
"Few spectacles so clearly show the politicization of life than the surreally silly award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama," writes Bruce Walker at American Thinker.
Related
"Honk If You Won a Nobel Peace Prize!"
Pearcey Receives 2 Nobel Peace Prizes
How long before this is a bumper sticker?
Moreover, comments the Herringpost, "I have no respect for the Nobel Peace Prize because it is a tool to promote" their "own socialist agenda which is Anti-Christian and secular progressive."
Bob Unruh reports at WorldNetDaily:
A political activist who was behind the famous Willie Horton advertisement that left Gov. Michael Dukakis' candidacy for president floundering and was among the first to sound the alarm on the need for Bill Clinton's impeachment says the United States is collapsing around its citizens right now, but there is a defense.
"Make no mistake. We're now in the middle of a bloodless coup – the takeover of an entire nation by the hate-America crowd – a cold-blooded gang that despises America's prosperity, our standing in the world, our trust in God and our generosity and goodness," says political activist Floyd Brown in a column in WND
His suggested defense is nothing more or less than a strike at the emperor, plans which are detailed on the new Impeach Obama Campaign website.
Troy Silva writes at American Thinker:
Kevin Jennings is Safe School Czar not by some vetting breakdown.
He was an official in the Obama Campaign as it Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual fund-raising co-chair. For twenty years until 2008, Jennings succeeded on a massive scale at pro-homosexual propagandizing of school children.
His adeptness and accomplishment at semantic deception are extraordinary.
Related
Audio: Obama "Safe Schools" Czar Criticizes Schools for Promoting Heterosexuality
Child Molesting: From Pelosi to Polanski to Jennings
Obama "Safe Schools" Chief Praised Child-Sex Promoter
The Evil Religious Presidents Do
"Faggot" Easy to Defend: Surprising Help From Secular America
No McDonald's Today
Rosie O'Donnell's Oppressive Coat
Jeffrey Lord concludes at American Spectator:
For a certain segment of American society -- a segment once presumed to be on the far fringes of an unimaginably unacceptable morality -- the idea that it's OK to molest children of either sex is just not a big deal.
Child molesting simply wasn't a big deal for Harry Hay. Nor for Nancy Pelosi, now the Speaker of the House. Not for Roman Polanski, or, apparently, for his famous friends in the filmmaking community either. Or for Kevin Jennings, he the school safety czar.
And not, apparently and shockingly, for the Obama Administration.
Wow.
Read "Pelosi to Polanski to Jennings: Why Sean Hannity Is Right" at American Spectator.
Related
Obama to Address Homosexual "Rights" Group
Obama "Safe Schools" Chief Praised Child-Sex Promoter
"President Obama on Monday sidestepped calls for his participation in a national march on Washington for gay rights by opting instead to give the keynote address at a dinner for the major gay rights advocacy group, Human Rights Campaign, on the eve of the event," reports the Washington Times.
Related
Obama "Safe Schools" Chief Praised Child-Sex Promoter
Betraying Christ: Obama Affirms Perverted Sex
The Evil Religious Presidents Do
"Faggot" Easy to Defend: Surprising Help From Secular America
No McDonald's Today
Rosie O'Donnell's Oppressive Coat
"Sources tell Newsmax the Obama administration is muzzling its top military leaders, and keeping them from publicly airing their views on how to fight the war in Afghanistan," reports David A. Patten at Newmax.
"The administration's primary target: top Afghanistan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal, whose speech in London last week apparently caught administration officials off guard," writes Patten. "In fact, The Daily Telegraph reported that Obama's advisers were 'shocked and angered' by McChrystal's speech."
Read the story at Newsmax.
"A federal judge in California today listened to government lawyers argue that a lawsuit over President Obama's eligibility should be immediately dismissed but refused to grant their request, saying he would make his decision and announce it later," reports Bob Unruh at WorldNetDaily.
"The result came this morning from U.S. District Judge David Carter, who already has set a tentative trial date for the dispute Jan. 26, 2010," Unruh writes. "The judge also already had lawyers draw up a tentative schedule for hearings and deadlines in preparation for the trial."
Read the entire story from WorldNetDaily.
Related
Rush: "Obama Has Yet to Prove He's a Citizen"
Farah: Where's the Eligibility Evidence?
Friday night highschool football in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, took a backseat to a battle of another sort in the bleachers and on the sidelines.
Since 9-11 the Lakeview-Fort Oglethorpe Warrior's cheerleaders have been using scripture verses on the banners that the football team bursts through at the beginning of each game. However, that tradition has been banned by school authorities who fear a hefty lawsuit if they allow the practice to continue. Officials nixed the banners after receiving a complaint from one individual who claims she was offended by the verses. (cheerleaders perform for local news video)
In a surprising turn of events, community members have showed their overwhelming support for the cheerleaders who have since become media celebrities. A local youth pastor, Brad Scott, started a facebook page in their support and organized a rally at a local Chick-fil-a. That rally had to be moved when more than 1,100 supporters showed up. Now in another overwhelming show of support, members of the community showed up to Friday nights football game to cheer the cheerleaders.
Here's the high school website.
Related
Why We Revolt: Cheerleaders Violate "Separation of Church and State"?
In "Palin's Revenge: Who's Laughing Now?," C. Edmund Wright at American Thinker writes:
Now correct me if I am wrong, but didn't I hear the Jurassic media bury the career of Sarah Palin just last July? And weren't they joined in this mockery by the so-called conservative elites like David Brooks and Karl Rove and Joe Scarborough and so on?
Wasn't Maureen Dowd just delirious in fact that the wicked witch (of her world) was dead?
You betcha.
After Palin decided to resign from office, it was all supposed to be downhill for the former governor of Alaska.
And yet, "every single ramification of Palin's resignation has come up aces," Wright concludes.
He has a word for it: "Brilliance."
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Sarah Palin Facebook: 875,000+ and What That Means
Rush: Media Fear Sarah Palin
Anti-Palin Media, Hong Kong, and the Decline of Journalism
Sarah Palin's 1st Presidential Speech
As most people on Planet Earth now know, the Olympics will samba their way to Rio come 2016, despite the personal intervention of El Presidente Barack Obama himself, up close and personal in Copenhagen.
This means many things, among them this from the Washington Times:
The news of Chicago's early ouster was not good for Mr. Obama, political analysts said.
"I think this is instructive about how seriously the international community takes President Obama," said John Feehery, a former aide to Republican Dennis Hastert. "It seems they don't take him very seriously."
Mr. Feehery, a Chicago native, said the president's decision to "desperately swoop to dramatically save the Olympic bid backfired."
"Backfired"? That's already climbing the charts for understatement of the year.
What happened to Obama on the world stage today may well happen again here in the U.S. in 2010 and 2012. In fact, judging by the ferment on the ground, in communities, and on the airwaves, it looks as though a wave of freedom is gathering strength day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment, from faith to faith.
The Democrats, the Liberals, and the secularists -- and squishy Republicans -- have awakened a sleeping giant, as a strong American woman stood up and told a deer-in-the-headlights Sen. Arlen Specter not too long ago.
And that sleeping giant remembers something about the Declaration, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and about a Real Creator who has endowed each and every one of us with "certain unalienable rights."
We are remembering who we are.
Creatures of nobility and freedom -- with hard-wired aspirations of individuality and creativity and liberty one nation under God, such that no federal bureaucrat and no empire on any Potomac can ever hope to satisfy.
We are remembering how to grab ahold of God and revolt against tyranny and against enemies of freedom foreign and domestic.
Viva freedom! Viva dignity! Viva the Constitution! Viva the Declaration! Viva the Bill of Rights!
And, yes: Viva Samba! Rio's gain could be ours as well.
The International Olympic Committee read the Obama healthcare plan.
Meanwhile, Obama's loss is Rio's gain.
From WorldNetDaily:
Politico's Ben Smith found it newsworthy that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin chose a "partisan evangelical" Christian to co-author her upcoming best-seller, but somehow he and the mainstream media have decided that serious evidence suggesting an unrepentant Marxist terrorist had a primary role in President Obama's highly acclaimed literary memoir is of no interest.
Not a single mainstream reviewer or political editor has so much as mentioned the controversy over authorship of Dreams from My Father that was resurrected last week when a major new book reported Obama sought the literary assistance of William Ayers, founder of the radical Weather Underground group, points out WND columnist Jack Cashill.
Read the entire story from WND.
A fun project from the Claire Booth Luce Policy Institute. Here's the calendar. More here.
I can think of an additional woman extremely well-suited for such a calendar -- though, as most true conservatives are, she's quite radically human, free-thinking, and Declarational.
Dave Welch, founder of the U.S. Pastor Council, writes at WorldNetDaily:
One of the country's most articulate and credible voices on the threat of radical Islam within our borders stated last week that it is the greatest threat to our nation today beyond any other domestic issues we are addressing. In the strictly national security and geopolitical contexts, this person was right. As she stated, government takeover of health care and other industries are not a concern to those who are dead.
I'll have to admit, however, that my spirit rejected the notion that radical Islam is THE greatest threat to America any more than it was when Muhammad's hordes were sweeping on horseback through northern Africa, the Middle East and into western Europe a millennia ago. Imperialist Islam has been defeated and contained before and certainly can be again.
The question is whether there are as many Christians left in America willing to live and die for our faith, families and freedom as there are orthodox Muslims willing to kill and die for theirs.
The pathetic preaching that has created a generation of shallow, self-focused professing followers of Jesus Christ has done far more damage to our national security than any conspiracies of men of any religion or no religion, any race and any creed could do.
Related
Francis Schaeffer: The Central Problem of Our Age
Francis Schaeffer: A Student's Appreciation of a Distinct Voice
Breitbart TV has this video of community organizers apparently praying to Barack Obama: "Hear Our Cry, Obama . . . Deliver Us, Obama . . ." But is this what they are saying? See update below.
Update -- See the following "Editor's Note" from Breitbart:
We've updated this post with the longer version of the original event. As you'll see in the comments and related links there is a debate over what is actually being said. Does the crowd say, "Hear our cry, Obama" and "Deliver us Obama?" Or are they saying "Oh God?" In the longer version the first two repetitions seem to have a distinct "uh" sound at the end that resonates as "Obama." The later repetitions are a little fuzzier. Did some of the religious leaders present become uneasy? Or was there a mix of what was being said? Read some of the blogger analysis below. What do you think?
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Cult in the City: Obama
"A Christian advocacy group says about 80 pastors have preached partisan political sermons -- daring the Internal Revenue Service to revoke their churches' tax exempt status," reports AP.
Few actions seem more timely, more humane, more liberating, more biblical -- and more patriotic today -- than Americans questioning authority and defying government when it violates the Constitution, shreds the Declaration, and sets itself up as the Creator and source of human rights, including the right of free speech.
And later on -- O Defiant Ones -- when your educated, free, creative, and responsible kids and grandkids full of life and humanity under God ask what you did in the war, you'll have something to say. The blessings of the fathers will be visited upon the children.
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Politics From the Pulpit
Joshua Rhett Miller reports at Fox News:
A song about President Obama that was performed by a group of young New Jersey students and has led to charges of indoctrination was videotaped and posted on the Internet without authorization, a district official told parents.
"The performance and the videotaping at the B. Bernice Young Elementary School in Burlington, N.J., have sparked a review by school officials, according to a letter to parents from Christopher Manno, Burlington Township's superintendent of schools.
"We are carefully evaluating what occurred and will implement any additional needed procedures to prevent children's images in school from being publicly posted without permission," Manno wrote on Friday. "We will also provide reasonable direction and guidelines so that classroom activities will not give the appearance of promoting a particular political perspective."
Is this an example of one fox videotaped in the hen house -- and other foxes complaining about the videotape?
About the only thing missing from the video were images of the glorious Obama walking among the children and patting them on their heads.
Didn't that glorious leader of Iraq -- what, Saddam Hussein -- do that sort of thing? Ah, don't worry. He was just a guy from the neighborhood.
If parents and neighbors are skeptical, good. That's precisley what they are expected to be as free and independent thinkers created in the image of the God who endows each of us with "certain unalienable rights."
By the way, one more thing is missing in the video: Education.
Read the whole story.
"Rasmussen Reports has a poll out today showing opposition to President Obama's health plan at 56 percent, and support at 41 percent," writes David Freddoso at the Washington Examiner. "That's the lowest level of support so far this year."
Here is "Support for Health Care Plan Hits New Low" at Rasmussen Reports.
"As President Obama fumbled badly at the UN and G-8 last week, Sarah Palin began redefining herself as presidential timber," writes James Lewis at American Thinker.
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"Newly discovered evidence shows the radical advocacy group ACORN has a man in the Obama White House," writes Matthew Vadum at American Spectator.
"This power behind the throne is longtime ACORN operative Patrick Gaspard. He holds the title of White House political affairs director, the same title Karl Rove held in President Bush's White House.
"Evidence shows that years before he joined the Obama administration, Gaspard was ACORN boss Bertha Lewis's political director in New York."
The challenge, of course, is not just the man, but the mentality, a mentality that has little use for Constitutional limits on government or for Declaration norms and content for human liberty.
This challenge concerns not just the mentality of one man, but the mentality of Barack Obama and unknown numbers of ACORN or ACORN-like personnel now occupying positions of power in U.S. government, in the Democratic Party, and in the collaborationist media. Etc.
There is work to be done. A free and dignified people endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights must rise up to resist and replace not just these people but also this intellectually and ethically challenged mentality so harmful to freedom, to each of us, and to our posterity.
Uproot ACORN. Replace it with the Tree of Liberty.
Read the entire article by Matthew Vadum.
Related
Atlantic: The End of ACORN
Obama Campaign Scrubbed Website to Hide ACORN Ties
Video Shows ACORN Founder Plotting America's Downfall
Megan McArdle writes:
Atlantic correspondent Wendy Kaminer has a fairly scathing piece noting that ACORN has had problems for a long time -- and that its defenders have always responded by dismissing any problems as "minor" [hmm ... "distractions"?] and complaining that partisan interests are harming all the fine work it does. Are the people who go after it partisan? Undoubtedly, as were the people who exposed problems at Halliburton, etc. But when your workers are caught on tape offering to help you smuggle your illegal underage prostitutes across the border, impugning the motives of the tapers hardly suffices.
ACORN belongs in the woodchipper. And keep the Big Gov't woodchipper handy.
Hat tip: Big Government
Related
Obama Campaign Scrubbed Website to Hide ACORN Ties
Video Shows ACORN Founder Plotting America's Downfall
AP reports that "President Barack Obama is offering Iran 'a serious, meaningful dialogue' over its disputed nuclear program, while warning Tehran of grave consequences from a united global front."
Well, that ought to put the fear of Allah in Ahmadinejad.
From OneNewsNow:
Sunday services may be a bit different this weekend in some churches across the U.S.
September 27 is "Pulpit Freedom Sunday." According to senior counsel Erik Stanley of the Alliance Defense Fund, it is a time when pastors can stand in their pulpits and proclaim the entire truth of the gospel -- even as it applies to candidates in elections.
"It really flows from the fact that pastors have a right to speak freely from their pulpits without fearing government censorship or intimidation -- and that no one should be able to intimidate pastors into giving up their constitutional rights," the attorney explains.
The Creator is, of course, a public figure. He is not stuck somewhere inside a "religious" closet, in obedience to the ACLU or MSNBC.
And He cares about liberating the whole person from sin, death, and decay, as expressed in our relationships as persons across the coherence of our private and public lives -- as fathers and mothers, teachers and students, pastors and politicians, artists and scientists, and all the rest.
The Leader of the Resistance himself could not have been more clear: "Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation" (Mark 16:15). That includes pulpits. Even in America. Even on Sundays. And the rest of the week, too. Across the whole of our lives.
Living as a free, dignified, and whole people in community with our Creator has consequences. Among them are what our Founders called "The Blessings of Liberty." This is one reason freethinkers rejoice. And why tyrants with all their god-talk tremble.
"An innovative new campaign to alert Congress of widespread grass-roots opposition to massive new spending plans as well as other objectionable and intrusive legislation is already responsible -- in the first 24 hours -- for the distribution of 500,000 'pink slip' notices to members of the House and Senate," reports WorldNetDaily.
Here's an attractive announcement page for the campaign.
Read more about Send Congress a Pink Slip.
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O'Reilly, Letterman, and the Culture War
Who thinks the American people ought to jump in the Constitution, turn on the ignition, slap it in gear, step on the gas, and run over the out-of-control federal government?
Not once. But twice. Leave Declaration treadmarks all up and down the Mall, Pennsylvania Avenue, and the White House grounds.
If it worked for Rush Limbaugh against AlGore last night on the Leno show, maybe it'll work for the American people against the Washington establishment.
Starting now. Then in 2010. And then however long it takes thereafter to drive oppression from our midst.
Ben Johnson writes at FrontPage:
Barack Obama's UN speech advanced a docrinaire left-wing foreign policy that will hamstring American defense, further sidlines the economy, and leave the nation relying on "law enforcement" to chase down terrorists after the fact. His anti-American statements were offensive, but his substantive proposals could do far more damage.
Read the entire article.
"New York Magazine today implicated WND in the murder of a Census worker in Kentucky," reports WorldNetDaily. "The article also linked Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage and Rep. Michele Bachmann with the crime. The four are suspected of creating an anti-government climate that led directly to the attack."
This being so, all you pro-freedom, pro-Declaration, pro-Constitution, pro-Bill of Rights, and pro-Creator-who-endows-every-human-being-with-"certain unalienable rights" people may want to contact a law firm. After all, you too may well be implicated in fostering an "anti-government" climate.
And those of you who wear glasses, know how to read, and can think freely for yourselves may want to watch your back, as well.
I recommend the firm of Washington, Jefferson, Patton, Lee, and Madison. Their 82nd Airborne research department is tops. They've done really good work in the past and could well be just the thing for current challenges.
Here's the story from WorldNetDaily.
"House Republicans are seeking a congressional investigation and information from the White House to determine whether the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) pushed politics in a conference call with potential grant recipients," reports CNSNews.com.
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Michelangelo, Schaeffer, and the Kingdom of Washington
Fireproof: Reel Rebel Upsets Tinseltown Stereotypes
Jack Cashill writes at American Thinker:
In his new book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage, best-selling celebrity journalist Christopher Andersen has blown a huge hole in the Obama genius myth without intending to do so.
Relying on inside sources, quite possibly Michelle Obama herself, Andersen describes how Dreams came to be published -- just as I had envisioned in my articles on the authorship of Dreams. With the deadline pressing, Michelle recommended that Barack seek advice from "his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers." . . .
Andersen continues, "In the end, Ayers's contribution to Barack's Dreams From My Father would be significant -- so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers' own writing."
One wonders how any self-respecting, truthful person can allow his or her reputation for smarts, much less genius, to be constructed upon the work of others (whether the others are willing or otherwise). And yet there are such people, known people -- here in the Washington area and beyond -- including, to be fair, both Christians and non-Christians.
It's all part of the deception that occurs all too routinely in "authorship," "worldview thinking," column-"writing," radio "commentary," and all the rest.
What, you think these folks so often marked by a culture that doesn't have time to read legislation before they vote somehow have time, energy, and space to write books, columns, etc., etc?
And yet, if these "gods" are to maintain the pretense of having the necessary smarts to save the world from their Washington offices or Washington "ministries," they must create and maintain an image of genius, compassion, humility, "spirituality," and so on.
Hence the necessity of the unseen people doing unseen work, often well-compensated, down in the basement or on contract out in the hinterlands somewhere. Hence ghosted work is parlayed into speeches, retreaded into devotionals, sublimated into training programs, and upgraded in the latest greatest book "written" by Mister Big. And it all goes on the website (bio: "author of 34 books!"), as a humble service for the readers (i.e., potential donors), of course.
If you wonder why secularists laugh at and scorn Christians in Washington, it's partly because the veterans know the score, know the pretense, and are more than happy for ammunition handed to them by which to ridicule, distract, and attack. This pretense, these phonies, and these pretenders hurt many people.
Fundraising machines fueled by Big Names created by PR teams, researchers, and ghostwriters are no way to redeem the culture, folks.
Especially if out of the other side of his mouth Mr. Worldview Expert is telling sinners they need to shape up and accept He who is the Truth. A corrupt political culture is downstream from many things, including a corrupt, secularized, Madison Avenue "Christian" culture.
Fortunately, we can do better and have models available in the likes of a C.S. Lewis and a Francis Schaeffer who demonstrate the authenticity, efficacy, and spirituality of real work by real people.
Until the pretender model of "ministry" is cast aside -- and truth is practiced and not just preached -- it is difficult to see how the God of Truth can bless those who dissemble even while proclaiming on street corners that they move forward under his banner. Claiming the blessing of God -- and having the blessing of God -- are, of course, two different things.
For more on this, you might consult chapter 13 ("Substantial Healing in the Church") of True Sprituality by Francis Schaeffer and chapter 13 ("True Spirituality and Christian Worldview") of Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey.
Related
Francis Schaeffer: "The Central Problem of Our Age"
Francis Schaeffer: A Student's Appreciation of a Distinct Approach
What Can We Learn From Francis Schaeffer?
"During the first nine months of his Presidency," writes David Catron at American Spectator, Barack Obama has accomplished the seemingly impossible: he has proven that a politician can be even less trustworthy than Bill Clinton."
Catron continues:
The broken promises of the latter were relatively conventional by Democrat standards.
Clinton ran on a middle class tax cut, for example, and promptly raised taxes. Dishonest, of course, but not terribly surprising.
Obama's policy pirouettes, however, have taken us to an entirely new level of presidential perfidy.
The man has reversed himself on virtually every position he espoused during last year's campaign.
And nowhere have these reversals been more brazen than in the case of health care. On a host of reform issues, including insurance mandates, taxing health benefits and patient choice,
Obama has demonstrated that his campaign rhetoric was utterly disingenuous.
Read the entire article.
"The federal government has suspended door-to-door interviews in the area where a U.S. census worker was found hanged from a tree in rural Kentucky," writes Sarah Netter at ABCNews.
"The FBI is investigating whether Bill Sparkman, 51, was the victim of anti-government sentiment. His body was found near a cemetery in Clay County Sept. 12 with the letters 'Fed' scrawled in his chest," says Netter.
"Predictably, the usual suspects are suggesting that Rush Limbaugh threw the rope over the branch and Glenn Beck tied the knot," notes Confederate Yankee.
"The only problem with this theory," writes CY, is "lack of evidence, lack of evience, and lack of evidence."
CY suspects "that when they do find a motive, it will have very little to do with politics and quite a bit to do with him stumbling across marijuana farming, meth labs, or moonshining."
That seems fair enough. We await further investigation.
Meanwhile, let us not glide too quickly over the phrase "anti-government sentiment."
Millions of Americans today are pro-liberty, pro-Constitution, pro-Bill of Rights, and pro-Declaration of Independence. They stand at the strategic center of what makes America America.
Theirs is a "yes" that is about respecting choice, self-determination, freedom, and dignity.
But this is also a "no." Not a "no" to "government," but a "no" to tyranny. The "sentiment" is anti-slavery, not anti-government.
As our Founders understood, there is a difference between self-government in community with a Creator who endows all of us with "certain unalienable rights," as opposed to oppressive government that imposes a train of un-Constitutional abuses from an increasingly alien and inhumane establishment whose political headquarters are located in Washington, D.C.
Protect life, protect freedom. Love of neighbor in community with our Creator challenges each of us to do both. Evil-doers and slave-masters may not like it, but let love and justice roll down anyway.
According to Jonathan Cheng and Alex Frangos, writing in the Wall Street Journal, Palin
. . . described her political philosophy as a "common-sense conservatism," and said the free-market policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher should be guides for how to get out of the current economic situation. "Liberalism holds that there is no human problem that government can't fix if only the right people are put in charge," she said.
This is well and good, no doubt. And yet friends of freedom must ask: If the Cheng and Frangos description of the speech is fair, is Sarah Palin meeting the challenge of tyranny at the crucial point when she describes her political philosophy as "common-sense conservatism"?
Please correct me if I am wrong, but is not the American Founding rather uncommon sense? That is to say, does not that Founding take on rather specific and uncommon content in the Declaration, Constitution, and Bill of Rights?
Thinking of this primarily in the political realm, how can America be refounded, reliberated, and rehumanized without an advance clearly rooted and clearly articulated in terms of the Founders' amazing emancipatory vision, with specific content regarding unalienable rights endowed by our Creator, and so on?
A "common-sense conservatism" consistent with the views of a Reagan clearly is an important step in the right direction. It is a move forward toward the philosophical universe inhabited by the Founders but despised by the likes of Obama, the modern Democratic Party, and elements within the GOP.
And yet one senses that America must purposefully move much closer to her electrifying philosophical home, as it were, if we the people are to throw off the shackles of the Washington establishment and recover that unique balance of governmental form and individual freedom so strategically and revolutionarily advanced by the Founding generation.
We await a transcript of Palin's remarks. Meanwhile, here's one cheer for her willingness to take the heat in attempting to advance the cause of freedom, and another cheer for moving toward the philosophic center of the American experiment. A third cheer awaits a clear, consistent, and practiced emphasis on the Founders' vision and the worldview upon which they and human liberty stand.
* Here are excerpts from her speech in Hong Kong.
"Obama science czar John Holdren stated in a college textbook he co-authored that in conditions of emergency, compulsory abortion would be sustainable under the U.S. Constitution, even with Supreme Court review," reports WorldNetDaily.
Sure. That's what the Founders had in mind. Liberate themselves and their posterity from tryanny so that pregnant women could impose the act of ultimate tyranny upon preborn American citizens endowed by their Creator with "certain unalienable rights."
This overreach, this abuse of the Constitution, this kind of inhumanity imposed upon the American people is one of the reasons for rising resistance to Obama. (Along with the "racism," of course.)
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Brent Baker writes at Newsbusters:
David Letterman, who still regularly ridicules former President George W. Bush -- and has even accused him of committing “war crimes” and lacking “humanity” -- didn't hide his affinity for Barack Obama during his Monday night Late Show interview of the President, while remaining unable to contain his disgust for Bush.
“I can't tell you how satisfying it is to watch you work,” a beaming Letterman gushed to Obama at the conclusion of the program.
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"House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Sunday that the health-care plan that President Barack Obama is pushing in Congress is now dead and will not pass," reports Terry Jeffrey at CNSNews.com.
Questions to consider:
1) How can Americans be sure the un-Constitutional attempt by Democrats to overhaul healthcare truly is dead? Where is the stake in the heart?
2) Why does this death, or lack thereof, imply for the attempted secular-socialist Big government assault on liberty in America? Where are we now in the struggle to "refound" the American experiment in human freedom and dignity?
The Facebook page of the former governor of Alaska shows 875,009 supporters as of 1:23 pm eastern standard time.
What does this mean?
It means millions of Americans are looking for answers to how to refound (hat tip: Glenn Beck) the American experiment in Constitutional liberty over against Washington tyranny.
And it means millions of Americans are looking outside of Washington for solutions.
On both accounts: Well done.
The resurgence of a humane and dignified liberty -- rooted in a Creator (and not the secular state) who endows the rights -- is just getting started. But, again, well done thus far.
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Apparently, having an internet eraser at Obama Central is helpful when called upon to, ahem, "Fight the Smears."
Hat tip: Biggovernment
"While ACORN remains riddled in scandal, lawmakers have voted to cut off federal funding to the group, the U.S. Census Bureau has severed ties to the organization -- and the White House has blasted its behavior as 'unnacceptable'," reports WorldNetDaily.
"But just how extensive are President Obama's personal ties to ACORN?"
Go here for a timeline that may not appear at the website of the White House, MSNBC, or other unapproved media outlets.
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If a thug with a knife or gun tries to get you inside his car, don't.
Speak up, speak out, resist.
If a politician with a podium tries to get you inside his tyranny, don't.
Speak up, speak out, resist.
Resistance is exactly what power-grubbers -- thief, thug, or politician -- do not want to see or hear. It's inefficient. It's inconvenient. A distraction. And it may well call attention to malappropriate designs.
Those malappropriate designs may be directed at your beautiful bride. Or they may be directed at the Creator's beautiful gift of freedom. The humane and loving person resists.
"A great many Americans -- a majority, according to recent polls -- are just plain fed up with the direction in which the Obama administration, and its liberal-Dem majority supporters in Congress, are trying to shove this nation," writes Richard N. Weltz at American Thinker.
"But don't speak up or speak out if you are among them," Weltz continues.
"According to former president Jimmy Carter, that makes you a racist. According to current harridan Nancy Pelosi, that makes you an inciter to violence."
Indeed. There's something about socialist, big government tyranny -- red or yellow, black or white -- that does not quite sit well with those who remember something about freedom under God, about a Declaration of inalienable rights, and about a Constitution designed to keep tyranny chained.
"Racist!" is a way of shutting you up and getting you inside the car.
"Violence!" is a way of shutting you up and getting you inside the System.
Resistance, however, is a way of not qoing quietly into the night of tyranny.
Rebelling against the knife, the gun, the thug, and the power-monger is a way to protect yourself, your bride, your God-given freedom.
We your neighors hear you. We hear your voice. Our eyes turn toward you. We see your face. We resist with you.
Thug, put down your knife. We would like to talk.
Thug, put down your gun. We would like to discuss.
Politician, listen.
You may shout. You may scream. You may warn. You may threaten. Eyes may moisten.
But we resist your tearful tyranny. We know the teeth are not far away.
The United States already allows an abortion barbarism that imposes death and destruction upon millions of preborn human beings.
Meanwhile, this in from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: "I have concerns about some of the language that is being used . . ."
Here she is on video.
* For additional discussion, see these comments at Facebook.
Hat tip: Drudge Report
Bruce Walker pipes up at American Thinker:
The Silent Majority forty years ago was cowed, afraid, and ashamed.
Its members, the majority of good Americans, felt the sting of being called a racist, sexist, fascist, or whatever casual insult the Left sought to hurl.
The voices of conservative America now include many black Americans, huge numbers of women, lots of Jews, and more Hispanics.
These Americans have seen how the Left mistreats Clarence Thomas and Sarah Palin: they know that any bigotry that exists in American politics is primary on the left.
Human beings were created by God to take this life by the horns and live it to its fullest -- not as self-idolatrous, relativistic inhumane money-grubbers, power-grubbers, or community-organizing-grubbers -- but as free people endowed by our Creator with "certain unalienable rights," to the great consternation of Big Government, Big Tyranny, and Big Secularism.
The rebels of the resistance under our true Creator -- which is not the State or the impersonal, heartless cosmos -- are finding their voice again. That's good for us. Bad for the Statists.
The freedom that chooses love condemns all pretend messiahs.
No self-respecting, free-thinking, rebellious human being created in the image of God and endowed by our Creator with "certain unalienable rights" should fall for such nonsense.
Andrew Cline helps explain why at American Spectator.
For a higher view of the person as a human being called by our Creator to sales resistance and to questioning all things on the basis of the evidence, see "Christmas Spirit in the Dirt."
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Jimmy Carter and the Content of Mr. Obama's Policies
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Lloyd Marcus, a human being with black skin pigmentation who was also a member of the Tea Party Express, writes:
I traveled on the Tea Party Express tour bus as a singer/songwriter, entertainer and spokesperson; 16 states, 34 rallies in two weeks. I experienced vicious racial verbal attacks, not from the tea party protesters. The racial hate expressed against me all came from the left, people who support President Obama's [sic] radial socialist agenda.
By the way, this article contains one of my favorite hand-made poster signs: "Lloyd Marcus for President."
Read the entire article by Lloyd Marcus (website) at American Thinker.
Related
Jimmy Carter and the Content of Mr. Obama's Policies
Racism! Racism! And Oh by the Way: Racism!
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Matthew Vadum writes at American Spectator:
America's worst living ex-president, Jimmy Carter, says that Rep. Joe Wilson's (R-S.C.) overhyped-to-the-endth degree "you lie" outburst during the Dear Leader's recent address to Congress, was "based on racism."
My sense is that, unfortunately for Mr. Carter, very few open-minded free-thinking Americans regard his utterances with any kind of weight.
Also, I am aware of no evidence to back up his accusation that an "overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man."
I am aware that Mr. Obama was elected president by the people of this nation whom Mr. Carter now accuses.
I am also aware that it may be possible that opposition to Mr. Obama's policies may have something to do with the un-Constitutional content of those policies and not with the color of his skin.
The possibility of a non-race-based approach to people and ideas may offend members of the KKK and others. Alas.
We respect our elders, and Mr. Carter appears to hold his view with sincerity. But even if sincere, Mr. Carter is sadly and predictably wrong.
It is unfortunate to see a grown man publicly embarrass himself in this way.
Related
Racism! Racism! And Oh by the Way: Racism!
How to Have a Race War
George Will explains why "an increasing number of Americans do not believe that [Obama] believes what he says."
"An immigration enforcement organization is calling on President Barack Obama to publicly apologize to Congress, the media, and the entire nation for lying about illegal immigrants not having access to healthcare reform benefits," reports OneNewsNow.
Connie Hair writes at Human Events:
In a move dripping hypocrisy, Democrats in the House are poised to introduce a floor resolution today to condemn Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) for his outburst during the President’s health care speech to a joint session of Congress last week.
Read the entire article.
As the massive protest last Saturday in Washington, D.C., indicates, millions of Americans are reawakening to the calling to take seriously their stewardship of freedom, their stewardship of hard-earned livelihoods, and their stewardship of a nation that challenges history because we and our Forefathers respect the Creator's information on how to found a nation of liberty under God.
Now comes a rather dysfunctional, simplistic, blame-Americans-first counterattack: Racism, racism, racism, racism, and oh by the way, racism. Please.
"Racism" is just another word for nothing else to say.
It's a scare word employed not to communicate but to silence.
It's the reactionary recourse of minds that are empty, power that is threatened, and fear that is palpable.
It's the watchword of dysfunctional demagogues. The voice of impaired ideology. The vein-popping snarl of barking, firehose tyranny.
Those capable of shame will be ashamed of this tactic and flush it down the political toilet. Those not will continue to stink their own house and pollute the community. A course in political-cultural hygiene may be in order.
The rest of us will question authority, maintain a necessary critical distance, evaluate political propositions, and call for a revival of public service on the basis of those Constitutional-Declarational norms and content that form the rulebook of human freedom and dignity.
That's progress. That's human. That's America.
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9/12 a Transformative Event
Whether one is talking tens or hundreds of thousands or a million, the 9/12 event is Washington, D.C., is a people's broadside of liberty across the bow of the un-Constitutional, Creator-denying federal-centric tyranny headquartered and dysfunctionally defended in the National Swamp.
"Sometimes an event occurs which is transformative in a way that everyone who sees it or participates in it instantly is aware of," writes Clarice Feldman at American Thinker. "Yesterday's demonstration was in Washington DC is one of those rare happenings in my opinion."
And, by the way, don't miss the Sarah Palin factor. As Rosslyn Smith, also writing at American Thinker, notes:
The political class often operates on the assumption that only those people who constantly tell other how smart they are actually are have brains. That if you don't relish life in the artificial confines of the District of Columbia and haven't come by to kiss their rings, you therefore must be lacking in the skills needed to govern.
Last year a young Governor who had been more concerned with raising her family than polishing her resume with the right schools and the right career path let the political class know that she was not in the least impressed with their inside the beltway criteria for leadership.
On Saturday a whole lot of people just like her showed up on their own time and their own dime to say it is time to end business as usual in the fetid, corrupt swamp that is Washington, DC.
Read Clarice Feldman and Rosslyn Smith at American Thinker.
Here is Mark Levin, from Thursday's show:
Our country is under attack from the court rooms to the editorial pages of this country, and we are supposed to be upset about what Congressman Joe Wilson shouted? Especially when he said the truth?
Here are recap and show notes for September 10.
From the website: "Listen to Mark's Opening Monologue and his interview w/ Congressman Wilson."
Mark J. Fitzgibbons at American Thinker gets to the point:
In his September 9 address to Congress and the nation on health insurance, President Obama said that under his plan, individuals will be required to carry basic health insurance.
There is no clause in Article I of the Constitution authorizing Congress to craft legislation forcing individuals to purchase insurance.
Fitzgibbons concludes, "Mr. Obama's proposal not only deprives us of a freedom to use our money as we best deem fit, and is therefore authoritarian, but it is unconstitutional as well."
Barack Obama may not be aware of this tragic inconsistency. Or he may not care.
In any case, those who care about Constitutional government and the preservation of liberty upon this planet cannot afford to let this abuse stand.
Related
Pearcey Accepts Obama Healthcare Proposal
Palin on Obamacare Flubbing the Point?
Senator Admits: "No Place in Constitution That Says Healthcare"
I, J. Richard Pearcey, agree with President Barack H. Obama.
He vows that he is "not the first president to take up" the cause of universal healthcare, but that he is "determined to be the last."
Mr. Obama, I accept your proposal: You should be the last president to try to pass nationalized healthcare.
Furthermore, I agree with free-thinkers everywhere that no present or future president who favors liberty over tyranny should ever again seek to impose such a regressive, unhealthy, and un-Constitutional program upon the American people.
"MSNBC commentators voiced support for President Obama’s speech and his health care plan shortly after the speech ended," reports Newsmax.
A few quotes:
* Keith Olbermann: "A touch of greatness."
* Rachel Maddow: "He's bringing a lot of ideas from across the political spectrum."
* Howard Fineman: "Good job of making the case."
Related
Collaborationist Watch: The Slave Press
Question the Collaborationist Media
Anderson Cooper and the Crisis of Journalism
"Just one day after President Obama plans tries to recapture the initiative in the health-care debate debate with a speech to a joint session of Congress, thousands of taxpayers plan to storm Washington, D.C., in a three-day event to take their fight against excessive spending, bailouts, growth of big government and soaring deficits to the front door of the U.S. Capitol," reports WorldNetDaily.
"In a major movement unaffiliated with -- but inspired by -- Fox News' Glenn Beck's 9-12 Project, called the National Taxpayer Protest, thousands of Americans are answering the call and traveling to make their voices heard at Capitol Hill," reports WND. "Sept. 10 marks the kickoff of the three-day march on Washington."
According to Darla Dawald of Grassfire/ResistNet, a group that has helped organize the protest, "Our mission is to present a unified voice of concern over the current administration's policies regarding taxation, our economy, foreign and domestic policy, as well as our individual constitutional rights as American citizens."
Read the news story from WorldNetDaily.
From the Rush Limbaugh radio show:
What we have here first up is a conference call between the editorial page's Kerry Picket at the Washington Times, and the spokesman for the National Endowment for the Arts, Yosi Sergant. And the conversation here is about a conference call in which the NEA tried to recruit artists to push the Obama agenda.
Related
George Will: NEW Pro-Obama Calls Likely Broke Laws -- Video
Official Dishonesty From National Endowment for the Arts
National Endowment for the Arts Trying to Create Cult of Obama
Fireproof: Reel Rebel Upsets Tinseltown Stereotypes
David G. Muller, Jr., argues for a rethink of 20th Century assumptions regarding the left-to-right political spectrum.
"The mental framing device of a political spectrum is not a bad idea in itself. There are indeed relationships among tyranny, liberalism, conservatism, and other political phenomena that lend themselves to depiction on a spectrum. But," he says, "the spectrum must reflect reality."
David Welch, founder of the U.S. Pastor Council, says there's far more at work today in Obama's talk to kids in schools than a simple speech to kids in schools.
That's what the Hollywood director said in Venice, in town at the big film festival to promote his new documentary about Chavez.
"The director has come from making the movie convinced that Mr Chavez does not deserve the description of 'dictator,' despite having survived a coup and having stayed in power for a decade," reports the BBC.
By the way, in a "surprise" visit, Chavez was in Venice too, where he "has been walking the red carpet."
Don't miss the BBC video of a smiling Stone and waving Chavez as together they parade the red carpet in triumphant solidarity.
Neil Braithwaite takes a look at American Thinker:
When Barack Obama told a Missouri crowd last November, "We are five days from fundamentally changing the United States of America," he meant exactly what he said and had a plan to do just that.
What is so striking about that statement is that in order to "fundamentally change" America, Obama will have to destroy the foundation laid by the founding fathers and replace it with one that serves his socialist ideology.
Below is the complete text of remarks President Obama is slated to deliver tomorrow to the schoolchildren of America. Released by the White House.
Prepared Remarks of President Barack Obama
Back to School Event
Arlington, Virginia
September 8, 2009
The President: Hello everyone -- how’s everybody doing today? I’m here with students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. And we’ve got students tuning in from all across America, kindergarten through twelfth grade. I’m glad you all could join us today.
I know that for many of you, today is the first day of school. And for those of you in kindergarten, or starting middle or high school, it’s your first day in a new school, so it’s understandable if you’re a little nervous. I imagine there are some seniors out there who are feeling pretty good right now, with just one more year to go. And no matter what grade you’re in, some of you are probably wishing it were still summer, and you could’ve stayed in bed just a little longer this morning.
I know that feeling. When I was young, my family lived in Indonesia for a few years, and my mother didn’t have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school. So she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday -- at 4:30 in the morning.
Now I wasn’t too happy about getting up that early. A lot of times, I’d fall asleep right there at the kitchen table. But whenever I’d complain, my mother would just give me one of those looks and say, "This is no picnic for me either, buster."
So I know some of you are still adjusting to being back at school. But I’m here today because I have something important to discuss with you. I’m here because I want to talk with you about your education and what’s expected of all of you in this new school year.
Now I’ve given a lot of speeches about education. And I’ve talked a lot about responsibility.
I’ve talked about your teachers’ responsibility for inspiring you, and pushing you to learn.
I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.
I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve.
But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world -- and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.
And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.
Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That’s the opportunity an education can provide.
Maybe you could be a good writer -- maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper -- but you might not know it until you write a paper for your English class. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor -- maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine -- but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class. Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.
And no matter what you want to do with your life -- I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.
And this isn’t just important for your own life and your own future. What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.
You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.
We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that -- if you quit on school -- you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.
Now I know it’s not always easy to do well in school. I know a lot of you have challenges in your lives right now that can make it hard to focus on your schoolwork.
I get it. I know what that’s like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t always able to give us things the other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and felt like I didn’t fit in.
So I wasn’t always as focused as I should have been. I did some things I’m not proud of, and got in more trouble than I should have. And my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse.
But I was fortunate. I got a lot of second chances and had the opportunity to go to college, and law school, and follow my dreams. My wife, our First Lady Michelle Obama, has a similar story. Neither of her parents had gone to college, and they didn’t have much. But they worked hard, and she worked hard, so that she could go to the best schools in this country.
Some of you might not have those advantages. Maybe you don’t have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their job, and there’s not enough money to go around. Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe, or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren’t right.
But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life -- what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home -- that’s no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That’s no excuse for not trying.
Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.
That’s what young people like you are doing every day, all across America.
Young people like Jazmin Perez, from Roma, Texas. Jazmin didn’t speak English when she first started school. Hardly anyone in her hometown went to college, and neither of her parents had gone either. But she worked hard, earned good grades, got a scholarship to Brown University, and is now in graduate school, studying public health, on her way to being Dr. Jazmin Perez.
I’m thinking about Andoni Schultz, from Los Altos, California, who’s fought brain cancer since he was three. He’s endured all sorts of treatments and surgeries, one of which affected his memory, so it took him much longer -- hundreds of extra hours -- to do his schoolwork. But he never fell behind, and he’s headed to college this fall.
And then there’s Shantell Steve, from my hometown of Chicago, Illinois. Even when bouncing from foster home to foster home in the toughest neighborhoods, she managed to get a job at a local health center; start a program to keep young people out of gangs; and she’s on track to graduate high school with honors and go on to college.
Jazmin, Andoni and Shantell aren’t any different from any of you. They faced challenges in their lives just like you do. But they refused to give up. They chose to take responsibility for their education and set goals for themselves. And I expect all of you to do the same.
That’s why today, I’m calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education -- and to do everything you can to meet them. Your goal can be something as simple as doing all your homework, paying attention in class, or spending time each day reading a book. Maybe you’ll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your community. Maybe you’ll decide to stand up for kids who are being teased or bullied because of who they are or how they look, because you believe, like I do, that all kids deserve a safe environment to study and learn. Maybe you’ll decide to take better care of yourself so you can be more ready to learn. And along those lines, I hope you’ll all wash your hands a lot, and stay home from school when you don’t feel well, so we can keep people from getting the flu this fall and winter.
Whatever you resolve to do, I want you to commit to it. I want you to really work at it.
I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work -- that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things.
But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.
That’s OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had the most failures. JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, "I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you -- you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time. If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.
No one’s born being good at things, you become good at things through hard work. You’re not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport. You don’t hit every note the first time you sing a song. You’ve got to practice. It’s the same with your schoolwork. You might have to do a math problem a few times before you get it right, or read something a few times before you understand it, or do a few drafts of a paper before it’s good enough to hand in.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do that every day. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. It shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something, and to learn something new. So find an adult you trust -- a parent, grandparent or teacher; a coach or counselor -- and ask them to help you stay on track to meet your goals.
And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you - don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.
The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.
It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.
So today, I want to ask you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country?
Your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I’m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn. But you’ve got to do your part too. So I expect you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from each of you. So don’t let us down -- don’t let your family or your country or yourself down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it.
Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.
Hat tip: Fox News
"During a town hall meeting at the Fredericksburg Expo Center, Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.) said [to a high school teacher] there is 'no place in the Constitution' that mentions health care or education, or even gives individuals the right to own a telephone," reports CNSNews.com.
"Warner also indicated that the high school government teacher was perhaps suggesting that government-run Medicare and Medicaid should be dissolved," says CNSNews.
Then, quoting Warner, this:
So I take, I take by your question, I take by your question , I take by your question that you would get rid of Medicare and Medicaid? . . . Or would you, are you, let me make sure I understand, you’re advocating doing away with Medicare, right? Because that’s a government program. I just want to make clear that you are suggesting doing away with Medicare.
This smacks of scare tactics. This is a senator trying to scare people into accepting un-Constitutional tyranny because some in America have gotten used to some of the benefits of big government -- benefits which clearly are temporary (watch what happens when the money runs out) and bait for tyranny (watch what happens when all matters of health are subject to government rationing, bureaucratic impositions, and political calculations).
The senator seems to suggest that America is too far down the path of Big Government to correct course and push instead for positive change based on Constitutional content and Declarational norms.
But he is wrong. We are human beings created in the image of God and endowed by our Creator with "certain unalienable rights." We are not locked inside or limited by the machine, the system, the establishment, or the confines of any federal closet.
Here are three additional points:
First, two wrongs do not make a right. And 138 Constitutional wrongs do not make a right, either. Just because America made a wrong turn years ago, it does not follow that we cannot retrace our steps, locate the proper direction, and get back on track. That is, if the destination is freedom, and our cause is that of liberty.
Second, real reform means addressing the challenge at the crucial point -- and the crucial point governmentally is the abandonment of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence by political elites headquartered in Washington, D.C. The status quo of an imposed federal hegemony is unacceptable.
The issue is not: We can have healthcare reform "if it is paid for," for that opens the door to any kind of federal encroachment as long as the money is there (or can be made to appear to be there).
Understand: For tyrants or pretend "messiahs" who want total control, no price is too high to achieve their goals. But for those who prefer neither black or white, red or yellow at the slave auction, no price is worth it to sell our liberty, forfeit our souls, and abuse our posterity.
Third, the senator misses a more germaine question, for those who prefer a humane and dignified liberty over an inhumane and belittling tyranny, namely:
A) Are Americans better off with healthcare overhauled and run by politicians? Or
B) Are Americans better off with politicians and government overhauled by the norms and content of the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, and Bill of Rights?
Our Founding Fathers chose the path of liberty. Their children know what to do.
We Americans have seen this before. We have seen the smiling faces, but also the sharp teeth.
We have refused the bait and faced down tyranny before. And with a "firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence," we can do so again.
Breitbart TV has the video.
Meanwhile: Are there any rebellious, freethinking, anti-status-quo, anti-Establishment, anti-System, Bourgeoisie-and-"The System"-decrying "Rage against the Machine"-challenging artists out there willing to address the question of state-sponsored propaganda masquerading as "art"?
Hat tip: Big Hollywood
Related
Official Dishonesty From National Endowment for the Arts
National Endowment for the Arts Trying to Create Cult of Obama
Fireproof: Reel Rebel Upsets Tinseltown Stereotypes
"America is in need of a new 'Great Awakening' -- an awakening that some Christian leaders say can only come about if Christians get on their knees," reports CNSNews.com.
That's the view of Rev. William Wilson, who is executive director of the International Center for Spiritual Renewal (ICSR), quoted by CNSNews:
America right now is facing great complexities. We have a financial struggle that we’re in, we’re facing health-care issues that have us scratching our heads. Our place in the world has shifted. We’re a nation that really needs help from beyond ourselves. We feel like God is the help.
ICSR is a member of the Awakening America Alliance, which CNSNews reports is sponsoring "Cry Out America," a September 11 event challenging thousands to "gather at noon [Friday] at county courthouses across the nation in repentance, to pray for the lost, to cry out for God to send another 'Great Awakening.'"
While free-thinking Americans watch, pray, and rebuild, here are three resources we think provide timely and essential content for national renewal:
* Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, by Mark Levin
* A Christian Manifesto (DVD), by Francis Schaeffer
* Total Truth: Liberating Christianity From Its Cultural Captivity, by Nancy Pearcey
From YouTube, Montel Williams offers advice:
Michele, slit your wrist. Go ahead. Why not? . . . Do us all a better thing. Move that knife up about two feet. Start right at the collar bone. . . .
Hat tip: Breitbart TV
U.S. Rep. Paul Broun, M.D., of Georgia is "again raising the specter of Democrats turning the United States into a totalitarian state," reports the Athens Banner-Herald.
"More than 1,000 people combined turned out to hear Broun speak mostly on the topic of health care at town hall meetings Wednesday in Madison and Greene County," says the Banner-Herald.
Hat tip: Drudge Report
The "Water Cooler" over at the Washington Times has been hearing things:
The Washington Times Water Cooler reported that we contacted the National Endowment for the Arts's (NEA) Yosi Sergant about an August 10th conference call invitation sent out to artists and other creative influence peddlers.
When asked if the NEA sent the invitation, Mr. Sergant denied the NEA had sent the invitations to any participants for the conference call and refused to send the Washington Times a copy of the invite. AUDIO
More at Water Cooler . . .
Hat tip: Big Hollywood
Related
National Endowment for the Arts Trying to Create Cult of Obama
Arthur Robinson, Ph.D., has written an excellent column, published at WorldNetDaily:
In the 18th century . . . . [w]hile most of the nations of the world chose to continue on various roads to oppression -- roads that led to socialism, fascism, Marxism, dictatorship and other forms of tyranny, the American people chose individual human freedom.
Now, America has retraced her steps to that fateful intersection. Now, she is poised to travel the road of slavery and tyranny. Now, those who still understand her greatness must prevent this. They must turn America back to the road of freedom. . . . [emphasis added]
Both Barack Obama and his press secretary have actually responded to questions about the rightness and constitutionality of certain actions they are taking with the simple -- in your face, I will not discuss it further -- words, "We won!" They consider themselves all-powerful because Mr. Obama received 53 percent of the vote in a national election and because his Democratic Party received majority votes in the majority of the congressional elections. They claim that, therefore, they can do anything they wish to the American people. . . .
This tyranny must be stopped -- soon -- by peaceful means! The alternative is chilling! The Declaration of Independence goes on to say, "That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it."
The necessary exercise of this further right of the people by force in the 1700s resulted in much suffering and death. Its exercise today, with modern technology, would be far, far worse.
Read the entire column by Arthur Robinson.
"President Barack Obama's plans for a televised back-to-school address to students next week are drawing fire from some conservatives, who say he's just trying to indoctrinate them to his political beliefs," writes Nia-Malika Henderson at Politico.
Yesterday on Facebook I wrote:
An event like Obama's presumptive, disrespectful in-your-face "these kids are my kids" speech to the public schools (all for a good cause, of course) may well sufficiently raise the consciousness of parents to begin a mass exodus out of the gov't school thoughtcamps.
Educational authority resides in parents, not in the State. No cause is good enough to sell our souls, forfeit our obligations, or give our kids away to any president, state, or other pretender of the gods.
As the Declaration of Independence makes clear, the American experiment in liberty is about independence under God, not dependence on presidents, Washington regimes, or federally controlled thoughtcamps otherwise known as schools.
W. James Antle III writes at American Spectator:
There is plenty of nonsense in this Newsweek dissection of the "top 5 lies" in the health care debate, but this one takes the cake: "But when fear and loathing hijack the brain, anything becomes believable-even that health-care reform is unconstitutional. To disprove that, check the commerce clause: Article I, Section 8."
Umm, what in Article I, Section 8 gives the federal government anything like the powers contained in Obamacare?
On the crucial issue of the Constitutionality of government-controlled healthcare, here are three questions I raised recently at Sarah Palin's page on Facebook:
1) Where in the Constitution, as written, is healthcare enumerated as a legitimate exercise of the federal government?
2) Are the American people better off with healthcare under the control of the Washington establishment, or are they better off with the federal government under the Constitution (as written)?
3) Insofar as federal control of healthcare violates the U.S. Constitution, let us ask: Are the American people better off with -- or without -- the U.S. Constitution?
Read the rest of James Antle's post at American Spectator.
From CNSNews.com:
A newly released report by the Institute for Medicine and the National Research Council details strategies for local governments to combat what it calls an epidemic of childhood obesity, including enacting zoning and land-use regulations that would “restrict fast food establishments near school grounds and public playgrounds.”
On the other hand, try this: Constitutional limits on unhealthy government.
The crazy assumption being, of course, that a free and dignified people do not need tyrannical, micromanagerial government to save them from themselves.
But these sorts of reports, along with the threat of Obamacare, etc., suggest that free Americans may need to organize to protect their lives, families, and freedoms from an increasingly intrusive, overbearing, and anti-Constitutional hegemonic regime headquartered in Washington, D.C.
Are you a rebellious artist longing for transformational hope and change?
Well, note this: Barack Obama loves your creativity, and the National Endowment for the Arts has a wonderful plan for your work.
Go here for an insider's look at an NEA teleconference call encouraging artists to get their pro-Obama groove on.
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