Matthew Boyle writes at Breitbart.com:

Radio’s Mark Levin will keynote a five-year anniversary event for the Tea Party movement hosted by Tea Party Patriots in Washington, D.C., Breitbart News has learned exclusively.

“The Tea Party, which consists of millions of hard working taxpayers, is to be celebrated not condemned,” Levin told Breitbart News. “The ruling class must be trounced and its media cheerleaders must be exposed if the republic is to survive. The Tea Party is our only hope.  It's a great honor to be asked to speak to such outstanding and courageous patriots,” he added. 

"Levin, the host of The Mark Levin Show, served as the chief of staff to Attorney General Ed Meese during Ronald Reagan's administration. He is the New York Times best-selling author of several books, and is the president of the Landmark Legal Foundation," Boyle writes.

"Levin will be delivering speaking alongside Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) at the Feb. 27 event, as will Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin among others," according to Boyle.

For my take on the opportunity that the Tea Party has represented, please see "How the New Resistance Can Win the Culture War."

Ann Coulter writes:

Wendy Davis, the Texas state senator running for governor, became a liberal superhero last June when she filibustered a bill to prohibit abortions after 20 weeks. (This was the good filibuster, not that awful filibuster three months later by Ted Cruz -- that was just grandstanding.)

Apart from her enthusiasm for abortion (and you have to admit, abortion is really cool), the centerpiece of Davis’ campaign is her life story. Also the fact that she’s a progressive woman who doesn’t look like Betty Friedan.

Coulter then turns to headlines that "capture the essence of Wendy-mania." For example -- 

CNN: Wendy Davis: From Teen Mom to Harvard Law to Famous Filibuster

Bloomberg: Texas Filibuster Star Rose From Teen Mom to Harvard Law

The Independent (UK): Wendy Davis: Single Mother From Trailer Park Who Has Become Heroine of Pro-Choice Movement

Cosmopolitan: Find a Sugar Daddy to Put You Through Law School!

"Actually," says Coulter, "that last one I made up, but as we now know, it's more accurate than Davis' rags-to-riches life story."

Go here to read the rest of Coulter's column on the "Heroism of Wendy Davis."

Kevin Jackson writes at American Thinker:

You probably don't know who Reverend Michael King, Jr., was.

That's because Reverend Michael King, Jr., is the only private citizen to have a national holiday in his honor, and is Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

King's father changed his and his son's names to Martin Luther in honor of the German reformer, Martin Luther. Martin Luther, of course, was a German monk, a professor theology and iconic figure of the 16th century reform movement of Christianity, also called the Protestant Reformation. He argued that you could not buy your way into Heaven, or avoid God's wrath, but instead must rely on God's grace.  Martin Luther was ostracized by both the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, when he refused to retract all his writings at the Diet of Worms in 1521. For this he was excommunicated by the Pope and condemned as an outlaw by the Emperor. . . .

"So why is Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., now referred to as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr? Jackson asks.

"It's simple," he explains. "The Left wants no remnants of the Christian revolution that changed this country. They want to make people forget that the biggest change to happen to American since the Civil War was led by a black Christian who was also a Republican. (See note below.)

"Referring to King as 'Dr. King' implies that the Civil Rights movement was led by an academic, that academia brought us 'change we can believe in.'

"Liberals believe in their educations, even if they have not a lick of practical experience or even common sense. Ph.D. King can lead a revolution," Jackson explains, "but a Republican pastor cannot be put in charge. That role is exclusively for black demagogues and fake reverends."

Two of those "black demagogues and fake reverends" would be Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, according to Kevin Jackson, who writes:

"Reverend" Jesse Jackson has no degree in Divinity. Jackson is a theology school dropout, having left the Chicago Theological Seminary in 1966 to "focus full-time on the civil rights movement." I think he meant the Civil Unrest movement.

As for "Reverend" Al Sharpton, he never even attended seminary. Sharpton attended Brooklyn College and dropped out in 1975, after just two years. But Sharpton did something better. He was befriended and mentored by "Reverend" Jackson.

"Michael, who became Martin Luther, was his own man. And unlike the false prophets of the Left who have profited on the back of the Civil Rights movement and the good works of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Reverend King made the ultimate sacrifice.

"Be proud Bible-thumpers," Jackson concludes. "It was a black Republican Christian who changed America."

Note: For further consideration, here is a Newsmax story headlined "Registration Unknown, Martin Luther King Was Likely Republican." According to Newsmax, "It is impossible to know whether King was Democrat, Republican, or independent. His home state of Georgia did not have registration by party, so allegiance to a political party depended on which primaries a voter chose to cast a ballot in. . . . But there is some evidence as to where his party leanings were, including the observations of the Republican who was Martin Luther King's congressman." 

Related
Shelby Steele: Decline of the Civil Rights Establishment 
Is Martin Luther King the Slave of Black People? 
How to Have a Race War

Greg Richter reports at Newsmax:

The legal sale of recreational marijuana began in Colorado on Jan. 1, but Dr. Ben Carson sees it as society's latest step downward.

The use of medical marijuana in some cases has been proven to be useful, Carson said Thursday on Fox News Channel's "On the Record with Greta Van Susteren." But, he added, it is a gateway drug.

"I don't think this is something we really want for our society," Carson said. "You know, we're gradually just removing all the barriers to hedonistic activity. We're changing so rapidly to a different type of society, and nobody is getting a chance to discuss it because it's taboo."

"The recently retired chief of pediatric neurosurgery at John's Hopkins University Medical School has hinted at his own run for the presidency in 2016," Newsmax reports.

Related
Dr. Ben Carson Had "1st Encounter With the IRS" After His Prayer Breakfast Speech
Liberals "Believe They Own Black America"

Al Goldstein pioneered hardcore smut in print. The "onetime millionaire" died homeless yesterday at age 77, according to LifeSiteNews.com.

Related
Miley Cyrus: The Tyranny of Porn, the Porn of Tyranny 
Bruni-Sarkozy and the Unbearable Lightness of Nudity 
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Caroline May reports at the Daily Caller:

A picture of [Nelson] Mandela from 1998 finds the former political prisoner attending a rally at the start of the African National Congress 1999 election campaign wearing a T-shirt with the instructions: "Get an ID. Register. Vote."

Anna Zieminski/AFP/Getty Images

Jason Howerton reports at The Blaze:

While Carson stopped short of accusing the IRS of targeting him because he openly criticized policies implemented by President Barack Obama or due to his outspoken conservative views, he did note that the tax agency’s visit wasn’t very surprising.

"I had my first encounter with the IRS this year, unsurprisingly after the Prayer Breakfast," he said at the annual Business Council of Alabama Chairman’s Dinner. 

Carson had managed to avoid gaining the attention of the IRS prior to his now-famous speech.

Related
Video: Watch Obama Get His "Medicine" on Live TV 
WPost: IRS Officials in Washington Involved in Targeting Conservative Groups 
Federal Agencies "Increasingly Treating the American Public as an Enemy"
Cal Thomas v. Star Parker: Should Ben Carson Apologize to Obama for Prayer Breakfast Remarks?

Alex Pappas reports at The Dailly Caller:

The duo are scheduled to be together Monday when Cain -- the former Republican presidential candidate -- hosts about 10 prominent black conservatives in Washington D.C. . . .

Cain -- the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza -- ran for president as a Republican in 2012. Carson, the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, has been mentioned as a possible candidate for office after several recent high-profile public appearances.

Related
Liberals "Believe They Own Black America" 
Cal Thomas v. Star Parker: Should Ben Carson Apologize to Obama for Prayer Breakfast Remarks? 
Report: MSNBC Host Touré Founded "Militant Anti-White Student Newspaper"

Jeffery Lord writes at American Spectator:

Shocker.

Having failed to end Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s congressional career at the polls, the left is now moving to do it the old-fashioned way: Bork Bachmann unto political death.

The problem?

This really is the old-fashioned way.

And any conservative even semi-awake recognizes the game instantly. In this case the game being played with the so-called Office of Congressional Ethics, the OCE.

This is what we now call “Borking.”

The method of choice of liberals when they are frustrated by the public’s attachment or potential attachment to a political figure on the Right.

"From then-California Senator Richard Nixon’s 1952 'scandal' about a campaign fund to Barry Goldwater’s 1964 'ties' to German Nazis to 1988 allegations that Dan Quayle bought drugs to Sarah Palin’s 2008 episode over Alaskan state troopers, the story is the same," Lord continues. "From charges designed to immolate any conservative from the late Robert Bork in 1987 (whence the Borking game took its name) to Clarence Thomas in 1991 or, in the last few days, Dr. Ben Carson, the game never changes when the objective is to destroy a prominent conservative." (emphasis added)

Related  
Red State on Pearcey, Bachmann, New Yorker
Dangerous Influences: The New Yorker, Michele Bachmann, and Me
NY Magazine Links Rush, Savage, Bachmann, WND to Murder

Udo Middelmann has released the following statement:

The funeral for Edith Schaeffer will be on April 19th at 2 PM in the church in Gryon, Switzerland, where she has lived and made her home for the past 13 years. She was a member of the church her husband and I pastured together in Switzerland. The service in Gryon will be the public funeral for her and in her honor, and everyone is invited to attend and to express their love and appreciation afterwards in the reception immediately following.

On April 25 at 2 PM there will be a service at the graveside in Rochester, Minnesota, to lay her body next to her husband’s, as they had promised to each other. Everyone is welcome to join in a tribute to honor Edith Schaeffer, whom we know as a generous, creative, loving, knowledgeable and wise person. In no way would Edith Schaeffer want either service to be private.

At her request, which Frank Schaeffer wrote down eight years ago, I shall conduct and preach at both services as her pastor, which she considered me to be after her husband’s death. Even when she was unable to leave her home in recent months I had church with her and others regularly and served communion to them in her own home. 

There may be a number of memorial services in the weeks and months ahead in different locations held for Edith Schaeffer. She was a generous person in all things and richly deserves to be remembered by many now and in years to come. These, however, are not part of the funeral arrangements Edith Schaeffer made for her own death.

We are very thankful to God for the life and work of Edith Schaeffer. . . . In the place of flowers we invite you to contribute to the work of The Francis A. Schaeffer Foundation, which she started in 1988 and which continues her and her husband’s ideas and interests.

The Foundation’s USA address is 313 East 92nd Street, Apt. 5E, New York, NY 10128, USA. The Swiss Address is Chalet Mon Abri, Jermintin 2, CH-1882, Gryon. 

Udo Middelmann is president of the Francis A. Schaeffer Foundation. 

Related
Edith Schaeffer and the Apologetics of Beauty 
Edith Schaeffer, 1914-2013 
Francis Schaeffer: A Student's Appreciation of a Distinct Approach

What most impressed me in knowing Edith at L'Abri was her emphasis on everyday beauty.

Arriving as a critical agnostic, I was surprised to meet Christians who actually cared about the world of ideas and the arts. It was not merely that Francis Schaeffer lectured about the arts, however.

It was also that Edith thought it important for the Christian to incorporate beauty into all of life -- such as simple but elegant table settings with a flower and a candle. Not expensive items, not conspicuous consumption. But creative (expressing your unique personality) and natural (using items and themes from nature when possible).

Though I had grown up in the church, I had never before met Christians who understood that our souls hunger for beauty just as much as for truth and goodness.

For me, as for many others who studied at L'Abri in the days when Edith still presided, there was an apologetics of beauty that made me want Christianity to be true, at the same time that I was working through a philosophical apologetics that was persuading me intellectually that it was true.

Edith described her love of everyday beauty in Hidden Art (the title was later expanded to The Hidden Art of Homemaking).

Related
Francis Schaeffer -- "The Central Problem of Our Age"

Udo Middelmann writes:

Edith Rachel Merritt Seville Schaeffer died on March 30, 2013 in her home in Gryon, Switzerland, where she had moved 13 years ago to be surrounded by memories, her music, her son’s paintings and the detailed care organized daily by her daughter Deborah Middelmann.

She was born on November 3, 1914, as the third daughter of Dr. George Hugh and Jessie Maude Seville in Wenchau, China, where her parents ran a school for girls and taught the Bible in Mandarin.

Edith Schaeffer marked her life with the expression of rich ideas, often rebellious against the staid and superficial life she saw among Christians.

The oldest sister became a communist in New York of the 30ies, the second eloped. Edith Seville married Francis August Schaeffer in 1935, and in no way was she the typical pastor’s or missionary wife.

She turned her active mind to work with her husband, teaching first seminary wives to think and to question, to create and make of life something of integrity, as her husband so wanted her to do.

White House reporter Keith Koffler writes:

The total cost to taxpayers of Obama’s vacations to Hawaii since becoming president is likely in excess of $20 million, and possibly much, much more.

During a time of budget deficits that threaten the nation’s security and its future, the Obamas have chosen to maintain a “family tradition” and vacation halfway around the world instead of finding far cheaper alternatives closer to home.

Michael W. Chapman reports at CNSNews.com:

Conservative leader L. Brent Bozell III, a nephew of the late William F. Buckley Jr., criticized a commentary in the New York Times that claimed his uncle, if alive today, would seek to purge “fringe” Tea Party folks and other “moon-bat” conservatives from the GOP.

Bozell said Buckley instead would argue that “moderates” such as Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and Karl Rove should be “driven from our ranks.”

In the Dec. 3 commentary, writer David Welch, a former research director for the Republican National Committee, equated the Tea Party and conservative talk radio  with the John Birch Society, the latter which Buckley did expel from the conservative movement in the 1960s. . . .

Chapman quotes from Bozell's letter: “Let me suggest to you what my uncle would have said instead, while laughing at Mr. Welch’s proposal: ‘Given that the Tea Party is definitely not the John Birch Society, we therefore do not need moderates like Jeb Bush or Chris Christie and operatives like Karl Rove running the conservative movement. They are ideally suited to be driven from our ranks.’”

Chapman reports that "Bozell is chairman of ForAmerica, a grassroots conservative group committed to traditional American principles. He is also president of the Media Research Center, the parent organization of CNSNews.com."

For more on the "fringe" Tea Party, "How the New Resistance Can Win the Culture War" may be of interest.

Related
A Tribute to the Empyreal Buckley 
Really? "Extreme" Limbaugh, Tea Party Cost Romney the Election? 
What Is "Mainstream" America"?

John Perazzo writes at Frontpage.com:

Like so many Obama appointees, Valerie Jarrett bears the unmistakable imprint of the president’s ideology.

She is a leftist to her core, with notable personal ties to the communist movement.

Jarrett’s maternal grandfather, for instance, was a Chicagoan named Robert Taylor, who in the 1940s was involved with such communist fronts as the American Peace Mobilization and the Chicago Civil Liberties Committee.

Also a member of these groups was Frank Marshall Davis, the communist journalist who in the 1970s would mentor a young Barack Obama.

Jarrett played a "key role in then-Senator Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign," Perazzo writes. "Following the election, Jarrett was appointed as a senior advisor and assistant to Mr. Obama, who admittedly consults Jarrett on every important political decision he makes."

Moreover, apparently, when Jarrett speaks, Obama speaks. "Indeed," Perazzo writes, "the president once told a New York Times reporter that he completely trusts Jarrett "to speak for me, particularly when we’re dealing with delicate issues.”

What does this mean? What this means is that radical extremists who despise the rules of freedom occupy establishment Washington.

Yes, the establishment, the so-called mainstream, can be extreme.

Extremism is not determined by counting noses but by measuring the distance that radicals, even if there are many of them, have departed from the enduring center of human freedom and dignity (see, for example, the Decaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution).

The task of every American who loves his neighbor, who respects the rules of freedom and the Creator (that is, not Washington) who has endowed humanity with unalienable rights, is to remove these extremists from power. And replace them with lovers of freedom. 

Today marks the passing of Eugene Genovese, scholar and historian.  I published in First Things the following review of one of his books, noting his move from Marxist hostility to religion to a genuine respect for Christianity:

Genovese took up southern history reluctantly, after a professor challenged him to test his Marxism by taking the slaveholders as a laboratory case in “how a ruling class really rules.” His initial forays, Genovese writes, were marked by “the biases of an atheist and a historical materialist” -- to whit, that religion was “no more than a corrosive ideology at the service of ruling classes.” If at the beginning, Genovese says ruefully, “someone had told me that religion would emerge as a positive force in my book -- indeed, as the centerpiece -- I would have laughed and referred him to a psychiatrist. In the end, the evidence proved overwhelming, and I had to eat my biases.”

What was the evidence, and which biases was Genovese forced to choke down? Fundamentally, he discovered that Marxism gravely underestimates the power of religion.

Among both black and white southerners, Genovese noted, “the overpowering evidence of religious faith aroused in me a skepticism about the reigning tendency in Academia to, as it were, sociologize faith out of religion -- to deny the reality of spirituality.”

Among the slaves, Christian faith “carried an extraordinarily powerful message of liberation in this world as well as the next,” Genovese wrote. That message empowered them to create a vibrant culture under extreme adversity -- a dynamic not explainable in Marxist or any other merely sociological terms. 

As Genovese put it, “No such theory or combination of theories could suffice to explain the power of the folk religion, as manifested, for example, in the spirituals.”

In the academy today it is fashionable to charge Western religion with complicity in a host of social evils: slavery, racism, sexism, imperialism.

But Genovese will have none of that. All civilizations have been disfigured by various evils, he argued. 

What sets the Christian West apart, he said, is that it alone raised “a profound theoretical opposition to those enormities, challenging their moral foundations and raising mass movements against them.”

Ben Johnson reports at LifeSiteNews.com:

When Family Research Council employee Leo Johnson braved three bullets to stop a hate-filled homosexual activist from committing a mass murder, he did not expect to receive an award. But that’s exactly what happened to sustained, enthusiastic applause at this weekend’s Values Voters Summit in Washington, D.C.

“During that fateful day," Mr. Johnson told the gathering, "and I think about it a lot, there’s no other place I’d rather have been than right there where I was. . . . Thank you -- and I will be back.”

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A hamfisted Juan Williams said Ann Romney during her RNC speech looked like a "corporate wife," which led one of my FB friends to ask how my "beautiful corporate wife" Nancy "is doing."

My response:

She's having her nails done, back by pool no. 2., which is next to the tennis courts and outdoor theatre.

Tomorrow, we join Clint Eastwood at the "Make My Day" self-improvement center for more target practice.

Saturday, we're over at the Kants to demolish a few tacky intellectual slums . . . maybe replace them with groundwork for a shining city on a hill.

Ahem, Williams wasn't guilty of imposing upon Mrs. Romney rather outworn stereotypes about the "rich," blondes, faithful mothers, and life outside of Template Obamaville, was he?

Surely, everybody knows that blondes have more fun because they have more brains.

Author Dinesh D'Souza writes at FoxNews.com:

George Obama felt he had to call me. He had no one else to call. He reached out to me in his time of need because he felt he couldn’t call on his real life sibling living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. . . .

Obama’s refusal to help George is especially surprising because George doesn’t just live in American-style poverty but rather in Third World poverty.

He lives in a shanty in the Huruma slum in Nairobi. He gets by on a few dollars a month.

Obama also has an aunt named Hawa Auma, his father’s sister, who ekes out a living selling coal on the streets of a small village in Kenya.

She says she would like to have her teeth fixed, but she cannot afford it. Obama hasn’t offered to help her either. 

D'Souza notes that "one of Obama’s favorite phrases comes right out of the Bible: 'We are our brother’s keeper.'

"Yet he has not contributed a penny to help his own brother. And evidently George does not believe, even in times of emergency, that he can turn to his brother in the White House for help." 

"What’s going on here?," D'Souza asks. "Why is President Obama so hesitant to help family members in need?"

Becket Adams writes at The Blaze:

Clint Eastwood just made Mitt Romney’s day.

The Dirty Harry star and Oscar-winning director of Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby endorsed the Republican presidential candidate Friday night during a Sun Valley fundraiser.

“I think the country needs a boost,” Eastwood told The Associated Press as he joined other Romney supporters for the private campaign event.

Obama responds (or did he ...?): "Clint Eastwood didn't say that. He didn't make those words happen. Somebody else built that sentence."

But would that mean the roads and bridges endorsed Romney? 

There's a rather strange photo on Barack Obama's Facebook campaign page, leading Jerome Corsi to ask at WND:

Does a family photograph of a young Barack Obama posted on the president’s Facebook campaign page offer a clue to the identity of his real father?

Corsi reports that a "professional graphic artist who examined the 1973 photo believes the image of Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, was airbrushed into the scene to cover up an African-American man who was standing next to Obama at the Honolulu airport."

According to Corsi, "filmmaker Joel Gilbert, who commissioned the analysis, told WND there’s substantial evidence that the man in the original photograph was Frank Marshall Davis, the Communist Party member, pro-Soviet propagandist and pornographer who played a fatherly role in Obama’s teen years."

WND reports:

A 1996 print advertisement in a local Chicago newspaper shows President Obama was the speaker at an event sponsored and presented by the Democratic Socialists of America, the DSA. 

Here is the advertisement:

Nope.

From David Limbaugh's most recent column:

If you’ll indulge me, I need to express this beyond my Twitter posts: I am proud of my brother, Rush, for his multiple sincere apologies to Sandra Fluke. I am not even slightly surprised that so many on the left refuse to accept his apology. . . .

What is a much bigger story is that the left’s primary interest here is not in protecting Fluke. . . . Liberals are attempting to exploit this as another opportunity to destroy Rush through a calculated, organized Saul Alinsky-type community-organizing campaign to pressure and intimidate his advertisers into discontinuing their sponsorship of his show.

I am watching them operate on Twitter and other social networks, and their viciousness is palpable. They didn’t want Rush’s apology, which they absolutely refuse to accept. They want his scalp. And they’ve wanted his scalp for years because he is the most effective and influential spokesman for the conservative cause.

What I am observing is the most radical display of hate and intolerance that I’ve witnessed in years. It does not surprise me, but it is ironic that the very people who masquerade as exemplars of tolerance, civility and compassion have no room in their hearts for forgiveness.

"With a terrible feeling of pain and loss we announce the passing of Andrew Breitbart," writes Larry Solov at Big Journalism.

Jeffrey Folks writes at American Thinker:

Clearly, Obama is not the son of Islam, or of Christianity, but he is very much the son of Marx. When Rick Santorum referred to the president's radical environmentalism as a "false theology," he was perfectly correct. Obama's "religion" is not Islam or Christianity, but the leftist ideology that Obama learned as a child. If anything, this radical ideology is the opposite of both Islam and Christianity since it would supplant individual conscience, and the conscience of the church, with centralized state control of all of life's functions. No devout Muslim or Christian wishes to inhabit a Marxist state that would run roughshod over the religious beliefs of the faithful. But this is very much Obama's goal.

Within the Marxist state that Obama envisages, all sectors of the economy -- all aspects of everyday life, in fact -- would fall under the control of a centralized bureaucracy. This destruction of liberty is already coming to pass with the implementation of ObamaCare. At the direction of a small panel of "experts," standardized protocols are being constructed that will constrain the health care choices for every American. When it comes time to decide upon end-of-life care, it will not be you, your doctor, and your family who make the decisions -- it will be a computer program implementing the cost-benefit analysis arrived at by a secretive panel appointed by the president.

Moreover, Folks concludes, "The death of capitalism -- is Obama's objective. The passion that he has brought to class warfare -- not just in the current re-election campaign, but throughout his presidency -- is clear evidence of where his heart lies. It does not lie with Islam or with Christianity, but with Marx."

The great thinker, theologian, social critic, and former agnostic Francis Schaeffer was born Jan. 30, 1912, 100 years ago today.

To help celebrate that birth and to remind ourselves of how Schaeffer offered a rich and humane alternative to the evangelical religious machine of his day (and ours), please see "Francis Schaeffer: A Student's Appreciation of a Distinct Approach."

The Belfast Telegraph reports:

English-American author and journalist Christopher Hitchens has died after losing his battle with cancer.

The outspoken atheist had been undergoing chemotherapy after being diagnosed with oesophageal cancer last year, but died aged 62 at the MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston, Texas, on Thursday night.

Herman Cain tells a New Hampshire newspaper "that ending his campaign is 'an option' he is considering." 

Curt Lovelace and I attended seminary in St. Louis back when I was watching a lot more Bergman films. Sometime last century.

Now Curt is in Prague, and here's his latest post. Maybe we can link up when we're in Italy this summer.

Andrew Breitbart writes at Big Hollywood:

Left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore has been touring Occupy Wall Street demonstrations across the country–including some of the most violent, such as Occupy Oakland -- urging activists to continue their fight against the wealthy “one percent” of Americans. Initially, Moore tried to deny that his massive wealth made him a member of that one percent.

Even when forced to admit the obvious, Moore suggested that he was not always among the one percent, based on his income: “Other years, like last year, I don’t have a job (no movie, no book) and so I make a lot less.”

The Democrat Congressperson from LA gives us another terrific way to start the week -- with "another chapter in the Democratic annals of civility," says Rick Moran at American Thinker.

Jesse Mullins offers an in-depth profile of Nancy Pearcey -- with observations from columnist David Limbaugh, World magazine's Marvin Olasky, "Hank the Cowdog" mega-author John Erickson, and more.

Fans and friends of Nancy should really enjoy this in-depth, 4,000-word-plus profile.

It will require courage and a commitment to free-thinking, but disciples of sheltered ideological, formerly mainstream media outlets such as the New Yorker may also want to turn in here for a far more fair and balanced look at the life and times and thinking of my favorite editor at large of The Pearcey Report. 

Tony Bennett lamented the loss of Amy Winehouse, "stating he was 'deeply saddened to learn of her tragic passing.' He went on to describe Winehouse as 'an extraordinary musician with a rare intuition as a vocalist'."

A "great American hero."

Jonathon M. Seidl writes at The Blaze:

It took him 400 rounds, 17 grenades, and a machine gun tripod used as a weapon, but one British Gurkha soldier single-handedly beat back an attack by 30 Taliban fighters in Afghanistan last summer. And now he‘s getting one of his military’s highest honors.

Here is a video report on the gallantry of Acting Sergeant Dipprasad Pun.

Kathleen Gilbert writes at LifeSiteNews:

A “pillar of strength” -- these were the words Etta Waterfield used to describe her mother-in-law, Jane Russell, who will be remembered by millions as a timeless beauty and talented actress of the silver screen.

But according to Waterfield, Jane’s true legacy lies in her deep devotion to the Bible as a born-again Christian, and her tenacity living out that faith as a pro-life advocate following a tragic botched abortion at the age of eighteen.

Dr. Bernard Nathanson was "responsible for more than 75,000 deaths," doing more than his ungodly and inhumane fair share in what he called the "most atrocious holocaust in the history of the United States," writes Wendy Wright at American Thinker. 

The doctor admitted he lied about the "numbers of illegal abortions and women killed from botched abortions," says Wright, president of Concerned Women for America.

"But then science, reason, and human dignity changed his mind on abortion. Love transformed his heart toward God." Bernard Nathanson died Feb. 21, 2011.

From Tucker and the gang at Daily Caller: "Rickles goes on a tear, making fun of President Reagan, Vice President Bush, Secretary of State George Schultz — even Nancy!" Here's the video at YouTube.

"The celebration of Ronald Reagan's life has come not a moment too soon for a dispirited, angry country momentarily derailed into the dead end of socialism," writes Jeffrey Lord at American Spectator.

Establishment elites left and right let loose almost daily cynical avalanches of pompous peer pressure to get Sarah Palin to shut up and sit down and be a good little girl.

But Palin keeps on smiling. And fighting. Resisting. And overcoming.

Jedediah Bila explains all at Human Events.

Although Quin Hillyer at American Spectator continues "to believe" Sarah Palin "is not yet qualified to be president," his "admiration for her continues to grow."

Hillyer continues:

Her interview with Sean Hannity, just aired, was almost pitch-perfect. It was dignified. It was well-modulated. It was strong. And it was thoughtful. She kept her composure even as Hannity put on the screen some of the vilest, most vicious attacks against her -- the sorts of things that were so bad that if they were said about me they might shake me to my core.

She explained her thought process after hearing about the shooting in Tucson, and explained the timing of her videotaped message, and explained her use of the term "blood libel." She insisted, rightly, that strong and honest -- but respectful -- political debate should not be stifled, and noted that it only seems like the right is asked to stifle its views. She was correct on all counts.

Here is video of Palin's interview last night with Sean Hannity. Here is "America's Enduring Strength," Palin's videotaped response to the Tucson shooting.

David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, which has been troubled in recent weeks by a wave of conservative organizations abandoning its CPAC conference, allegations of hundreds of thousands of dollars gone missing, and a charge of Muslim Brotherhood infiltration, reportedly will be stepping down from that post sometime this year," according to WorldNetDaily.

"Confirmation came today [Tuesday, January 11] from ACU board member Morton Blackwell, who told WND in an e-mail that Keene announced that he will step down this year as ACU chairman," reports WND. 

Related
Nancy Pearcey: CPAC, Homosexuality, and the Crack-Up of Conservatism

Here is Matt Barber's latest column:

From the instant his fruitful eight-year reign ended, Republicans have pined for the next Ronald Reagan. To date, no man has succeeded in filling the conservative standard-bearer's legendary boots. Well, maybe it's time to swap boots for pumps. Could he be a she?

Sarah Palin, you say? Perhaps, but there's actually another outspoken, attractive, fearlessly conservative Tea Party favorite firing up the center-right grass roots: Rep. Michele Bachmann, Minnesota Republican.

Forget a Senate run. The buzz inside the Beltway is that Mrs. Bachmann may be looking to add a woman's touch to the Oval Office (beyond just sprucing up its temporary occupant's eyesore decor). Her spokesman, Doug Sachtleben, has confirmed to media that the congresswoman is considering a potential presidential run, saying: "Nothing's off the table."

Mrs. Bachmann also hinted at the possibility, recently telling MinnPost.com: "We're going to have a deep bench for 2012, I have no doubt, and I think what people are asking for is a bold, strong, constitutional conservative."

Mrs. Bachmann is all that and more. Let's put aside for a moment the delightful prospect that the mere chance of a President Bachmann would be worth the price of admission if only to watch Chris Matthews' punkin burst about the set of his ratings-scraping MSNBC sideshow. The truth is that a Bachmann presidency could be just the shot in the arm Republicans -- and our worse-for-the-wear republic -- desperately need.

Mrs. Bachmann has shown unwavering commitment to the same conservative precepts -- be they fiscal, national defense or social -- held near and dear by the Gipper himself. Precepts that, when properly applied, took us from a deep Carter recession -- a tiny scale model of the Obama recession -- to abiding prosperity. Abiding, that is, until the Reagan Revolution dust settled and godless, big-government "progressives" wormed their way back into leadership.

Mrs. Bachmann has been a stalwart in advocating on behalf of constitutional conservatism. She's chairman of the HouseTea Party Caucus and has put her money where her mouth is, voting consistently in Congress to limit the size and scope of government, fortify national security and protect life, liberty, and the natural family. National Journal rated Mrs. Bachmann among the most conservative members of Congress in 2009.

Moreover, as with Reagan, it's principle over popularity with the feminine firebrand. She's evidently indifferent to what the moonbat media and the larger loony left think about her. This is an indispensable quality in a leader "We the People" can get behind. She's a maverick's maverick, not the media's.

Still, Mrs. Bachmann is not afraid to shake things up in her own Republican Party. What she lacks in physical stature, she makes up for in -- to borrow one of the mainstream media's favorite terms -- gravitas. If it takes a step stool to kick a moderate Republican in name only's tail into line, the counterestablishment lawmaker will climb it and kick it.

True, a House member hasn't been elected president since James Garfield, and a woman never has. But as Barack Obama, our first black president, might tell you: We live in an age of firsts.

And speaking of Mr. Obama: In the unlikely event that you could untether him from his tele-prompter binky long enough to debate Mrs. Bachmann, I'd bet my share of the stimulus money that she'd mop the floor with him.

Will she run? Could she win? It remains to be seen. But one thing's for sure: The fireworks leading up to the 2012 presidential election will be something to behold. Based on her penchant for telling it like it is, her existing widespread Tea Party support and her fast-growing national popularity, if this intelligent, principled, bomb-dropping bombshell were to run, I suspect her campaign might just catch fire.

J. Matt Barber is director of cultural affairs with Liberty Counsel and also serves as associate dean with Liberty University School of Law.

Larry Klayman, founder of Judicial Watch, writes:

Michele Bachmann, because she is a principled anti-establishment conservative who not only talks the talk but walks the walk, is a real threat to the establishment left in particular. An attractive anti-feminist woman who is a Christian and is not afraid to be part of our revolution to take Washington apart at the seams, she could well be the next president of the United States.

And, not only is the left scared, so much so that it will disgrace itself by mocking a highly intelligent, well-educated and experienced straight female who believes in individual freedom and the vision of our Founding Fathers, it is catatonic. This in and of itself tells us who the next Ronald Reagan could well be.

"The GOP establishment -- and some conservative pundits -- ridiculed Sarah Palin for backing rough-edged Tea Party challengers over establishment figures," note Investor's Business Daily. "But "recent congressional votes prove her right."

Emily Miller at Human Events interviews Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann.  

American Thinker asks regarding newly elected Col. Allen West (R.-Fla.): Are we witnessing a "statesman in the making?"

Go here for comments by Greg Halvorson and here for a Youtube video of Rep. West before entering his first meeting with the liberal Congressional Black Caucus.

"Sarah Palin is a political talent we haven't seen since Ronald Reagan," says Angelo Codevilla, author of The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It.

Codevilla also warns the Tea Party movement that the GOP establishment may not be its No. 1 political friend. More at Newsmax.

"His name is Barack Obama," writes Carol A. Taber at American Thinker.

True believers in Barack Hussein Obama do not question whether the evidence supports certain basic articles of faith, including, let us suggest, the doctrine that the current occupant of the Oval Office possesses an IQ "that is off the charts," as historian Michael Beschloss once infamously, confidently, and blindly proclaimed to Don Imus of radio fame.

When Imus on Nov. 10, 2008, in the context of an interview of effusive praise for Obama, asked Beschloss a followup question, "What is his IQ?," Beschloss at first tried to talk through Imus's question. But Imus persisted and the historian eventually admitted, "I don't know."

Free-thinkers take a more noble path.

Having been endowed by our Creator with "certain unalienable rights" and responsibilities, among them the right and responsibility to question authority, including political authority, regular people are thereby liberated as holistic human beings to ask questions and discover amazing truths. 

This kind of critical distance and discovery, despised in certain circles, especially among secularized people of secularized faith, is a key element of representative, Constitutional government. Liberated minds precede free societies.

Victor Volsky at American Thinker maintains such a distance, and he asks a question ("Just how smart is Obama?") that may trouble those who are comforted by, and who place their trust in, Obama. Yes, Barackian sychophants on campus, in Hollywood, in politics, and in the formerly mainstream media may not be pleased with the answer suggested by the evidence.

But those who understand that resistance to foolishness goes to the heart of our calling as Americans and as human beings rejoice.

Here is audio of the Imus-Beschloss interview. The historian's blind, nonsupported but gushing praise of Obama's supposedly high IQ occurs near the end of the interview.

"Any possible shred of doubt remaining in anybody's mind about former Senate GOP leader Trent Lott's true allegiance have now been definitively removed," writes Mark Tapscott at the Washington Examiner. "Lott is a paid tool of the Washington Establishment who hates the Tea Party and all other insurgents who have had it with politics-as-usual."

"'We don't need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples. As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them,' Lott told The Washington Post in an incredibly revealing story," says Tapscott, who is editor of the editorial page at the Examiner.

Why target Jim DeMint? Because, Tapscott continues, "Sen. Jim DeMint . . . is the South Carolina conservative Republican who last year formed the Senate Conservatives Fund to back precisely the kind of insurgent conservative Senate candidates most feared by the Lotts of the world."

As Tapscott sees it, "Lott's quote points to the all-too-familiar GOP-losers mentality that GOP officials can just go on as it did in the years before they lost their congressional majorities in the Senate and House, talking the talk of limited government without having to actually walk the walk with their votes."

For a solution to the problem of strategic Republican weakness in the face of challenges to the very essence of the American experiment in freedom and dignity, please see "How the New Resistance Can Win the Culture War."

Robert George, professor of jurisprudence at Princeton, in "'Natural Law' and 'Far Right Reconstructionist Extremism!'" says Frank Schaeffer "claims to have met me several times. Perhaps that is true, but I remember meeting him only once. Admittedly, it was a memorable experience."

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From AP:

Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich says he's considering running for president in 2012 and expects to make a decision by early next year.

In an interview Monday with The Associated Press, Gingrich predicted a Republican would defeat Democratic President Barack Obama in 2012. He called Obama a "disaster" who would go down as the worst president in modern times.

On July 4, Josh Harris wrote:

Today, July 4, 2010, at approximately 11 pm, our dear mother, Sono Sato Harris, passed away and went to be with her Lord Jesus Christ. It was an entirely peaceful parting. Our family is grieving, and yet grieving as those who have hope because of Jesus' death and resurrection for us. Goodnight, Mama.

An email from husband Gregg Harris notes that all the remaining "Raising Kids to Do Hard Things" seminars "are on hold until further notice due to the sudden death of my dear wife Sono Harris."

Friends and family are irreplaceable. Condolences.

"Former Fox News producer Julianne Rolle died over the weekend," TVNewser reports. "Her body found at the bottom of a cliff near her father's Southern California home. . . . Investigators believe the 39-year-old committed suicide but her father isn't so sure."

Girly men and manly girls ("the usual suspects") have thrown insults, outrage, mockery, and the kitchen sink in efforts to mute Sarah Palin. But as A.W.R. Hawkins avers at Human Events, none of that has silenced, or will silence, this pro-woman, pro-child American Woman.

"Tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of Governor Palin’s surprising Independence Day-Eve resignation announcement," notes Nicole Coulter at Conservatives4Palin.

In making this move, "Governor Palin outflanked her enemies," Coulter continues. "By stepping down, becoming a private citizen, and handing the reins of power to Sean Parnell, she was able to leverage her strengths and minimize the unnecessary hits to her state. Palin genuinely means it when she says, 'You don’t need a title to make a difference.'

"That’s a key difference between her and other politicians," Coulter says. Palin "became involved in politics to serve, not to rule. Rulers cling to titles. Public servants put the public interest first."

But there's an even more important point to make, and Coulter makes it: "As an inspirational figure on the national stage [Palin] has given voice to the pent-up frustration of millions of Americans who have seen their federal government over-reaching its Constitutional constraints for too long without adequate checks."

This is what, politically speaking, America needs: Servant leadership plus a return to Constitutional government, both of which are rejected in practice and in philosophy by the current regime and, unfortunately, more than one or two Republicans.

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How the New Resistance Can Win the Culture War 

"I'm not going to pretend to a faith I don't feel," says Julia Gillard. But she has "great respect for religion," according to the UK Telegraph.

Three quick points:

1) Faith, at least "trust" placed in our Creator, is a matter of facts, not of feeling. The resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, for example, is not a feeling. It is either a fact of history or it is not. If it is a fact of history, a reasonable person acts in accordance with that fact; an unreasonable person does not.

2) If the prime minister does not "believe in God," why does she "respect religion"? If a particular "religious" truth claim is false (for example, an assertion that the Easter Bunny is God), why respect it? If a relgious assertion is false, one might hold respect for the misinformed "believer," but "religious" truth claims are the same as any other truth claim. Those which are true ought to be affirmed, and those which are not true ought not to be affirmed. 

3) Finally, the epistemology of the Creator as set forth in the information given in the Biblical data rejects the concept that "faith" is merely a private experience in which people can pretty much "believe" whatever they want and feel good about it. That's not faith, it's nonsense. Biblical "faith" is not about a privatized a way of knowing but rather a fact-based way of trusting -- it's a decision of the whole person based on good and sufficient evidence (as Francis Schaeffer often said) that certain propositions about God, man, and the universe are true.

Gillard gets high marks for her lack of pretense. But based on what we have in this report in the Telegraph, what she rejects has little to do with real Christianity, for what she thinks she rejects is already equally rejected, and even more profoundly rejected, by Christianity itself. 

The real thing -- holistic commitment based on knowable truth -- so that people might live lives of community with their Creator and fellow man -- has always been much more rigorous and reality oriented that what sometimes passes for "faith" these days.

As for me and my house of free-thinkers, we too have great respect -- for truth.

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In today's edition of The Pearcey Report we feature an article by Cindy Simpson, who writes on the question: "Should GOP Call 'Truce' on Social Issues?"

As the author's footnote states at the end of her article, Cindy is a "'citizen journalist' inspired by Nancy Pearcey's book Total Truth and a proud member of the New Resistance. Her work also appears at American Thinker."

This is Cindy's first article for The Pearcey Report, and we look forward to more.

Mr. Obama in Canada, just off the helicopter. 

Hat tip: American Thinker

Psychotherapist "Robin of Berkeley" offers a diagnostic assessment of an enigma wrapped in a president and asks what it means for liberals and conservatives.

It's now 16-plus months into the reign of Barack Hussein Obama, and the topic of conversation among one writer's "friends and associates in London" concerns Obama's "incompetence and narcissism, and the danger he poses to the United States and its allies in Europe."

"That grainy, sleazy undercover video of Sarah Ferguson selling access to Prince Andrew!

"It's making Beltway clutch at our pearls," exclaims Julie Mason at Beltway Confidential.

"Gingrich was a revolutionary until he got power," writes Joseph Farah at WorldNetDaily. "Then he became the politician, again. Ask most members of the freshman class of 1994 who betrayed the 'Republican Revolution' and they will tell you Gingrich did."

"Two of the three Americans held for months in an Iranian prison have become engaged and plan to marry after they are released, according to their mothers," reports the UK Telegraph.

Happy couple Shane Bauer and Sarah Shourd expect to get hitched as soon as they untie the knot. 

"The founder of the group Jews for Jesus has died after a long battle with prostate cancer," reports AP. "Moishe Rosen was 78."

Andrea Billups writes at Human Events:

Even as the Rev. Al Sharpton is being touted as the Obama Administration’s latest -- and increasingly connected -- ally on race relations, some are wondering if his presence on the scene of the Arizona immigration debate is hurting more than helping as heated battle lines over the state’s tough new law are drawn everywhere from Facebook to talk radio to state legislatures.

A friend of ours, Stovall Witte, is running for Congress in South Carolina. We recommend that citizens of the 1st Congressional District from Charleston to Myrtle Beach and there abouts will give this good man (who has consumed Nancy's book Total Truth, by the way) every due consideration.

Here from the Witte for Congress website is "Sto's" Vision Statement:

The people of the First District of South Carolina need someone in Congress they can trust with their national security, economic security and their constitutional security. Stovall Witte wants to be that Member of Congress.

Stovall has spent his life serving others in many different positions of leadership. He has stood firm on a solid foundation of conservative values and is a man of strong moral character.

He recognizes that we have people in Congress who seem not to realize we’re at war. His position on national security is a priority for him both personally and professionally. He is committed to ensuring that it becomes a higher priority for the leaders of our country.

Stovall understands the future of our nation lies in the hands of our children. What will that future look like if Congress continues to spend our children’s money? Stovall has seen the compromises that are made at the expense of our nation and it’s future, and is passionate in his pursuit of a better working government that is held accountable for wasteful spending.

Stovall believes that we have people in Congress who don’t seem to care that they’re passing laws that aren’t in line with the Constitution. He understands that a government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have – including your Freedom. Stovall will be a devoted ally in the defense of Freedom as a Member of Congress for the First District of South Carolina.

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."

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From Going Rogue to Going Constitutional

This time it's the mayor of Tampa. Florida.

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 step with the title of her No. 1 best-seller Going Rogue, former GOP vice-presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin is bypassing the traditional summit for conservatives this year, the Conservative Political Action Conference, while planning to speak at a tea party event," reports WND.

And that's even though Wikipedia pronounced Rush had died, and a "major news organization" made inquiries about the "fatal plane crash of Glenn Beck," reports Jim Meyers at Newsmax.

From KNSS News Radio 1330: "Rush will return to the microphone on Wednesday, January 6th. Mark Steyn will be the guest host on Monday, January 4th and Tuesday, January 5th."

Hat tip: Big Hollywood

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'."

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?"

"She’s clearly laying the groundwork for her own White House run," writes Alan Dowd at Frontpagemag.com.

Prejean makes the announcement on Facebook. Here's the new website.

"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.

In an interview with Newsmax, "former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Tuesday sharply criticized President Obama's deep bow to the emperor of Japan and charged Democrats are 'purposefully' holding back details on their healthcare reform proposals from the American people to avoid an open debate."

The body of Michael Scott was found floating in the Chicago River, reports MyFoxChicago. No comment as of yet from the Chicago Public Schools.

"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."

Or Maybe 3: James O'Keefe, Hannah Giles, and Andrew Breitbart, who, says the Post, "may be the biggest winner." 

"A senior analyst and executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, [Dalia] Mogahed was appointed to President Obama's Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships," reports WorldNetDaily.

"The Egyptian-born, hijab-clad adviser drew attention earlier this month when she defended Shariah, or Islamic law, on a British television show hosted by a member of an extremist Muslim group, insisting the majority of women around the world associate Shariah with 'gender justice'."

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"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."

More . . .

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"Before I get to the chilling implications for free conservative speech underscored by the vicious campaign to blackball Rush Limbaugh as a potential owner of an NFL team," writes Diana West, "I want to provide a little context about the pre-existing NFL comfort zone of expression.

"I will start with two words: Keith Olbermann."

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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.

More . . .

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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.

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Rosie O'Donnell's Oppressive Coat

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann says columnist and author Michelle Malkin is a "mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it." And fascist, too.

We at The Pearcey Report/Pro-Existence think she's a great American.

And for that reason today is officially Michelle Malkin Day at The Pearcey Report.

Thank you, Michelle, for striving in your work and in your family to uphold that which defines America at her best: America the free, the brave, under a verifiable and knowable God, and in community with our fellow man.

Let the well-deserved cheering, partying, and celebrating begin.

Here's Malkin's website.

"The Norwegian Nobel Committee says U.S. President Barack Obama has won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for 'his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.'" reports AP.

"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.

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Holocaust-denying Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's "vitriolic attacks on the Jewish world hide an astonishing secret," says the UK Telegraph.  "A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots." 

"A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian -- a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver," reports the Telegraph. "The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth."

One wonders how many of Ahmadinejad's Jewish family and relatives were murdered or otherwise liquidated in the Holocaust that never happened.

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's 1st Presidential Speech

"Chicago was eliminated in the first ballot of voting for the 2016 Olympics on Friday, a stunning defeat for the city that was expected to be one of the two finalists," reports AP.

"Not even the presence of President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama -- nor a long list of celebrities -- was enough to help the United States' third-largest city."

"US chat show king David Letterman has revealed that he had sexual relationships with female staff members on his show and faced an extortion bid over the liaisons," reports the U.K. Telegraph.

"Letterman said he had received a threat to either pay $2 million (£1.25 million) or risk the relationships being made public."

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"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.

Related
Anti-Palin Media, Hong Kong, and the Decline of Journalism
Palin Speaks in Asia: The Challenge for "Common-Sense Conservatism"

See Jay and Rush talk.

See Rush run over Algore. Twice.

"It was worth it!" said Rush of the "Green Car Challenge."

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John Ziegler writes at Big Hollywood:

You would think at this point it would be impossible for anyone (especially me) to be stunned or outraged by anything the news media tries to pull when it comes to Sarah Palin.

After all, once you have been exposed to a year-long brutal beating, one tends to become numb to a simple low blow.

However, the news coverage of her Hong Kong speech still managed to spark the senses on several levels. . . . 

Let me suggest two strategic points to keep in mind regarding "mainstream journalism" today:

1) It is "far outside" and "even against" the American mainstream (see "Mainstream" Press & the Treason of the Journalists)

2) It is out of touch with the journalist's calling to "test everything" (see Question the Collaborationist Media)

The point is not simply to gravitate to a "conservative" media that loses objectivity and begins singing the praises of Palin -- as if she were the president, and reporters were kids in school.

Rather, the point is to refuse the decline of media, to demand news coverage that is rooted in a passionate search for truth that can be considered and discussed on the basis of facts and evidence available to any person, regardless of one's political passions. 

Here from Palin's page on Facebook is an extended excerpt of the Hong Kong speech.

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Just coming in from soccer and am looking forward to Rush Limbaugh's appearance tonight on the Jay Leno show.

Time: 10 p.m., eastern; 9 p.m., central

Place: NBC

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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.

Despite alarm bells from the usual reliable sources, Robert Stacy McCain over at American Spectator seems alarmingly unalarmed that this fellow Glenn Beck at Fox remains out and about. Unsupervised, apparently.

McCain writes:

Grassroots conservative enthusiasm notwithstanding, the talk-radio host and Fox News personality is under attack this week, with the liberal establishment's favorite weapon, a Time magazine cover: "Mad Man: Glenn Beck and the angry style of American politics." This continues a long tradition of weekly newsmagazine covers demonizing conservative figures like Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich.

Read here to get to the bottom of this apparent lack of concern vis-a-vis Mr. Beck.

But the columnist, pastor, and radio guy is a proud father, anyway.

And now Rush can know for sure which Doug Giles is the Doug Giles of Hannah. 

Read here to let Doug tell you himself.

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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"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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"Oprah Winfrey's reign as chat show queen may be coming to an end," says the UK Telegraph.

OK. But how about an alternative? 

Try this for a little broadcast rebellion: A humane, pro-liberty entertainment hour of guests, talk, etc., that understands the content and norms of Declaration freedom over against the closed-down liberal state oppression.

There might be one or two stories out there -- maybe even hundreds and thousands -- that interests the millions and millions of Americans who have had it with the Springeresque carnival and broadcast hegemony that passes for information and entertainment these days. (By the way, is that Springer thing even on anymore?)

Or is Hollywood too small-minded, too afraid, too weak for that kind of culture shock?

Hat tip: Big Hollywood

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Julia Duin writes at the Washington Times:

I still remember the first time I saw Frank Schaeffer, then known in the evangelical Christian world as "Franky," the son of revered scholar Francis Schaeffer.

It was 1983, and Franky, then 31, was giving a rousing speech about laying down one's life in defense of the unborn to pro-lifers gathered at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Twenty-six years later, Mr. Schaeffer, 57 -- who changed his moniker to 'Frank' around the time his 1992 autobiographical novel "Portofino" was published -- is unrecognizable. He is now Greek Orthodox, although contrary to the position of his church, he believes abortion should be legal. He does call for the repeal of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, on the grounds that it launched an intractable culture war.

His invective against his former allies has puzzled the evangelical world. The coup de grace was his 2007 book "Crazy for God," where he dumped a load of dirt on his father and Edith Schaeffer, his 90-something-year-old mother, by asserting the couple's world-famous Christian retreat, L'Abri, was a con job.

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Pete Winn reports from CNSNews.com:

Rush Limbaugh, who calls himself the man the mainstream media "love to hate," would have created a stir last week -- if the media had actually taken notice.

Arbitron's "Portable People Meter" (PPM) ratings for August show that Limbaugh experienced record ratings in a number of major American radio markets. 

According to broadcasting industry analyst Brian Maloney, Limbaugh had "blockbuster success" in some key cities, including Los Angeles -- home to the number one radio station in the country.

But why the huge uptick? Winn quotes Maloney:

There’s no question that the raging debate over Obamacare has many more listeners turning to Rush for answers and support -- and everything they’ve turned to Rush for, for so many years, but in far greater numbers than ever before.

Here's the entire report from CNSNews.

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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.

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"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.

Has 122,359 followers, as of 9:56 am eastern time.

This is not an endorsement, but speaking theoretically, one of the reasons the United States would be better off with a Sarah Palin as president rather than a Barack Obama is that she operates within thought-forms closer to the mission statement and vision statement of our country -- as defined by the Declaration of Independence and as safeguarded by a form of government consistent with the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Now comes the Palin op-ed that appears in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. The op-ed makes several points worthy of discussion. For example, "that the Democrats' proposals would still empower unelected bureaucrats to make decisions affecting life or death health-care matters."

That's good, and the op-ed is a worthy read. But does it miss a crucial point, perhaps the crucial point?

Consider how the former governor of Alaska defines "real health-care reform." She says it is "market-oriented, patient-centered, and result-driven."

Attractive as this sounds, my friends, I am not so sure. Yes. Big federal-centric government is a devastating problem -- but, at the heart of the matter, on what grounds?

At its strategic core, it seems to me, for those who appreciate something of the historic and principial struggle between liberty and tyranny, real healthcare reform is primarily Constitution-oriented and Declaration-oriented.

Is this not more to the point?

The weakness of the merely "market-oriented," etc., formulation is that it leaves untouched the socialist big government premise that the ever-expanding and mutating federal empire somehow has the Constitutional authority to impose its freedom-limiting will on American healthcare in the first place. 

An additional weakness is that it offers a tactical answer to a strategic challenge, an approach that seems ill-suited to win the battle for freedom, much less healthcare. Moreover, it offers solutions that belong to realms beyond the calling of government, especially the federal government. 

Far better to get government out of the way of markets, so that ethical people can creatively make their living and provide for their families. Far better to get government out of the doctor's office, so that health is not subject to political calculations and the aspirations of rogue politicians. Far better to see results driven by success, health, and humanity.

But perhaps I err. In that case, if someone would like to make the Constitutional argument for socialized medicine, please step forward. In the process, please note that Democrat Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia has already admitted that "there is 'no place in the Constitution' that mentions health care."

What seems to disturb -- and rightly so -- so many of the Tea Party people is that too many members of both the Democratic and Republican Parties seem not to appreciate the Constitutional crisis at the heart of not just the healthcare debate but so many other issues across the board in American life and political thought today.

My conviction is that there is hope for freedom in America.

A free and dignified people -- who have "read the directions" and who understand they are created in the image of God and thereby endowed by our Creator with "certain unalienable rights" -- do not willingly sell the soul of liberty in exchange for state-controlled hospitals or equalized medical outcomes as rationed by socialists, calculating politicians in Congress, "helpful" federal bureaucrats pulling strings from Washington, or greedy power-grubbers in general.

This is why we begin to resist that growing train of abuses conceived and enacted against our will and against the content and spirit of the Founding vision. We welcome the arrival of public servants who know precisely where to drive the stake.

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. 

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

"Last week, radio talk-show host, Fox News commentator and best-selling author Sean Hannity just offered the slightest hint that he might consider a bid for the presidency," writes Joseph Farah at WorldNetDaily. "I can tell you that he instantly became my pick."

Interested in sending a "warrior to Congress"? Then U.S. Marine Jesse Kelly wants you.

"President Obama participated in a controversial 1990s political party with a socialist agenda, recalls a major member of the organization known as the New Party," reports WorldNetDaily.

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to Chris Matthews of MSNBC:

Chris, the Constitution of the United States specifically says you have to be a natural born citizen.

Watch the interview. Here's the DeLay website.

He was 78. Kenneth Tomlinson, formerly editor in chief of Reader's Digest, pays his respects at Human Events.

And here's "Remembering Bob Novak," from Tim Carney.

While managing editor at Human Events, I wore the additional hat of "associate editor" at the Evans-Novak Political Report, working with, among others, both Tim Carney and Novak himself.

The family will miss a loved one. Journalism will miss not just a well-informed reporter with institutional memory, but also someone who understood and worked diligently at his craft. RIP. 

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"Legendary inventor, guitar player and recording artist Les Paul has died from complications from pneumonia," reports the Voice of America. "He was 94 years old." 

"Paul revolutionized the music scene with his solid-body electric guitar that he first built in the 1940s in his quest for a guitar with amplified sound. In 1952, Gibson Guitar company began production of the Les Paul guitar."

By the way, along with motorcycles, there will be guitars in Heaven.

"Political opponents have portrayed the US president in a new comic series named as a play on words with the popular horror franchise Resident Evil, reports the UK Telegraph.

Here's the page at Amazon.

Where is the evidence that the "man sitting in the White House for the last six months is constitutionally eligible"? asks Joseph Farah at WorldNetDaily.

Farah clarifies:

Once again, I am not making accusations about where Obama was born.

All I am saying is that he is without question hiding something by not producing a real birth certificate -- one that bears a signature of a physician and the name of a hospital where that birth took place.

He is hiding something. And I think I have proved that.

It's not my job to prove he was born elsewhere. It's Obama's job to prove he is a natural born citizen.

If he has any respect for the U.S. Constitution he swore to uphold, he would have done that by now -- if he can.

Every day he delays doing that, the suspicion will only grow.

No, this is not a "dead story," as the president of CNN pronounces. It is very much alive. It is getting bigger every day. And, yes, I am proud of the part I played in making that true.

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From Robert Stacy McCain at American Spectator:

It is not illegal to impersonate a journalist, but when ... anti-Palin blogger [Jesse Griffin] published a bogus "exclusive" Saturday, he signed up for a lesson in the law of unintended consequences.

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Drew Zahn writes at WorldNetDaily:

Ronald Reagan's birthplace, a second-story apartment over what was once a small-town tavern in Tampico, Ill., is today marked by a museum.

John Adams' birthplace is a national park.

Even Rutherford B. Hayes, whose birthplace is today covered over by a BP gas station, merits a metal plaque commemorating the location.

While most of America's 44 presidents have tourist attractions or monuments of some kind marking their birthplaces, President Barack Obama -- for several reasons -- may not be granted the honor.

Too much Obama, too little care.

Asking the question,"Can we separate the man from the myth?" Ellis Washington at WorldNetDaily says, "There is much to admire in the journalist career of Walter Cronkite," and yet . . .

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Stuart Williamson at American Thinker explains why "Democrats -- and Repubicans too -- may find the next stage of Sarah Palin's public career uncomfortable."

How so? "True to form, Sarah Palin, her Governorship behind her, clearly and forthrightly declared her intent: to take up arms against the forces dedicated to tearing down our Constitution, destroying our principles of government, disparaging our history of defense of democracy and free enterprise, weakening our military, and saddling generations to come with oppressive debt and entitlement programs. She did so in the same inspirational, forceful manner that won her immediate and enthusiastic acclaim when she joined John McCain on the Republican ticket in '08."

Read the entire article here.

". . . And it's Obama."

Brent Baker at Newsbusters also quotes Limbaugh as saying the press has "sacrificed whatever integrity, character, professionalism, ethics that they've had . . . their total reason -- most of them -- for existence . . .  [is] propping this guy up. . . . The mainstream media has cashed in its chips, they have become nothing more than stenographers for Rahm Emanuel.”

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Hat tip: Instapundit

Columnist Cal Thomas shares a few of his concerns regarding former Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter:

. . . who once attended and occasionally taught a Sunday school class in Washington, which I visited, then claimed to believe much of what Scripture teaches. In practice, though, he was pro-choice on abortion and recently announced his support for same-sex "civil unions." He says he sees nothing prohibitive in Scripture to such arrangements. Carter must have gotten hold of a Reader's Digest condensed version.

Carter has announced he is leaving the Southern Baptist Convention -- the nation's largest Protestant body -- because he claims it treats women as inferior to men. In a statement he said, "At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities."

Carter must have missed the passage about mutual submission between married couples and the requirement that a man love his wife "as Christ loved the church," a very high standard that implies such love be equal to the self-sacrifice demonstrated by Christ on the cross. Such sacrifice can hardly justify any of the sins against women that Carter unfairly ascribes to the Southern Baptist Convention.

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Because she doesn't fit the failed GOP formula, writes Jane Chastain at WorldNetDaily.

Although, in Chastain's view, "it's pretty clear that Sarah Palin doesn't really want to be president," the Alaskan does understand "how desperately this country needs reform and, if no one else is available who can get the job done, she likely will take off her apron, put down her hunting rifle, dust herself off and run for the office."

"One thing is sure," says Chastain. "She will have to climb over the GOP establishment before she gets to the White House."

Related:
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A self-described "recovering liberal and psychotherapist in Berkeley" comments at American Thinker on the cruelty, abuse, and inhumanity that passes for politics in secular society today.

If Rush is the "Doctor of Democracy," what does that make Obama?

"Brushing aside the criticisms of pundits and politicos, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said she plans to jump immediately back into the national political fray -- stumping for conservative issues and even Democrats  -- after she prematurely vacates her elected post at month's end," reports the Washington Times.

"The former Republican vice-presidential nominee and heroine to much of the GOP's base said in an interview she views the electorate as embattled and fatigued by nonstop partisanship, and she is eager to campaign for Republicans, independents and even Democrats who share her values on limited government, strong defense and 'energy independence.'

Palin says she "will go around the country on behalf of candidates who believe in the right things, regardless of their party label or affiliation . . . . People are so tired of the partisan stuff -- even my own son is not a Republican."

Are Americans really "tired of the partisan stuff"?

Yes -- if by "partisan stuff" is meant the reduction of politics to superficial, unending, and disastrous power plays in that three-ring circus called Capitol Hill. You may have noticed: Those kinds of power plays leave the non-Constitutional Washington-centric empire untouched and imposing its will upon the land.

But no -- if by "partisan stuff" is meant Americans who yearn for the return of freedom and dignity would love to see a partisanship of conviction rooted in evidence, facts, reason, the Declaration, the Constitution, and the emancipatory Creator-based worldview for which all of this stands. That's the counter-revolution we need. The status quo is a dead-end.

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"A website aimed at combating so-called internet 'smears' about President Obama has disappeared from the Internet -- including an alleged certification of live birth posted during his campaign -- and archives for the website have been thoroughly scrubbed," reports WorldNetDaily.

Scrubbed statements included information on the "birth certificate, Bill Ayers, ACORN," reports WND.

Related:
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Ben Voth writes at American Thinker:

As a communication professional I have largely been at a loss to explain the judgments being drawn about Governor Palin by allegedly expert pundits. The general meme from pundits is that Palin is a quitter who cannot take the heat.

It seems rather like the "heat" has been more like hate -- maybe we are dealing with a simple spelling error? Journalism has gotten rather weak of late. 

More from "Hating Palin" . . .

With ample doses of "French" peppering his act, the comedian declares, "I'm done with Michael," and compares the singer to O.J. Simpson. 

"Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is again drawing fire from conservative groups, this time as the result of a 2003 ruling against a Christian group," reports CNSNews.com.
 
"In the case of Okwedy v. Molinari, decided in 2003, Sotomayor sat on a three-judge panel that upheld a lower court’s ruling (from 2001) against Keyword Ministries and its pastor, Kristopher Okwedy. The ministry had purchased billboard advertisements featuring Bible verses that condemned homosexuality."

Related:
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To Obama and Sotomayor: Keep Your Tyranny Off Our Constitution

Robert Stacy McCain on Sarah's July surprise and why the punditocracy is behind the Palin curve: 

The punditocracy can't predict Palin because she shares neither their perspective nor their assumptions. Her ascent to political stardom has been treated as a fluke by most of the GOP establishment for the simple reason that she doesn't slavishly follow the standard script of Republican politicians.

For all the back and forth Saturday and Sunday, Independence Day weekend seems as good a time as any for a strong, independent woman to declare her independence from political business as usual.

The Founding Fathers "shook up the world" (to quote a famed pugilist).  To the degree that Palin shares and ably articulates their Declaration principles and their Constitutional vision, one might expect more surprises from her and more gnashing of teeth from members in good standing with the massive federal state and the oft-unquestioned, freedom-denying assumptions for which it stands.     

More on "Sarah Surprises Again" at American Spectator.

"While millions of other Americans will be celebrating Independence Day weekend," writes Joseph Farah of WND, "Rick Warren, often called 'America's Pastor,' will be serving as the keynote speaker for a Saudi-backed Muslim group that promotes a radical strain of Wahhabi Islam in about 80 percent of U.S. mosques.

"I don't know about you," says Farah, "but I'm getting tired of Rick Warren's bad judgments."

The problem? "This time Warren will be schmoozing with the Islamic Society of North America, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood -- just as are al-Qaida, Hamas and most other Muslim terrorist organizations."

Related:
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"Honduras is part of a pattern," asserts this editorial in the Washington Times.

On issue after issue (abortion, homosexuality, healthcare, GM, energy, taxes, spending, Iran, Israel, Honduras), the present occupant of the White House operates on the basis of what he wants when he wants it (aka, "living Constitution"), restrained in principle only by the present configuration of political power that may or may not resist him.

Ladies and Gentlemen, that is not Constitutional government. And it exists nowhere in the words or spirit of the Declaration of Independence, which we celebrate in two days, with yearning in our hearts.

Mr. Obama has opened wide the door to tyranny in America -- and beyond. By way of contrast, however, in the spirit of humane and dignified resistance, a free-thinking, self-governing people supports the restoration of Constitutional government in Honduras and the United States.

That is bad news for apparent Chavez and Castro wannabe, Manuel Zelaya, the rogue president of Honduras, given his walking papers.

And it is bad news for Mr. Obama, the rogue president of the United States, who might be better suited to life amid the glories and government health planning genius of Castro's Cuba or Chavez's paradise in fair and equal Venezuela. Both of those guys have Ph.D.s in knowing how to redistribute the wealth. 

By the way, interested parties might check in here for the next flight to Caracas out of Reagan National Airport.

Talking to a "Democratic-centric crowd," Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts wades into Letterman territory:

Too bad if a governor had to go missing, it couldn't have been the governor of Alaska. You know, Sarah Palin.

I suppose the rule is: Whether in season or out of season, hate Sarah Palin. Use any and every opportunity to try to ruin her reputation. 

Identify. Personalize. Polarize. Destroy.

Thank you, Sen. Alinsky.

This chilling video from Iran demonstrates something about the price of freedom, something about the high personal cost of standing up to government tyranny.

Our Founders understood something about this. Do we here at home in the U.S.?

Or have secularized Americans and "Christian" presidents such as Barack Hussein Obama forgotten about unalienable rights endowed by the Creator? Those real human rights, of course, violate the "separation of church and state" written into the "living" U.S. Constitution by the likes of the ACLU.

If that rewrite of history and the Constitution stands, then it may be Tehran today, but America tomorrow, for ideas have consequences. And bad ideas can have evil consequences.

If we despise the Founding Vision -- as elites and secularists preach and teach in Washington, Hollywood, Media, and academia -- one wonders on what basis American individuals and families can really hope to maintain their freedom and dignity.

Related:
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Jon Voight Calls for Resistance to "Obama Oppression"
Independence Day Tea Party Tally Explodes

"Our mission statement," says FireDavidLetterman.com, is "David Letterman must be held accountable for his disgraceful statements." As part of this effort, the website is announcing a rally planned for 4:30 p.m. tomorrow (Tues.) at The Ed Sullivan Theater, 1697 Broadway, New York City.

Speaking of Ed Sullivan, he always presented himself in a dignified manner. His variety show had class and treated its audience with respect.

The same cannot be said of Mr. Letterman and the CBS "Late Show," as is indicated by the man's crude sex jokes attacking Sarah Palin and her family. Instead, the CBS star appears to operate in a different, less-enlightened moral universe from that of Ed Sullivan.

That's bad for entertainment, the Letterman audience, and David Letterman himself (not to mention his family). He might want to look in the mirror and ask a few heartfelt questions.

That is not meant as a putdown. It's something every human being with a conscience has to do from time to time. Otherwise you drift. Otherwise 30 years later you see a face in the mirror you no longer recognize.

This phenomenon is inclusive: It happens to entertainers, pastors, politicians, scientists, activists, artists, authors, and hard-charging ministry leaders.

Related:
Comedy Has Consequences: Still Open Season on Sarah Palin
O'Reilly, Letterman, and the Culture War

A tactical, self-serving admission of "guilt" doesn't cut it, writes George Michalopulos, a layman in the Greek Orthodox Church.

Hat tip: John Couretas

Related:
Schaeffer Son Tries to Pin Tiller's Murder on His Father Francis Schaeffer
Franky Schaeffer Plays Schaeffer Card, Again
Francis Schaeffer: A Student's Appreciation of a Distinct Approach
What Can We Learn From Francis Schaeffer?
Francis Schaeffer: "The Central Problem of Our Age"
Telegraph: U.S. Religious Right Concedes Defeat
Michelangelo, Schaeffer, and the Kingdom of Washington

David Letterman's below-the-belt sex-joke shots at Palin and her family are cheap and demeaning and reflect rather poorly on him as an increasingly unfunny and uninteresting entertainer. 

But it also speaks volumes about the inherent inhumanity at the heart of materialistic secularist thought as it impacts popular culture. There is a way up from that, but it requires an embrace of that which secularists despise: The high view of the individual person reflected in the Declaration of Independence and based in the objective and factual reality of human beings as having been created in the image of a rational, personal, knowable, and verifable God.

Palin "wasted no time unloading both barrels at the hoary Letterman for his lurid jabs," writes J. Robert Smith at American Thinker. "The time has come for conservatives to start fighting back. Governor Palin is showing the way."

Related:
O'Reilly, Letterman, and the Culture War

In an stirring speech at the 2009 GOP Senate-House Dinner Monday night, actor Jon Voight takes on the Democrats, Obama, and even Oprah. Will Hollywood ever recover?

But here's the more important question: Will the Republican Party move forward not just on the basis of policy wonkism, and not just on the basis of opposition to Obama, but on the basis of the genius of the Founding Vision and Mission Statement set forth in the Declaration of Independence?

Anything less is doomed to failure.

As the Founders understood, declared, lived, and struggled, only a republic poised in the content of liberty rooted in a living and knowable Creator will have the resources needed to break free of state tyranny, ideological oppression, and false prophets disguised as U.S. presidents.

This is the direction of Mark Levin's terrific book Liberty and Tyranny, after which reading all patriots would do well to read (or view the DVD) Francis Schaeffer's A Christian Manifesto.

"We, and we alone," the Oscar-winning actor said, "are the right frame of mind to free this nation from this Obama oppression."

Voight's "analysis of how President Obama got elected will eventually be the accepted truth once sober and dispassionate journalists reenter the mainstream media," says Andrew Breitbart at Big Hollywood.

Click here to see a video of Voight's speech as well as additional comments by Andrew Breitbart.

Related:
Breitbart, Rush, and the Cult of Secular Politics
Question the Collaborationist Media
O'Reilly, Letterman, and the Culture War

Molotov Mitchell raps a tribute to mass-murderer of babies for money -- the heroic and liberal-sainted baby-killer Dr. George Tiller.

Related:
Pro-Life "Smear" Suspected in DOJ Tiller Probe
Collaborationist Media Spike Muslim Convert's Murder of U.S. Soldier
The Evil Religious Presidents Do
Ann Coulter: 49 Million to 5

Larry Thornberry writes at American Spectator:

Marion Mitchell Morrison, springing from humble beginnings in Winterset, Iowa, was known to millions of movie-viewers as John Wayne, and to his friends as "Duke."

He breathed his last at 5:23 P.M., June 11, 1979. Thirty years ago tomorrow.

In those years we haven't seen his like, and probably won't again. The cultural soil just isn't here to grow another giant like the Duke.

Thornberry recommends John Wayne: American, by Randy Roberts and James S. Olson, as the "gold standard" of "serious attempts to tell the Duke's story." 

More on "Remembering the Duke Again" . . .

Related on film:
Fireproof: Reel Rebel Upsets Tinseltown Stereotypes
We Were Soldiers: Flesh, Blood, and Spirit in the Valley of Death
Evolution vs. the Aliens: Cosmic Irony Found in Earthy Comedy

"Here in Normandy the rescue began. Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny . . ." In this speech, U.S. President Ronald Reagan marks the 40th anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 1944.

Peter Barry Chowka in American Thinker reviews yesterday's 3-hour appearance of William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn on C-SPAN's "Book TV."

Chowka writes: "Ayers has gained some notoriety for comments he made that appear to defend his bomb making past (gaining for him in some circles the moniker 'unrepentant domestic terrorist') and for his murky but apparently influential association during the 1990s with the then new-on-the-scene, up-and-coming Chicago politician, Barack H. Obama."

Ayers "personifies the moral bankruptcy of the far left," and Dohrn "comes across as decidely rough around the edges and inarticulate."

More from Chowka on Ayers and Dohrn . . .

John Sexton writes at Verum Serum:

No surprise to those who’ve followed his career. Franky Schaeffer has found a new way to drag his father’s name through the mud, this time by blaming him for the murder of Dr. Tiller.

More on "Franky Schaeffer Dishonestly" . . .

Related:
Franky Schaeffer Plays Schaeffer Card, Again
Francis Schaeffer: A Student's Appreciation of a Distinct Approach
What Can We Learn From Francis Schaeffer?
Francis Schaeffer: "The Central Problem of Our Age"
Telegraph: U.S. Religious Right Concedes Defeat
Michelangelo, Schaeffer, and the Kingdom of Washington

Bob Tyrrell writes on the flawed mindset of Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor:

What kind of a society have we arrived at through Judge Sotomayor's reasoning? It is a society in which some groups are superior to others, namely, wise Latinas are superior to the rest of us. That is not what I call progress over intolerance, bigotry, or, for that matter, stupidity.

Nonetheless, this is the mindset of Liberals who hold sway at the nation's law schools. Professor Barack Obama had the same point of view when he taught at the University of Chicago Law School. . . .

The problem with their position is that it assumes we are all prisoners of our experience, except for Sotomayor and Obama who have somehow transcended their experience.

The rest of us cannot think objectively.

In fact, we cannot read the law or the Constitution unimpeded by our backgrounds.

Yet Sotomayor and Obama are here to guide and to govern.

At some point, perhaps, we will get over this middle class idea of holding elections. Or maybe Sotomayor and Obama will simply suspend them. They seem to know what is best.

More from Bob Tyrrell on the "Flawed Reasoning" of Soto-Obama-Mayor . . .

Related:
Making Racism Cool Again
How to Have a Race War
Time to "Man Up" GOP: Don't Fail to Fight Sotomayor
Sotomayor? Obama Invites War
Rush: Sotomayor the "Antithesis of a Judge . . ."
To Obama and Sotomayor: Keep Your Tyranny Off Our Constitution
Why Judges Make Law: The Roots and Remedy of Judicial Activism

Thomas Sowell explains:

In Washington, the clearer a statement is, the more certain it is to be followed by a "clarification" when people realize what was said.

The clearly racist comments made by Judge Sonia Sotomayor on the Berkeley campus in 2001 have forced the spinmasters to resort to their last-ditch excuse, that it was "taken out of context."
 
If that line is used during Judge Sotomayor's Senate confirmation hearings, someone should ask her to explain just what those words mean when taken in context.

More from Sowell . . .

Related:
Time to "Man Up" GOP: Don't Fail to Fight Sotomayor
Sotomayor? Obama Invites War
Rush: Sotomayor the "Antithesis of a Judge . . ."
To Obama and Sotomayor: Keep Your Tyranny Off Our Constitution
Why Judges Make Law: The Roots and Remedy of Judicial Activism

"Barack Obama has another outspoken critic on the stump today," reports WorldNetDaily.

"Judge Roy Moore, former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court launches his run for governor of that state and hits the national media promoting release of his autobiographical manifesto, So Help Me God.

Related:
Those 10 Commandments: Did Chief Justice Moore Go Too Far?

Eric Boehlert at Media Matters would like to know. He writes:

That's the only way to confirm her account and make sure that Dowd didn't simply plagiarize TPM. The media's Village is quite content that Dowd did nothing wrong. That it was just one innocent mistake. To date, the Times editors agree and are giving Dowd a complete pass.

See also:
Plagiarism: Pretend People, Fake Work
What Is a Plagiarist?
Oxford, Cambridge, Plagiarism, and Christian Worldview
Controversy Over "Michelangelo" Sculpture

In case you missed it, WND recently linked (scroll down) to "Beauty and the Beast: Now This Is Extremism," with the following kicker: "Rick Pearcey: Miss California Has Upheld Founders' 'Humane and Liberating Worldview.'"

Here's the article at Pro-Existence.

From FoxNation: "Open Minds" and "Fair-Minded Words"? You be the judge. Click here to view the entire speech at RealClearPolitics.

Related
Humane Resistance: Palin Hits Notre Dame for Recognizing Obama
Farah: Obama Wants Civil Dialogue Over Murder of Unborn Humans
Obama at Notre Dame: Text

In an email to columnist Holly Robichaud, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin writes: 

My favorite grandpa, Clem James Sheeran, was Catholic. Irish to the core, his favorite place (other than church) was Notre Dame.

I can’t imagine what he would think as the university recognizes someone who contradicts the core values of the Catholic faith by promoting an anti-life agenda. As we learned today, our nation is more pro-life than ever before; it is a very important time to strengthen the message that every baby is created for good purpose and has the potential to make this world a better place.”

"While Palin understands this battle is about a fundamental value," comments Robichaud, "Obama supporters trivialize it by suggesting it is about opening a dialogue with people of opposing views. Despite their belittling, this outrage is well deserved. By bestowing the degree on President Pro-Choice, a message is conveyed that he is a role model, someone deserving of recognition in the eyes of the university. Jenkins even said he is an inspiring leader."

Well said. But note also that Obama is in conflict not just with a question of "value," even a fundamental one. For this man stands on the wrong side of fact, science, evidence, the Constitution, the Declaration, and the Founding Vision of the United States of America. Most of all, the president of the United States stands against the knowable, verifiable, and factual Creator, upon whom and from whom all human rights that have any adequate foundation are based.

The president's ideological alienation from the good, the true, the beautiful, and the humane is complete and total. No amount of oratory or dialogue or enablement from a lapdog, secularist press can cover up the stench of this cult of barbarism divorced from humanity and reason. By the measurement of the American experiment in liberty, his is an extremism rooted in inauthentic faith.

What remains is for albeit imperfect people of good will to listen -- as did our Founders -- to their Creator instead of to this mere mortal and his pretended wisdom but all-too-real vanity. What remains is to insist on human freedom and dignity under God in effective and principled resistance to overcome a kind of state control and cool barbarism that European dictators and totalitarians and orators from days not that long ago could only have dreamed of.

That kind of resistance would be progress. That would be humane. That is the way of dignity.

Related
Farah: Obama Wants Civil Dialogue Over Murder of Unborn Humans
Obama OKs Killing Unborn in Notre Dame Speech
Episcopalian High Priestess: "Abortion Is a Blessing!"
What About Obama, Mussolini, and the Unmentionable Herr Hitler?
The Evil Religious Presidents Do
How to Argue Like a Fascist
American Fascism: Obama and Mussolini

Go ahead. Make Nice. But Notre Dame party-spoiler Joseph Farah of WND chooses not to play by Obama's pathetic, inhumane, and bloody rules:

If I were presiding over a public policy that called for the murder of unborn babies for any reason or no reason at all, that provided mandatory public funding of those procedures both domestically and in foreign countries, that required doctors and nurses to perform abortions even if they were conscientiously opposed, that permitted experimentations on living human embryos, that promoted even partial-birth abortions outside the womb and that called for the extermination of infants who somehow defied all the odds and managed to survive efforts to kill them before birth, I guess I would want to frame the debate in such a way as to diminish the hideous monstrousness of my morally indefensible position.

He doesn't really want people who recognize what abortion is to approach the debate with "open hearts." He wants us to harden our hearts.  

More on "The Blowback of Notre Dame," by Joseph Farah at WND . . .

Related
Obama OKs Killing Unborn in Notre Dame Speech
Episcopalian High Priestess: "Abortion Is a Blessing!"
What About Obama, Mussolini, and the Unmentionable Herr Hitler?
The Evil Religious Presidents Do
How to Argue Like a Fascist
American Fascism: Obama and Mussolini

"After receiving an honorary doctorate in law at the University of Notre Dame’s graduation ceremony yesterday, President Barack Obama delivered a speech to the school's graduating seniors that sought to legitimize his position in favor of the legal killing of unborn children," reports Terry Jeffrey at CNSNews.com.

"Obama told the graduates of the nation’s most well-known Catholic university that abortion 'has both moral and spiritual dimensions' -- although he did not explain why he had made this conclusion -- and made it quite clear that, even so, he has no intention of moving from his position that it ought to be legal for a pregnant mother to have a doctor kill her unborn child for literally any reason at any stage of pregnancy."

More on Obama at Notre Dame from CNSNews.com.

Related
Episcopalian High Priestess: "Abortion Is a Blessing!"
What About Obama, Mussolini, and the Unmentionable Herr Hitler?
The Evil Religious Presidents Do
How to Argue Like a Fascist
American Fascism: Obama and Mussolini

This ABC News interview is must listening.

Here's a report from The Note, a blog at ABCNews.com.

From Peter Wehner at Commentary:

Andrew Sullivan has turned with indignant fury against Barack Obama. The triggering event for Andrew was President Obama’s decision to seek to block the release of photographs depicting the abuse of detainees held by U.S. authorities. And it is not simply that Obama has done a grave moral wrong.

“Slowly but surely,” Sullivan writes, “Obama is owning the cover-up of his predcessors’ [sic] war crimes. But covering up war crimes, refusing to proscute [sic] them, promoting those associated with them, and suppressing evidence of them are themselves violations of Geneva and the UN Convention. So Cheney begins to successfully coopt [sic] his successor.”

More from Wehner on Sullivan's "Daily" . . .

Ann Coulter writes:

Not even Dick Cheney can incite the blood-curdling rage of liberals at the sight of a sexy Evangelical Christian. Paula Jones, Katherine Harris, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin and, most recently, Miss California, Carrie Prejean, have all come under a frenzy of attacks from liberals.
   
Christians are supposed to be fat, balding sweaty little men with bad complexions. It's liberals who are supposed to be the sexy ones. (I know that from watching "The West Wing" and all movies starring Julia Roberts.)
   
But sadly for liberals, in real life, the fat, balding sweaty little guy with the bad complexion is Perez Hilton and the smoking-hot babe is Carrie Prejean.

More . . .

Related
Seriously Hot: The Carrie Prejean Story
Shuster Asks, "Can I Vomit?"
Miss California on Liberty Live Radio
Centrist Miss California Told to Shut Up "About Your Faith"
Resisting the Reactionary Extremism of Perez Hilton
BBC: On Murdering Miss California
Wildmon: Carrie Prejean vs. Rick Warren
Rosie's Coat

In deciding Miss California Carrie Prejean could retain her crown, "proud heterosexualist" Donald Trump Jujitsued homosexual-"marriage" activists by "invoking Barack Obama's opposition to it," writes George Neumayr at American Spectator.

But, as Neumayr notes, there remains a subtle, magnificent difference between Obama and Prejean.

Meanwhile, "the sexual revolutionaries at MSNBC, who usually encourage off-the-rails carnality, want to 'vomit' over Prejean," Neumayr continues. 

What's really upsetting their collective stomachs? The "violent reaction . . . illustrates once again . . . the intrinsically violent character of homosexual activism" and "its deep fear of fertile heterosexual women." 

More at American Spectator . . .

Related
Shuster Asks, "Can I Vomit?"
Miss California on Liberty Live Radio
Centrist Miss California Told to Shut Up "About Your Faith"
Resisting the Reactionary Extremism of Perez Hilton
BBC: On Murdering Miss California
Wildmon: Carrie Prejean vs. Rick Warren
Rosie's Coat

"While the left has been indulging and fostering the 'Bush Is Hitler' meme, they have just put a genuine ideological fascist heir in the White House," writes Kyle-Anne Shiver at American Thinker.

"There is an inherent danger in making scurrilous comparisons (as were perpretated unceasingly against George W. Bush), but there seem to be some very worrisome signs in the rise of Barack Obama that we Americans would be foolish to ignore."

More on Barack Obama: The Quintessential Liberal Fascist . . .

Related:
Can Obama Be an Economic Fascist?
Fascism Watch: Village Voice and Pro-Existence
American Fascism: Obama and Mussolini
National Obama Socialism
Regarding "Change" -- Liberals Drink Deeply From Fascist Well
Fascism Is Back
The Evil Religious Presidents Do

From Brent Baker at Newsbusters:

To Bob Schieffer's astonishment, when he wrapped up his Sunday interview by asking former Vice President Dick Cheney where he comes down between Rush Limbaugh and Colin Powell who both say the Republican Party would be “better off” without the other, Cheney declared: “I'd go with Rush Limbaugh.”  

More on Schwimpdaddled Schieffer at Newsbusters.

Robin, last name withheld, writes at American Thinker:

Dear friends, family, loved ones, conservatives, Republicans, libertarians, my brother-in-law, Sam, and my cousin Joe: I am sorry and you were right.

These are not easy words for anyone to utter, much less a leftist from Berkeley, or a recovering leftist, that is.

Even though I've been in recovery for 14 months, 2 weeks, and 3 days, leftists are always right in your face, in an I-hate-you-if-you-disagree sort of way.

Hence, this letter of amends to all the people I've lectured, scolded, ranted and raved at, and otherwise annoyed during my 30 plus years of "progresssive" politics. . . . 

For more "Amends From a Recovering Liberal in Berkeley," go here.

That's the conclusion invited by an entry at the BET website.

The truth is, however, "Limbaugh has no problem following black conservatives," a fact "you’d never know . . . were you to read the Black Entertainment Television website," counters Mike Sargent at Newsbusters.

There is, of course, no foul per se in criticizing public figures such as Limbaugh. Fair-minded criticism is a practice every free-thinking person endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights ought to embrace.

But if BET wants to be seen as something more than a political race cult with a broadcast license, it ought to supply evidence to back up charges against those in whom they find fault. We know they can do better and look forward to them doing so.

"The Rev. Katherine Ragsdale will soon become the first female president of Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts," writes Mark Tooley at American Spectator.  

In addition to a sermon in which the "openly lesbian" (what bravery!) Ms. Ragsdale exclaimed the "blessing" derived from one class of humanity being able to destroy another class of humanity, she has on occasion "boasted" before the congressional gods of the Federal Empire "of chauffeuring a 15-year-old girl to get an abortion and vowed to do so again, no matter the law, because the 'vows' of her ordination supposedly require it," says Tooley.

PR is key when advocating such inhumanity out of accord with real Christianity and the American founding. "However provocative Ragdale's pronouncements often are," Tooley writes, "she is in demeanor calm and polished and seemingly disciplined."

In short: No sudden moves, "seemingly." Unless, you're a "doctor" at work in an aborcentration center on a mission from god. That's where Ms. Ragsdale's "blessings" are "safe, rare, and legal" -- unless you happen to be on the wrong end of the safety. "No sudden moves" is absolutey vital here: Baring teeth too soon, or in public, may scare the horses.  

Jerry Doyle writes at Human Events:

It is dangerous in this day and age to use the word “fascism” lightly. Liberals sling around the term “fascism” without regard to its meeting -- for the left, “fascism” applies to everything from religious social perspectives to conservative tax cut prescriptions. But economic fascism has a precise, defined meaning. And Barack Obama’s economic policy fulfills that meaning in every conceivable way.

Economic fascism can be defined as government control over the four P’s: Product, Price, Profit Margin, and People. When the government controls the product created by the market, when it controls the price structure for product and company securities, when it controls how much profit particular companies can make, and when it controls the people who are hired and fired, economic freedom has been banished, and economic fascism reigns supreme.

And economic fascism reigns supreme in Barack Obama’s America. Just look at the recent government handling of Chrysler. In a series of press conferences this week announcing Chrysler’s bankruptcy, Obama hit on all of the four P’s.

More on Can Obama Be Called an Economic Fascist?

Related:
Fascism Watch: Village Voice and Pro-Existence
American Fascism: Obama and Mussolini
National Obama Socialism
Regarding "Change" -- Liberals Drink Deeply From Fascist Well
Fascism Is Back
The Evil Religious Presidents Do

It seems that accurately locating the affirmations of Miss California Carrie Prejean at the philosophic center of the American experiment in liberty was a bit much for Jim Galloway at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Over the top," said Galloway.

Galloway describes himself as a "writer and editor with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for 30 years," and he writes a blog called "Political Insider." He was responding to a column in RedState titled Beauty and the Beast: The Reactionary Extremism of Perez Hilton, also published at Pro-Existence, here. 

Note also this strange comment from a fellow who thinks I'm a "foreigner" who "would do well to draw from the actual well of Our Founders’ writing." He suggests I leave the country. 

Well, I think I've done well by the commenter and perhaps even Mr. Galloway. As a Christian, Miss Prejean affirms the existence of a Creator, as does the Declaration of Independence, which expresses the basic worldview and mission statement of the Founders of the United States. Both positions relate the Creator to questions of public life, including government and politics.

Miss California, therefore, is operating within the same philosophic universe as that shared by our Founders. She occupies the middle ground, the "center," as it were.

Those such as Perez Hilton who reject the application of verifiable information from the Creator to public life, including politics, operate in a totally different philosophic universe. In both outbursts and outlook, they are the extremists. 

Miss California Carrie Prejean, who recently stood up for the moral fact of the superiority of the Creator's objective norms for human marriage over against the subjective inventions and impositions of the secular homosexual establishment, will appear on nationally syndicated radio today at 4-5:00 p.m., Eastern Standard Time.

Prejean will join hosts Mat Staver and Matt Barber on Liberty Live, a video broadcast that can be accessed online at American Family Radio and OneNewsNow.

Listeners who want to ask Miss California questions on air may call 866-963-2037.

It is worth noting that Prejean's comments in defense of marriage at the Miss USA pageant place her at the vital center of the American experiment in liberty under our true and knowable Creator. This affirmation of male and female in lifelong and liberating community under God has earned Miss Prejean the scorn of intolerant extremists such as Perez Hilton, whose pro-homosexualist, anti-Judeo-Christian worldview could never have yielded the "the blessings of liberty" that alarm tryants past, present, and future. 

Related:
Centrist Miss California Told to Shut Up "About Your Faith"
BBC: On Murdering Miss California
Resisting the Reactionary Extremism of Perez Hilton
Wildmon: Carrie Prejean vs. Rick Warren
Limbaugh vs. Obama

In short, "America's Pastor" needs to grow a backbone. A 21-year-old California blonde might be able to show him how. Here's Tim Wildmon's take. 

Related:
Centrist Miss California Told to Shut Up "About Your Faith"
BBC: On Murdering Miss California
Resisting the Reactionary Extremism of Perez Hilton
Limbaugh vs. Obama

Fortunately, in the highest, centrist tradition of American exceptionalism, Carrie Prejean responds to a calling higher than that afforded by "Miss CA USA" or by extremist anti-family, pro-homosexual activists such as Perez Hilton.  WND has the story.

Related:
BBC: On Murdering Miss California
Resisting the Reactionary Extremism of Perez Hilton
Limbaugh vs. Obama

Imagine the face of a terrorist and then the face of an unborn baby. Which one, according to "care for the least of these" Barack Obama, signifies the "innocent victim" and which one the "dangerous enemy"?

Dan McLaughlin comments at RedState.

Related:
The Evil Religious Presidents Do
Regarding Change: Liberals Drink Deeply From Fascist Well

The following column is by Matt Barber, director of cultural affairs with both Liberty Counsel and Liberty Alliance Action. Barber also co-hosts the nationally syndicated “Liberty Live” talk radio program on AFR Talk. Brackets and ellipsis below indicate an editorial effort to keep Pro-Existence a family-friendly source of comment and analysis, an increasingly challenging proposition, given the rise of anti-family forces of secuarism and intolerance in the land, exemplified of late by a judge with the Miss USA pageant. 

You may have heard. During Sunday’s Miss USA pageant openly “gay” activist and pageant judge Perez Hilton -- the self-styled “Queen of Media” -- ambushed Carrie Prejean -- the openly Christian Miss California -- with a politically loaded question on so-called “same-sex marriage.” Prejean’s candid answer -- as both Hilton and Miss USA organizer Donald Trump later admitted -- likely cost her the crown. 

From the moment she opened her mouth, Prejean has given liberals a clinic in class.  Hilton, on the other hand (a.k.a. Mario Armando Lavandeira), has provided the world a sneak peek into the soul of homosexual activism.  

This is one for the up-is-down-black-is-white hall of fame. The media’s fabricated flap over Prejean’s answer -- a public defense of legitimate marriage -- has a reasonable America scratching its collective noggin in stunned disbelief. Not because of the answer she gave Perez -- which was both well received by the pageant audience and overwhelmingly shared by about 70% of Americans -- but, rather, because of Hilton’s hate-filled, misogynistic response to her answer and the disgraceful, knee-jerk defense of that response by liberals in Hollywood, the media, and organized homosexuality. 

After Hilton asked the lovely and talented Miss California whether “every state” should legalize “same-sex marriage,” Prejean responded: “In my country, in my family . . . I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that's how I was raised and that's how I think it should be  -- between a man and a woman.”

Oh the humanity!

Evidently this was not the rooty-tooty-fresh-n’-fruity answer Hilton -- the creepy valley girl wannabe with a five o’clock shadow -- had hoped for. He promptly marked Prejean’s score card with a zero, plopped down in front of the television cameras and began blubbering away like a fussy little snot with a dirty diaper. 

Having already publicly called Prejean a “dumb b----,” he then yammered to a sympathetic Norah O’Donnell on MSNBC that not only was he refusing to apologize he was actually “thinking the C-word.” This, of course, one of the vilest things anyone can call a woman. Yet, rather than taking Hilton to task for the boy lover’s girl-hating poison, O’Donnell joined in on the bash-fest, criticizing Prejean for her traditional view.    

But Hilton wasn’t done yet. Ramping up his vicious attack on the Christian California bombshell, our lispy-wispy lil’ cupcake dove headlong into the annals of dirt-baggery lore. He defaced a photo of Prejean on his weblog scribbling . . . a crude depiction of [male anatomy].

How did Prejean react?

While talking to Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today Show she said, “I knew at that moment after I answered the question, I knew, I was not going to win because of my answer, because I had spoken from my heart, from my beliefs and for my God. . . . I wouldn't have answered it differently. The way I answered may have been offensive. With that question specifically, it's not about being politically correct. For me it was being biblically correct.”

On the Fox News Channel’s Hannity program, Prejean shared, “You know, I forgive him. I know that he's angry for whatever reason. I know there must be a bigger issue going on in his life.”

Like I said -- Class.  

Still, Perez Hilton -- Hollywood’s frothy-potty-mouthed little drama queen -- isn’t alone in his hatred for Prejean or the three-fourths of Americans who share her opposition to the novel and incongruous concept of “gay marriage.”   

For example, Wayne Besen, a prominent leader in the homosexual activist community, unbelievably went on Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor to defend Hilton. He picked up Hilton’s anti-Christian torch, incredibly charging that it was Prejean, not Hilton, whose millennia-old recognition of biblical marriage “was divisive.” Besen then added insult to injury and revealed his true rainbow colors by tagging the 70% of Americans who oppose “gay marriage” as “bigots.” 

This whole hateful affair provides the perfect metaphor for the current divide between defenders of traditional sexual morality and the extremist “queer” activist movement. As Congress debates the constructive repeal of both the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of “equal protection under the law” and the First Amendment guarantees of free speech and freedom of religion through passage of discriminatory and wholly unnecessary “hate crimes” legislation, this little episode once again reminds us that the self-described champions of “tolerance” and “diversity” are the most intolerant and hateful among us. 

How soon we forget. Just hearken back a few months to the passage of California’s Proposition 8, which restored the definition of natural marriage to the Golden State. There we all played witness to “gay” activist calls for church burnings, Mormon Temple vandalism, death threats against Prop 8 supporters and quasi-riotous assaults against peaceful Christian marriage supporters. 

So, insofar as liberals continue to dig their own hole by defending Hilton and piling on Prejean, I submit they’re doing the other 70% of us a favor. In their biting anger, they’ve cast aside the sublime mask of “tolerance,” revealing an ugly, desperate and most intolerant countenance below.   

For that, I say thank you. For your treatment of Carrie Prejean, I say shame on you.

Related:
Beauty and the Beast: Resisting the Reactionary Extremism of Perez Hilton
Miss California: "God Was Testing My Faith"
Open Lesbian, CNN Anchor, Defends Miss America Judge
Anderson Cooper and the Crisis of Journalism

"Nice credit card company there," said da guy in da White House. "Shame if something should happen to it." Matthew Vadum on the big sqeeze from guys in suits. 

Openly homosexual blogger and Miss USA judge Perez Hilton has called pageant contestant Carrie Prejean the "C-word," defaced a photo of the young lady, and admits to giving her a score of zero, reports WND.

And this from an individual giving public face to those who wrap themselves as victims in banners of "love" and "tolerance." But it is nothing of the sort, of course, as is clearly seen in the emotional outburst of this "judge" who took upon himself also the roles of jury and executioner. Such hubris.  

Mr. Hilton apparently hates the reply Prejean gave to his question concerning homosexual "marriage." As Prejean told Sean Hannity last night on TV, she chooses being "Biblically correct" over being politically correct and concludes therefore that marriage ought to be between a man and a woman.

Her view has the advantage of expressing a life lived in community with our true Creator, which is a better foundation for growth and humanness than is reducing ourselves -- as a consistent naturalistic secularism requires -- to bundles of particles organized by chance inside bodies that have no meaning in an impersonal universe.  The resulting breakdown of the distinction between male and female is an expression not of progress into love but of regress into meaninglessness.

Her courageous stance places Prejean at the center of political and ethical discourse as framed by the Declaration of Independence, which articulates the Founding vision and mission statement of the United States.

She is occupying the same ontic and philosophical universe set forth by our Founding Fathers. The real extremists are those who reject that Founding vision and indeed reject the world as it objectively exists in its externality as a creation of our Maker who endows humanity with unalienable rights.  

The reactionary behavior of Hilton and his association with the Miss USA pageant indicate just how radically extreme and ugly certain intolerant elites have become after rejecting that humane and liberating worldview which gave rise to the American experiment in the first place. They war against nature and nature's God, against human nature and human nature's God.

This war is real. Instead of human rights rooted in a knowable, verifiable, and loving Creator who has a moral character, we have instead aggressive power groups imposing a false, subjective, and hurtful agenda upon a patient and forbearing nation. 

Love of God and man, of neighbor and community, calls for a humane resistance for freedom, the individual, and wholeness. Fortunately, we are beginning to see signs of free-thinking individuals rising up to throw off the chains of pretended absolutes masked and marketed as progress, toleration, and positive change.

A 21-year-old held her ground the other night and holds it still. She lost a pageant. But she won a crown. 

See also:
Miss California: "God Was Testing My Faith"

Her affirmation of the Creator's objective, verifiable, public, and liberating norm for married life in reply to a homosexual "marriage" question from judge Perez Hilton helped make Carrie Prejean the "most famous runner-up in Miss USA history."

But what was that blonde girl thinking?

There she was . . . publicly proclaiming foundational moral truth about marriage. So tyrannical.

There she was . . . taking a social stand that places her at the philosophical center of the American experiment in liberty and unalienable rights under God. So extreme.

There she was . . . daring to resist mass-marketed peer pressure and the unbending demands of tolerance. So rebellious.  

In all fairness, let us ask: Who does the uppity individual Miss Prejean think she is, brazenly resisting the secularist status quo?

And for all we know she's pro-life. That would fit the profile. Speaking of profiles, that "Right-Wing Extremism" report from the Department of Homeland Security, headed up by Janet Napolitano, couldn't have been more timely. 

Who now can doubt that the American people need to be educated and prepared to allow the federal government to deal with blonde bombshells, free-thinking individuals, constitutionalists, and other potential terrorists at large in the forward-looking land of change?

It's no accident: Only last week we had those Tea Parties. And now this pageant. Who knows what might be coming down the pike?

Yes, there is much to consider in the defense of America. Meanwhile, here's an exclusive interview with Carrie Prejean at FoxNews.com. 

The Prince of Washington faces a special challenge May 17 at Notre Dame, says Joseph Lawler. 

"CNN's Anderson Cooper should have his dirty, little gutter mouth washed out with soap," writes Joseph Farah. "Then he should be fired." Farah is responding to Cooper's use of the word "Tea-bagging" to describe the nationwide Tea Party rallies of April 15. 

While lining up for or against the comments made by Cooper, let us note a strategic point: The liberal secularist mindset lacks an adequate basis for objective norms not just in regard to right and wrong, but also in regard to epistemology (theory of knowledge). This is a major contributor to the breakdown of journalism today. (Those who want to pursue this argument might take a look at The Dust of Death, by Os Guinness, and He Is There and He Is Not Silent, by Francis Schaeffer.)

These factors united in perhaps one of the most unfortunate episodes in erstwhile journalistic practice in recent memory when Cooper expressed on-air a profound hatred for the Tea Party movement by "jokingly" describing it in terms appropriate to that "progressive," dehumanizing squalor known as the homosexual movement. 

Homosexuals as broken creatures made in the image of God (as we all are, that is, broken but also noble) are better than the worldview embraced by their cadres of leadership. A truly humane and liberated civilization affirms their ontic dignity even while challenging their ethical pain and brokeness. This is an "up from barbarism" distinction that applies across the board to all of us -- and it is made possible on the basis of verifiable information from a knowable and rational Creator. That's the kind of Creator referenced in our Founding documents, with their roots in Judeo-Christian thoughtforms.

Not only is what Cooper said deserving of ethical condemnation, but it also reveals a principial breakdown between journalism and urinalism, where there no longer is a line of demarcation between facts and propaganda, between reporting and demonization, between knowledge and Goebbels. 

Using insider gutter language to demonize political opposition is part and parcel of the fascist, liberal, statist, and secularist playbook these days. It bespeaks a form of cultural pollution in play with special viciousness since the demonization of Judge Robert Bork when in 1987 he was nominated to the Supreme Court. 

On display here is not just the weakness and inherent destructiveness of the homosexual worldview -- not just personally but also in its impact on societal foundations -- but also the desperation of establishment media and other elites who rightly perceive a real threat to their secularist and statist agenda.

The need for progress rooted not in vain and hurtful philosophy but in that vision displayed so brilliantly and courageously by our Founding Fathers is more apparent than ever. That, at its core, is the profound hope energizing the Tea Party movement. Hence the bared fangs of those on the wrong side of unalienable rights, life, liberty, happiness, and the Creator from whom those rights derive.

Mr. Cooper has spoken, and his own words condemn him. This much seems clear: Either he is in the wrong line of work, or the line of work his is in is not journalism. 

The jazz standard "Cry Me a River" is Susan Boyle's "first-ever record release," reports the UK Mirror.

The ballad, originally written for Ella Fitzgerald, was first released in 1955 and famously performed by Julie London.

The Susan Boyle version was recorded 10 years ago. What are the chances of our hearing a live performance in the near future, say, from a stage in England? 

See also:
It Takes a Village Singer: Susan Boyle, the Anti-Obama?
Britain's Got Talent: Listen to This Stunning, Stunning Performance

No artifice, no teleprompter, no Grecian columns.

William Tate comments on the Scot singer and YouTube sensation from nowhere, which may be a good place to be.

Here she is, straight from Glasgow: "My name is Susan Boyle. I'm nearly 48 . . ."

Previously, on Pro-Existence: Britain's Got Talent.

It's the kind of question both journalists and Christians might want to ask. With "lukewarm pretenders" on his mind, Joseph Farah writes: 

Sometimes I get confused watching these mega-church preachers.

Are they reading the same Bible I'm reading?

Do they really have an intimate relationship with the same Jesus I know?

Is the Holy Spirit actually working within them -- providing the kind of discernment He promises believers?

These questions came to mind while watching Joel Osteen and his lovely wife, Victoria, on CNN's "Larry King Live" last week. . . .

David Welch, founder of the U.S. Pastor Council, writes:

Whether it is Warren groveling before the militant sexual diversity power structure, Osteen floundering in whether eternal salvation through Jesus Christ is the only way or Wallis, Campolo and the other mouthpieces of the religious left serving as spiritual advisers to a Marxist president -- the American pulpit is indeed at a critical crossroads.   

See also:
Rick Warren's Holy Week Crisis

In his handbook for living as a human being in a broken world with manipulative politicians, preachers, scientists, and used-car salesmen, the Creator liberates his fellow rebels against evil by exhorting them to "test everything" (1 Thess. 5:21).

Thus, Sandy Rios questions "America's Pastor" Rick Warren vis-a-vis his Larry Kingish running for the hills on the question of standing up for the Biblical, Gospel, and life-enhancing circle of life called marriage -- as between a man and a woman in community under God.

One might add, however, this to the Rios column: Let's refrain from calling Mr. Warren "America's Pastor." You can be his friend, his seminary classmate, etc., etc. I have never met Warren personally, and he may be a swell guy. But, please, "America's Pastor"? That's ridiculous.

Who she is and why she fights:

She's the fierce blond attorney behind Obama eligibility lawsuits, a successful dentist with two offices, a second-degree black belt and a mother of three boys who speaks five languages.

Dr. Orly Taitz, a woman with a vibrant smile and an ebullient personality, has not always enjoyed an independent life filled with promise and ambition. She was born and raised in Kishinev (also spelled Chisinau), the capital of the Republic of Moldova, a country in Eastern Europe that was formerly part of the Soviet Union. . . . 

Asked what motivates her continue fighting the eligibility battle, Taitz replied, "I feel that this man is arrogantly spitting in the face of each and every American citizen. I feel like he has just spit in my face. I take it personally that he is trampling on our Constitution and on our laws."

She continued, "Having the experience that I had in the Soviet Union -- seeing lack of freedom, lack of a system of justice, lack of judicial integrity, lack of press with integrity, an economic system in shambles -- when I saw all that, I began fighting."

More at WND.

Thomas Lifson at American Thinker presents visual evidence that U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama bowed before the King of Saudi Arabia, evidence that contradicts White House denial ("It wasn't a bow") of this "major mistake," as Lifson describes it.  

Conclusion: "President Obama voluntarily bent his knee and bowed his head to the most important ruler in the Islamic world." Neither the lie nor its implications bode well for our nation.

Strategic Memo to the White House and those in authority of any political party: Americans are not a "slave class" to be trifled with, lied to, or otherwise exploited by a "master class" entrenched in Washington. We hired you, and we can fire you. Furthermore, the process of liquidating your employment in our service need not wait until the next election.

As a free and dignified people, created in the image of God to think freely across the whole of reality, including pronouncements by politicians and governmental authorities, Americans are right to rise up and question authority.  This is humane, biblical, and foundational to the American experiment in liberty.  It is key to throwing off the shackles of tyranny. 

Joel and Victoria Osteen, interviewed by Larry King.

As noted by Julia Duin of the Washington Times.

Not that Nancy is looking for a White House appointment, but would it not be refreshing to have someone in the White House with a robust, humane, and rational Christian worldview who therefore can honestly affirm and protect the Founding Vision, the Declaration, and the U.S. Constitution?

The current regime, unfortunately but not surprisingly, may be a bit small and narrowed-minded for that kind of liberty. A free and brave people liberated by our True Creator can do better and that may well be something for which to work, pray, and build.

Here is video of Rick Warren's appearance on Larry King last night.

When Larry asks Warren about the Iowa court's repudiation of marriage, this: "I'm totally oblivious . . . not even my agenda . . ."

This strikes one as rather odd for a minister of the Gospel, for Christ clearly cared about family, marriage, and about male and female as both distinct partners in God-ordained community with eachother for life. He forgave sinners, but never tolerated sin. It's how you love people while acknowledging we live in a moral universe.

By way of contrast to some, despite being such a lovable, affable guy, a regular life-of-the-party guy, Jesus of Nazareth managed to get himself crucified. Quite purposefully, he took rather unpopular, offensive, intolerant, not-getting-on-Larry-King views on controversial matters. And the beautiful people of his day didn't like it one bit.  

So hardline was he that if you didn't maintain community with the Son of God, he promised your future would not be bright: 

Whoever is ashamed of me and my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in his glory and the glory of his father and of his holy angels. (Luke 9:26)

True enough, popular reverends get to be on Larry King, talk with presidents, oversee great big churches, pray before the kingdoms of this world, and sell lots of books. All for good causes, so really who can complain, who can question? Besides, half the money is given away to . . . well, you know the drill.

Silly Jesus. Talk about judgmental. He was one of "those" people that "hip" Christians know better than to be associated with when cameras are around. He knew about poverty -- but never let poor folk get away with demonizing those who were better off.

He knew about the hungry -- and he fed them miraculously with fish and loaves. But The Bread of Life never condemned people because they had full stomachs, big carbon footprints, and knew where their next meal was coming from. In fact, the reputed glutton and wine-drinker knew a thing about eating and drinking and celebrating. The politically correct people of his day hated him for it. Sometimes the guy hung with the scum of the earth.

He knew of course that the deeper problem wasn't that of preventing 1st century STDs, hunger, or poverty. But sin. Our great ability -- day in and day out -- to treat God as if he were some kind of pious symbol to be manipulated for political greed, religious gain, or private satisfaction. And there's that sin captured by our unending ability to treat others as so much fodder for the machine of our closed-down self-idolatry. 

Being one of "those people," intolerant Jesus managed to offend the powerful spiritual sensitives of his day. The esteemed people. The respected guides. Jesus was a guy without a press agent, and the klutz committed so many PR fumbles that the crowds turned against him and saw him nailed to a cross. Thank you, pagan faith-based office of Roman crucifixions.

If only he had been a sophisticated, nuanced evangelical squish with smiles in shirt sleeves.

But there he is. Scum of the scum of the earth. Not fit for the Green Room. Human leftovers stuck on a stick on a hill. Do you not realize how ugly, bloody, pathetic, and popular his crucifixion was? Maybe a TV preacher could have saved him. Get him a spot on cable TV, maybe a regular gig, an audience with a president. Save the world from hunger. Reimagine thine own divine self. Yeah, man, that's what I'm talkin' about. Abundant life. Oblivious.

Related:
Spineless, Silent Clergy
Francis Schaeffer: A Student's Appreciation of a Distinct Approach

"There's a lot of -- I don't know what the term is in Austrian -- wheeling and dealing . . ."

-- Barack Obama, Strasbourg

Kansas lawmaker Tim Huelskamp has seen pro-abortion radical and Obama HHS pick Kathleen Sebelius "up close and personal."

He writes:

If all goes according to schedule, Governor Kathleen Sebelius will be confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services late next week. This is a mistake.

Recall that the Barack Obama claims to be a Christian and is fond of claiming to care for "the least of these." This hypocrisy and that of his enablers, including those who voted for him, is drenched in blood, which cries out from the incinerator.

It seems there are "Christian" fascists among us after all.

From Quin Hillyer at American Spectator:

All of this economic intervention and government expansion, all of this use of collectivist language and collectivist goals, combined with the first big steps towards Obama's goal of "a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded" as the American military, is straight out of Mussolini's playbook.

Then you combine it with the Obamanation of a growing, Il Duce-like cult of the leader. The stadium speeches in front of a Greek emperor's columns. The permanent campaign, the deliberate ubiquity. The "public service" radio ads with the president himself urging national service upon us. The iconic imagery on campaign materials. The millennial language about his own election as the moment when seas stopped rising and Earth started healing and about the need to "save the planet." The traveling abroad with an official entourage of 500 people (and a limo nicknamed "The Beast"). The fawning media. The simplistic slogans chanted over and over. . . .

Hillyer cautions, however, seeing a great distance between Obama and Nazism:

To be clear, none of this is to even come close to equating the Obama administration with Nazism. The conflation of Nazism with fascism is a gross misunderstanding of history; the original fascism and Nazism are entirely different breeds of vipers, with the latter being far more deadly. 

But however appreciated, this analysis of the difference between national socialism and Obama socialism may not hold up. Those who think what happened in Germany, the land of my birth, cannot happen here, may need to think again.

We already have among us the "hard tyranny" of millions of innocent unborn American citizens dead because of an inhumane secular statist ideology that says one class of humanity (pregnant women) has the right to destroy another class of humanity (unborn human beings). Talk about division and class struggle!

Instead of Berlin delegating to concentration camps guards the power to decide who lives and who dies, we have Washington delegating to women the power to decide who lives and who dies. And we have legal but immoral aborcentration centers across the land to clean up the slaughter and protect our sensibilities. But it's all good because we drive ourselves and our unborn children to the "camps." You don't even need the trains to run on time.

In principle it seems we are operating on the basis of raw power, allowing in practice that which a particular political dynamic can get away with at a particular moment in history. Abortofascism is just one issue. One could also look at attacks on the family, church, Christianity, freedom of speech and thought, and so on.

The liberal secular statist operates as a relativist who looks to the Federal Empire as the supreme (but pretended) absolute, an idol of raw "choice" collectivizing a raw will to power set loose and affirmed by worshippers of this idol in media, on campus, in Hollywood, government, and activist groups.

The Constitution is "alive" but dead, the Bill of Rights subject to the poll of the week, and there is little but the weak memory of freedom under God that remains in a nation once brave. That is the secular liberal statist worldview, and it appears to be exemplied by the rise of community organizer Barack Obama.

American fascism -- whether the stormtroopers wear black shirts or brown shirts -- must fall, in spirit and in fact, if America the free is to continue in fidelity as a nation under God, our true Creator, as set forth in the Declaration of Independence and as protected by the real U.S. Constitution. No one who appreciates the "blessings of liberty" will stand by and watch American fascism devour the American experiment in human freedom and dignity under God. There is much work to be done.

Question authority, go to jail?

Free-thinkers and others endowed by our Creator with the unalienable right to liberty of speech may find the Obama administration's March 24 argument before the Supreme Court -- in the case of Citizens United v. FEC -- more than a little intriguing. Here is Ken Klukowski's take over at American Thinker.

Human beings are created to think and speak freely, and the Founders expressed this ontological fact politically when they agreed in the 1st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution: Congress "shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech."

This seems rather clear: The Declaration, the Constitution, and a public figure otherwise known as the Creator stand on the side of liberty. The Obama gang, however, asserts tyranny.  

WND's Joseph Farah knows a dictator when he sees one. He writes:

If Obama can fire the head of a troubled, but legendary corporation like GM and then order its business plan to be rewritten according to his wishes, presidential power has become unlimited.

We no longer live in the United States of America that is guided by a Constitution based on the limited power of government. . . .

There's a name for this kind of government direction of what have traditionally been private corporations. It's called "fascism." Look it up.

This is what Mussolini did. It's what Hitler did with what had been a "private sector" in Germany.

We live in a tyranny, and we're all subject to the whims of one man.

Yesterday, in discussing Herr Obama and Aborcentration Centers in America, I called for not just that the First Fascist be disinvited from speaking at Notre Dame but also from the presidency of the United States.

"Yes he was elected, but he now imposes tyranny. He now wars against the American experiment in liberty under God." 

We do not have to wait for the next election in 2010 to begin showing this man and his inhumane, anti-American, anti-Creator program the door. Herr Obama, consider yourself fired.

"The outrage over Notre Dame inviting President Obama as commencement speaker has not abated," reports OneNewsNow.

"Last week, pro-lifers strongly voiced their anger about a pro-abortion president being invited to speak at a prominent Catholic university, which supposedly upholds church doctrines such as the sanctity of life. But they also are objecting to the school's plan to give Obama an honorary Doctor of Law degree. Notre Dame has been flooded with complaints, but university President John Jenkins will not be deterred."

Says Notre Dame graduate Eric Scheidler of the Pro-Life Action League: 

If Jenkins won't do the right thing and disinvite Barack Obama, then we are absolutely going to have no choice but to go out and rain on Barack Obama's parade on May 17 in South Bend, Indiana. . . . We are already working with pro-life leaders around the country, especially throughout the Midwest, to put on the mother of all protests.

In his language and policy moves, this man Barack Obama is a rogue official occupying the office of the President of the United States.

Why rogue? Because, for example, he is in violation of the Declaration of Independence, which is the Foundational Vision Statement of the United States of America and which acknowledges that every single human being is endowed by our Creator with "certain unalienable rights," including the rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Well, dead preborn American citizens are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And no American politican ought to serve who favors the liquidation of the preborn in aborcentration centers that mar and bleed the land.

One would think that governing according to the Vision Statement of the United States is not above the paygrade of the president of the United States.

One would think that respecting unalienable rights endowed by the Creator upon alive but preborn American citizens is not above the paygrade of the President of the United States.

One would think that elementary scientific and inclusive facts of biological life regarding the humanity of unborn human beings created in the image of God is not above the paygrade of the President of the United States.

What kind of man is this? Let us hope not, but is Barack Obama too much of a political ideologue to care about the facts, the Declaration, the Constitution, and that liberating vision of life that American heroes have bled and died for on battlefields across history and across the world, both within and without the borders of our homeland?

No only should Barack Obama be disinivited from Notre Dame, the American people should rise up and disinvite him from the presidency. His pro-abortion, anti-life policies are an embarrassment to civilized humanity under the Declaration, under the Constitution, and under God. Yes he was elected, but he now imposes tyranny. He now wars against the American experiment in liberty under God. 

Americans must take every opportunity to disinvite not just him, but his alien, anti-American, inhumane, and anti-Creator coup against the foundational Mission and Vision Statement of this land. We can yet still enjoy the "blessings of liberty," but this will require a return to the Creator to whom our Founders looked and from whom those blessings derive. It will require casting off the chains of the Federal Empire and its new Emperor on the Potomac.

No only should pro-life Americans "rain" on Obama's parade, they ought to thunder and lightning upon it, with a few cats and dogs thrown in for good measure. May the "mother of all protests" at Notre Dame have many children.

"I have been watching an interesting phenomenon on the Right, which is beginning to cause me concern," writes David Horowitz at Frontpage.

"I am referring to the over-the-top hysteria in response to the first months in office of our new president, which distinctly reminds me of the 'Bush Is Hitler' crowd on the Left."

Is Horowitz onto something? Naive? Your thoughts?

From columnist Kathleen Parker:

In what one might call a biblical move, Christian philanthropist Howard Ahmanson -- one of three major funders of California's Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriages -- has abandoned the GOP for the Democratic Party.

A hard-copy prepublication version of Nancy's new book arrived in the mail today. This edition is also being sent to expert readers who have requested such a copy. More about this later, but comments already coming in are quite positive, for which we are thankful.

Remembering that politics follows culture -- especially during these days of an oppressive secularism, governmental and otherwise -- I can honestly say that this next volume offers a mighty blow against the forces of manipulation, fragmentation, and inhumanity at large in so many areas of contemporary life, thought, and society.  

Nancy and I are thrilled with how this project has developed, and we appreciate the vision and support of Philadelphia Biblical University in producing this hard copy and in supporting Nancy's writing and thinking. Great job all!

From Zogby:

President Barack Obama's ratings for job performance and favorability did not improve over earlier this month. In the most recent survey, 49% rate his job performance as excellent or good and 50% as fair or poor (less than 1% were not sure). That is a dip of three points from the previous poll.

"It's a Zobgy poll, so a little skepticism is required," comments Rick Moran over at American Thinker. "But even Zogby -- a Democratic pollster -- isn't off by much more than the others. And Rasmussen has been showing a steady decline in the president's job approval as well."

Prediction: The more Americans understand who Obama is and the Federal-centric Empire for which he stands, the less they will appreciate him, his "investments," and the redefinition of America (read: "change") he seeks to impose. 

David Noebel of Summit Ministries writes:

Who is the president's latest adviser? The Rev. Jim Wallis. Frontpage Magazine (March 17, 2009) reports, "The most notable of [Obama's] spiritual advisers today is his friend of many years, Rev. Jim Wallis." Rev. Wallis admits that he and Obama have "been talking faith and politics for a long time." He was picked by Obama to draft the faith-based policies of his campaign at the Democratic National Convention in Denver last year. Why should this alarm us?

First, Jim Wallis has had relationships with the communist Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES).

Second, his "Witness for Peace" was an attempt to defend the Nicaraguan Sandinistas! Wallis, together with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (Obama's former pastor of 20 years) "rallied support for the communist Nicaraguan regime and protested actions by the United States which supported the anti-communist Contra rebels" (Family World News, February 2009, p. 7).

Third, Wallis and his Sojourners Community of fellow-travelers believe Fidel Castro's Cuba, Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, Daniel Ortega's Nicaragua and the other revolutionary forces "restructuring socialist societies" are the communist paradises the United States needs to emulate in order to establish "social justice." Writing in the November 1983 issue of Sojourners, Jacob Laksin notes, "Jim Wallis and Jim Rice drafted what would become the charter of leftist activists committed to the proliferation of communist revolutions in Central America" (Laksin, "Sojourners: History, Activities and Agendas" in Discoverthenetworks.org., 2005).

The ugly truth is Wallis wishes to see the destruction of the United States as a nation and in its place "a radical nonconformist community" patterned after the progressive, socialist commune he established in Washington, D.C., in 1971 (Laksin, Ibid.).

More from Noebel at WorldNetDaily.

Rush Limbaugh has announced that Mark Levin will join him on air at the top of the 1 O'Clock hour (eastern) to talk about "The Great One's" No. 1 best-seller Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto.

"Opposition is mounting to the University of Notre Dame's invitation to President Obama to be a commencement speaker in May," reports OneNewsNow.

This is a sign of spiritual health. Inviting him to speak and conferring a degree upon him is a sign of spiritual weakness. Worldview confusion. Sellout.

By his language and actions, Obama inhabits a post-Catholic, post-Protestant, post-Christian, post-Declaration, post-Constitution, post-American, post-humane universe. Other than that, no problem.

Notre Dame would do well to disinvite the President with extreme unction. Just as the great and free people of the United States of America should show him and his Statist, Washington-centric worldview the door at the first opportunity. Exit stage left. Now, April 15, and forevermore. 

If asked to serve humanity in such a fashion, I'll be happy to stand in for the President at Notre Dame to explain the matter in further detail. You don't even have to confer a degree.

Terry Jeffrey of CNSNews.com reports:

In Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary the first meaning listed for the word “investment” is “the outlay of money usually for income or profit,” and the meaning of the word “invest” is “to commit (money) in order to earn a financial return.”
 
The idea is that investing money is something private individuals and businesses do on the calculation that they will get back more money than they put into a particular enterprise.
 
In his prime-time Tuesday press conference, however, President Barack Obama used the words “invest” or “investment” 18 different times to describe the deficit spending he wants the federal government to undertake in pursuit of his budget plan.

Questions:

1. Is this not a tyrannical use of language, in which a powerful figure imposes subjective meanings upon words to manipulate people for political gain and ideological greed?

2. Could someone please explain why this is not a case of President Obama's lying to the American people?

3. Could someone demonstrate how this abuse of language cooly foisted upon a watching public is in any sense Christian (after all, the President claims to be a follower of "Jesus")? Or is this putative "faith" in "Jesus" unrelated to the information we have in the Bible?

Oh, that doesn't sufficiently narrow it down for you?

Well, this lawmaker wants the Federal Empire out of our bedrooms (that's the propaganda line) but not out of our wallets (that's the truth). Tar and Feathers brigade report for duty here. 

"The son of the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath has taken his own life, 46 years after his mother gassed herself while he slept," reports The Times.

"Nicholas Hughes hanged himself at his home in Alaska after battling against depression for some time, his sister Frieda said yesterday." 

Death, self-inflicted or otherwise, remains an outrage and an enemy.

A guy can't even get a cup of coffee anymore.

There I was, innocently frequenting the Bistro le Pearcey, Ahmadinejading a cup of cold kava java, and what does one hear but the heartless Rush Limbaugh on the radio and at it again.

"I hope Obama's teleprompter fails!," he intoned. 

That's right. He said it. "I hope Obama's teleprompter" . . . and then the "f word."

I kid you not.

It's actually worse than you think. This bald assertion is -- apparently  -- a reiteration of equally brazen insensitive and unfair remarks made just yesterday: On the air --  Public air waves -- In Obama's America -- During the Era of Change.

I'm not claiming that I personally heard these remarks of yesterday. If I had, I would have told you. In any case, I do not live in the past. Besides, my fellow Americans, Mr. Limbaugh himself admits to uttering them. 

Do you understand what is being said here? "I hope Obama's teleprompter fails!" (Sorry for the adult language. Hope no kids are reading.)

Does Mr. Limbaugh not realize that teleprompters are people too? Their job is hard enough and challenging enough as it is. Have you not seen their schedule?

Let us be clear: Teleprompters have rights, too. And let there be no doubt: They do not need these kinds of distractions.  

As the San Franciso branch of the Teleprompter Rights Action League has made clear: The fundamental rights of presidential teleprompters are self-evidently existant in the penumbra of the perception of human beings vis-a-vis the living Constitution of the United States of America. George Washington himself could not have stated it, or intended to state it, more plainly.

And if you think not Mr. Limbaugh -- or Sean or Mark or Laura or Glenn -- well, how dare you "otherise" perfectly respectable, loving, hardworking, and patriotic teleprompters who are just as valued and just as much a part of the family as any other vital component of our march into the future. Yes they can!

And shame on those who impose their values on the facts of others' heartfelt readings of the penumbras of perceptions of the living Constitution of the United States of America. Thomas Jefferson must be rolling over in his grave.

Now the coffee's cold again. Back to the bistro. Dare I turn on the radio? Sean might say something.

Obama loves America and has a wonderful plan for our lives.

Furthermore, he is thoughtfully creating a massive Federal Empire to ensure that evil private-sector interests do not stand in the way of a progressive, secularist Washington-centric state that also loves us and has a wonderful plan for our lives.

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., however, knows a socialist when he sees one:

The Prophet Obama was very disturbed recently when asked if he was a socialist. Socialism is government control of the means of producing and distributing goods and services. What I have just described is a powerful instrumentality toward socialism. Along with Cap-and-Trade, the Obama Administration is calling for a sufficient number of these instrumentalities to socialism that by the next election the United States will be very close to being a socialist state. There is no point in Obama arguing against that observation. He ought simply to come out and say it. He is for socialism. What could possibly be wrong with that?

What on earth is Tyrrell up to? People like him could ruin Obama's best-laid plans. Something to consider at tea-time. 

Roll the "Divorce Court" videotape. AP reports:

The Haggards say their marriage and Christian faith are stronger than ever, and they want people to know that divorce is not the answer.

"This is part of Ted's journey," Gayle Haggard said. "It's made him a better man. I see what has happened as a divine rescue."

AP also reports: "The couple will be paid an undisclosed amount for the interview, the latest in a series of public appearances that started in January when Ted Haggard began promoting an HBO documentary about his time in exile. He also has appeared on the 'Oprah Winfrey Show' and 'Larry King Live.'"

Teleprompt Prez Obama blunders at White House. 

Sweetness and Light has noticed "Obama's (Highly Creepy) 'Pledge Project'," complete with training videos and a commitment to "I'm asking you to believe." 

Says S&L:

Anyone who is a student of totalitarian regimes, especially Nazi Germany, should recognize this tactic. Mr. Obama has organized his own cadre of Brown Shirts (or, if you prefer, Red Shirts) to agitate for his agenda.

Mr. Alinsky would be proud. And rightly so. For this is simply the continuation of Mr. Obama’s perpetual campaign. A campaign, as we noted at the time, that was modeled on Saul Alinsky’s organizing principles.

Of course, Alinsky, had modeled his methods on the great communist and/or fascist agitators of the past. Hence, the unsettling resemblance to Soviet-style and Nazi Germany agit-prop.

If you think audacious initiatives such as this violate the mission statement of the the United States of America, you're right. "Pledge Projects" or any move that smacks of loyalty oaths to individual leaders, or to a secularistic Washington-centrism for that matter, have nothing to do with the liberating unity and diversity under our true and knowable Creator currently banished by the "faith" agenda of the paternalistic power establishment. The secular state is not God, and Barack Obama is not his prophet.

"Another polarizing move from Barack Obama," writes Thomas Lifson. "His permanent campaign is organizing a political organization loyal to him, bound by a pledge, outside the government and existing party apparatus. The historical precedents are ominous."

Hat Tip: American Thinker.

Great news!

As of today, Nancy's next best-selling book is in the hands of our great agents (Yates & Yates). Pre-publication readers are already taking a look.

It's not yet time to release details. But let me just say: If you liked Total Truth: Liberating Christianity From Its Cultural Captivity, well, get ready to celebrate again. We'll keep you informed with further updates.

Save the planet, right? Perhaps not, according to this report from CNSNews.com:  

Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, told the International Conference on Climate Change that the true aim of environmentalists is to stop global development, not save the planet.
 
Klaus, an economist by trade and a skeptic of the theory of man-made global warming, delivered the keynote speech to an audience of more than 600, including 75 scientists, economists, and environmental policy experts, as the conference got underway in New York City on Sunday.
 
“Their true plans and ambitions: to stop economic development and return mankind centuries back,” he declared. “It is evident that the environmentalists don’t want to change the climate. They want to change our behavior. Their ambition is to control and manipulate us.”

Here's the rest of the story from CNSNews.com.

My radio interview with "Changing Worldviews" host Sharon Hughes of KDIA 1640 AM in San Francisco aired yesterday.

We are also adding the Center for Changing Worldviews to our list of resources under "Groups" on the main page of The Pearcey Report.

To listen to "Revenue, Rush, and Revolt?," click here.

From Facebook:

"My friend's Italian grandmother, lifelong Democrat, told her grandson Tony, 'Bama no good' . . . Who am I to disagree?"

On which another Facebooker commented: "Grandma knows best!"

New results: Thus far, 56% of 33,146 responses award the president an "F".

11% award him a "D".

Therefore, 67% of responses award Obama a "D" or "F," up from 58% at 4:52 this afternoon.

Has WND uncovered patriotic vigilance?

Wikipedia, the online "free encyclopedia" mega-site written and edited entirely by its users, has been deleting within minutes any mention of eligibility issues surrounding Barack Obama's presidency, with administrators kicking off anyone who writes about the subject, WND has learned.

A perusal through Obama's current Wikipedia entry finds a heavily guarded, mostly glowing biography about the U.S. president. Some of Obama's most controversial past affiliations, including with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and former Weathermen terrorist Bill Ayers, are not once mentioned, even though those associations received much news media attention and served as dominant themes during the presidential elections last year.

Or a dysfunctional system well-defended?

Jake Jones examines a conscience.

This past week, Pres. Obama’s administration published its official request to rescind the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services regulation that clarifies that health care professionals have a right to conscience and should not be forced to participate in aborting a baby, or other medical services, that offend their moral convictions.

This is of great concern for Christians across the country. Not only because of the reversal of the ‘rights of conscience’ clause, but because Obama has chosen Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as Secretary of Health and Human Services. She is a high profile supporter of abortion and has strong ties to pro-abortion organizations.

"President Obama is working to deprive the country of medical professionals who use their consciences when treating their patients," said Heartbeat International President Peggy Hartshorn, Ph.D. "Women, babies, and families deserve conscientious health care by doctors who believe in the sanctity of human life. It is wrong for the U.S. government to condemn doctors who follow the Hippocratic principle of 'do no harm'. This is un-American." 

Hat tip: UnbornHumanLife.

The Obama birth certificate issue is not going away, writes Al Ritter at Examiner.com:

The newest plaintiffs on the scene for lawsuits about Obama’s birth certificate are a group of military personnel, some active, some reservists, and some retired. They all share the same concern, they don’t think that our sitting President has the requirements set forth in the Constitution to be our President.

Many cases have already been submitted concerning the same issues, but all so far have either been dismissed without comment, or dismissed on the grounds of “no standing.” So far Barack Obama has spent close to $800,000 through 3 different law firms to deny access to his birth certificate, and not the Certificate of Live Birth, he showed on his website prior to the election. . . . 

One has to wonder what Obama has to hide, and why he’d spend almost $800,000 to avoid producing a $10 birth certificate, and why with all the present law suits the US Supreme Court has so far refused to hear even one. The biggest question is why wouldn’t the Congress institute a law to avoid this in the future, unless they already know the answer to this question. 

Yep. CNN.

Brother Steve pushes the envelope: 

The violence, vulgarity, and anti-family fare produced in excess in Hollywood contributes to social decay and the higher rates of youth suicide and teen pregnancy, actor and media personality Stephen Baldwin told CNSNews.com. He added that pro-family films sell well and more conservatives should move into the industry to control the content and produce the types of films that many American families desire. 
 
“Hollywood and the Academy has an agenda every year,” Baldwin told CNSNews.com at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. “Okay -- the fact that they churn out more content that is gratuitously violent and sexual and vulgar when in fact more family programming -- animated films and things like that -- make more money, there’s your agenda problem right there. . . .

How to make it better?

“I’m not saying that Hollywood or people that create content in Hollywood should not be allowed to do it,” said Baldwin. “I’m saying that the people who want more conservative content out there need to get into positions where they can create that.”

A little Screwtape here, a little fireman there, and before long you might create a humane alternative to the current fare. A renaissance is long overdue. 

Here's a video interview with Baldwin. 

Hat tip: Big Hollywood.

Blood for power?

A pro-life activist says Senator Sam Brownback's decision to support pro-abortion Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius for Health and Human Services secretary shows that his commitment to the unborn is merely political rather than a core value. . . .

Mark Crutcher, president of Life Dynamics, Incorporated, says Brownback -- a self-professed pro-life Catholic -- "abandoned" the unborn by backing Sebelius.
 
"I think it's typical of what we've seen over the years when somebody's commitment to the unborn is political rather than a core value with them," says the pro-life leader. "It's like the difference between a politician and a statesman."
 
Crutcher says Brownback's desire to become the next governor of Kansas may be driving his support of Sebelius. "All of Brownback's flowery words in the past don't really mean much," he says. "When push comes to shove, he'll throw the unborn under the bus for some political advantage -- and that's what's happened here."

OneNewsNow reports that it "has twice contacted Senator Brownback's office for comment on his support of Sebelius. Those emails have not been returned."

Dave Miller writes at Facebook:

Rick, Have you noticed how all of these liberals and pseudo-conservatives are coming out of the woodwork and proclaiming shock that Obama is actually a radical leftist, possibly even a card-carrying socialist and outright Marxist? After all the stuff with Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground and Rev Wrong and Black Liberation Theology, you have to wonder exactly what they were thinking.

Of course we know what they were thinking. They were letting their liberal notion of "white guilt" lead them to vote for the first black president despite his views and positions, simply on account of his race. If anyone is a racial coward (sensu AG Holder) it's the cowardly left who blindly voted for Lord Obama.

And this is the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is that they all knew exactly what they were getting and are now having second thoughts. Their leftist "bed-time story" is a heck of a lot scarier in person than in the text books and leftist think-tanks.

Comment: It is important to analyze the presuppositions and worldviews of those seeking office, because office-seekers always actualize them, or try to. This will help protect people from superficial, politically correct, and reactionary analysis of trends and current events.

Obama may employ the term Christian to describe himself and may throw in a Bible verse for good measure. But to the degree that he presupposes and works within Marxist categories (class struggle, class warfare, spread the wealth, blame and therefore tax "the rich"), those presuppositions will seek incarnation in Obama's policies. A Christian label -- often just political god-talk -- is no match for the actual thoughtforms that inhabit and move a person. (This analysis, by the way, holds for any politician or public figure, including Republicans.)

This worldview dynamic is how a "Christian" can advocate that which does not line up with real-world information we have from the verifiable and knowable Creator, creating a seedbed for hypocrisy, manipulation, distrust, inhumanity, and revolt.

This is one reason resistance is a civilized option to a "Christian" president who accepts the ugly fascist barbarism of abortion. To wave the bloody banner of "choice" contradicts reason, advances oppression, and constitutes a pathetic loss of dignity. Legalized theft to redistribute wealth and property is also inhumane and sinful, even if you throw a Bible verse on top of it and get a preacher to say a prayer. 

Journalists and observers of the political scene would do all a favor if their work addressed politicians at a more insightful level. Added benefit: Fewer unpleasant surprises and a more humane country.

Live From Detroit -- Tomorrow WLQV am 1500 talk show host Paul Edwards and I are scheduled for 5:30 p.m. Eastern Time.

He tags his show "The Center for Study of God and Culture," and I look forward to joining Paul and his on-air academy again.

To call in, phone: 866-423-WLQV. Listen online here. 

Somewhere in the tundra of Northern Virginia

You can see video of Ann Coulter's brilliant, upbeat, and funny CPAC 2009 speech here. This will take you to the CPAC video streaming page.

Ignore the video box on the left for the moment. Find the archive menu on the top right and select "Saturday." Click on the "February 28, Session 8" box (right side of page).

After the video loads, you'll see Tom DeLay introduced by David Bossie. DeLay offers a good set of humorous remarks and then introduces Coulter. She is at the top of her game.

Among Coulter's lines (roughly quoted): "I love going on the 'View' because being around those gals makes me feel so young and pretty."

You may recall that in 2007 at CPAC, Coulter remarks on John Edwards created a "Faggot" firestorm, which I comment on here. 

I do not know how long CPAC will keep this page alive. The organization is selling DVDs of speakers' remarks.

By the way, DeLay once told me at an earlier CPAC that Nancy Pearcey was one of his heros because of her work (28+ chapters!) in How Now Shall We Live? (tri-authored with novelist Harold Fickett and Prison Fellowship Chairman Charles Colson). I was attending CPAC on behalf of Human Events.

Once again, Tom, thanks for the kind words.

Part of a "succession plan," according to AP.

Speaking of Churchill: When Obama Talks, the Market Drops.

Hat Tip: NetRightNation.

Here's a blog and news report on how Gov. Bobby Jindal could have done a better job with his "big speech" after President Obama the other night.

A viewer who had not seen the Jindal speech might conclude the governor's performance was so poor that he alreadly has one political foot in the grave.

There's no harm in getting a little advice on how to put your best foot forward -- so long as the marketers and handlers don't wag the dog.

Best advice? Ignore any input that gets in the way of your authentically communicating what's really on your mind. 

National politics is enough of a dog-and-pony show as it is. What you see is rarely what you get. 

Michael Totten publishes a fascinating first-hand account of how he and Christopher Hitchens were attacked last week in Beruit.

But what's this embedded stinkbomb about Syrian Nazis being Christian?

The SSNP, according to the Atlantic in a civil war era analysis, "is a party whose leaders, men approaching their seventies, send pregnant teenagers on suicide missions in booby-trapped cars. And it is a party whose members, mostly Christians from churchgoing families, dream of resuming the war of the ancient Canaanites against Joshua and the Children of Israel. They greet their leaders with a Hitlerian salute; sing their Arabic anthem, 'Greetings to You, Syria,' to the strains of 'Deutschland, Deutschland über alles'; and throng to the symbol of the red hurricane, a swastika in circular motion." (emphasis added)

"Mostly Christians from churchgoing families"? Thanks for the Goebbelesque demonization.

In fact, the Judeo-Christian worldview depises the fascist worldview, which seems far more at home, philosophically, with the vacuum of meaning and ethics fostered by atheism. More about change and fascism here, and the fascist hatred for Judeo-Christian thoughtforms here.

The only time some might want to see a Hitler salute from a "Christian" is right before he plants a bomb next to Der Fuhrer.

Despite this editorial IAD -- and quite irrelevant to it -- we're relieved to see Hitch and co. alive, well, and pugnacious. When's the next trip?

Hat Tip: Instapundit.

Federal Frank knows all, smells fear. From CNSNews:

“I don’t think we found any Republican minds today,” Frank told a reporter minutes after the president had finished his speech. “They shut their minds down. They are so afraid of being yelled at by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity they won’t even clap for him [Obama], even when they agree with him.”

In other words: Republican minds are closed, but Barney Frank can read them.

A little skepticism may be in order.

One also wonders: With hubris and demonization like Frank's on display, why would any self-respecting free-thinking person created in the image of God allow his life to be run out of Washington?

Two more questions:

1) Is America worse off or better off with Barney Frank in office?

2) Is America worse off or better off with Rush Limbaugh in radio?

Frank Gaffney wonders what up.

It is no secret that Team Obama is all about symbolism and messaging. So presumably it was no accident that one of the new president's first gestures was to have a bust of Winston Churchill given to the United States by the British government removed from the Oval Office....  

If indeed this explicit disassociation with one of the iconic heroes of the last century was meant to convey a symbolic message, the question occurs: Precisely which message and for whom was it intended?...  

With the Oval Office now cleansed of Churchill, Gaffney suggests a suitable replacement might be a bust of appeasement icon Neville Chamberlain. 

What bust would you suggest to adorn the digs of Barack Obama? Why?

Viva Change!

Image: Matt Weurker/Politico.

After drinks, an eventful Saturday afternoon.

That's how Jim Foss sees it.

Robertson objects to Limbaugh's having said, "I hope Obama fails."

Here's Pat's analysis, at U.S. News & World Report:

That was a terrible thing to say. I mean, he's the president of all the country. If he succeeds, the country succeeds. And if he doesn't, it hurts us all. Anybody who would pull against our president is not exactly thinking rationally.

But here is Rush, pulling "against our president" -- "I know what his politics are. I know what his plans are, as he has stated them. I don't want them to succeed."  

What's irrational about that?

Based on his rhetoric and action, President Obama is trying to impose a secular socialist regime upon this country, a Washington-centric vision of government that stands in total antithesis to the Founders and in total antithesis to that humanity and freedom rooted in the Creator so boldly acknowledged by our Declaration of Independence. 

On this analysis, to the degree that Obama succeeds, to that degree America courts failure. The rationality of success in liberty seems to require the lack of success in Obama.   

Toronto girl overcomes discouragement from teachers, disqualification by judges.

Here's her winning presentation.

Camille Paglia blasts Democrats:

* What?! -- "I don't get it . . . . Not for one second should the government be wandering into surveillance of, monitoring of, the ideological content of talk radio."

* Betrayal -- "The Democrats have totally betrayed the soul of the party, OK, to even mention this."

* Try This -- "Every true liberal Democrat should be speaking up in defense of talk radio."

* Roots -- "Stupid theory . . . comes from the 1930s . . . fascism."

The entire interview with Mark Simone, uncut.

Socialism: "Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy." -- Dictionary.com (emphasis added)

Obama: "His administration is establishing a presidential task force to direct the restructuring of General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC, a senior administration official said Sunday night," reports AP. (emphasis added)

See also: "Regarding Change: Liberals Drink Deeply From Fascist Well, Says Reviewer."

"Adam, Ne Pas de Printemps," encaustic, by Carol Bomer.

Days ago AP reported Jennifer Figge swam the ocean blue. "Not quite."

A "few seconds of thought and a pocket calculator" indicate the impossibility of this feat, notes an observer, even though there's a picture of her swimming right there in the ocean (one supposes it's her).

Now there's nothing wrong with marketing, with putting your best foot forward. But why not market truth, and why not market truth truthfully?

It seems we are in abundant supply of pretend authors, fudged data, phony stimuluses, cheating students, market-driven ministry, and activist-driven journalism. Plus assorted groupies and enablers and staff who know what's going on but courageously rock not the boat that pays their bills, establishes their identity, and affirms their vested interests.

Selling souls is big business and requires team players you can trust not to ask questions. As insiders well know, certain CEOs and trusted "spiritual giants" excel at spotting the right kind of person for this kind of sensitive job. My how the "giants" are enraged when regular people grab hold of God and rebel against the con.

Maybe this instead: Real work by real people. Let's tell the truth about that. It'll make the swim all that more enjoyable.

Your thoughts?

Political editor John Gizzi of Human Events sat in the third row at yesterday evening's White House press conference.

Gizzi understands fair and balanced journalism, is a true gentleman, and possesses an encyclopedic memory.

Americans are well-served when press events include the likes of Gizzi, who offered this report on President Obama's first White House news conference.

This CNSNews video features editor Terry Jeffrey interviewing Ann Coulter, two colleagues from my Human Events days.

Or the end? In any case, Jethro Bodine suggests 11 Alinsky rules for radicals that Obama has learned well.

In the mail this week arrived Rules for Radicals, a "pragmatic primer for realistic radicals," written by Saul Alinsky and published in 1971.

What's striking, immediately, about this book is that Alinsky at the outset acknowledges his debt to the "very first radical," who turns out to be none other than: "Lucifer." This appears on the page preceding the table of contents.

The problem for Obama, who famously asserts that he is a "Christian," is that he appears to be in significant debt to the thinking and tactics of this man Saul Alinsky (as is noted here by an Obama opponent and here by a supporter).

The challenge for Obama -- if he wants to be understood as an authentic Christian -- is that the Lordship of Christ applies to the whole of life, including the tactics of political and social change one employs.

Methods matter far more than some people appear to realize (this challenge applies with equal force to the so-called religious right, let us say in fairness). "Thy will be done on earth as it is done in Heaven" is not a relativistic option up for vote on Capitol Hill. To be tossed aside if electoral results or fundraising pressures require.

How can an Obama, or any public figure claiming to be an authentic follower of Jesus of Nazareth, also embrace the spirit of one who is the intellectual, moral, and worldview antithesis of this same Jesus, this true Messiah verified in history?

So what's going on? Is Obama a hypocrite, a manipulator? Deeply confused? Or was Alinsky simply hyping his book for street cred and publishing attention?

The President's performance at the National Prayer Breakfast has an individual of "godless" faith singing from the Barack hymnbook.

Andrew Sullivan also praises prayerful Obama for walking the walk on the behalf of atheists. "Good for him," says the prominent homosexual activist.

But as free-thinking individuals created in the image of God, let us question authority:

Are the President's Prayer Breakfast remarks a step forward, or a step backward, in relation to applying information given in the Bible, by our true Creator, to the whole of life, including political life and its application in public policy? 

Here are text and video of the event.

The Gentlelady from California speaks, revealing the depth of the present crisis.

Hat tip: David Theroux

She speaks:

I try not to forget to smile, because giggles are hard stones in the teeth of the authoritarian. So I continue my life, without letting them turn me into a whiner, with only one regret. Ultimately, everything that I live today has also been the product of my silence, the direct result of my former passivity.

Don't miss this story about Sanchez in today's American Spectator. One need not affirm all that Sanchez writes to agree: One voice can help make a revolution, help undo a devolution.

Something to think about in an America where secularism and Washington-centrism gnaw at human dignity and freedom on a daily basis.

 From Cal Thomas:

Though like many in his and our time, [Lincoln] wrestled with his inner demons. As [Harvard professor Henry Lewis Gates, Jr.,] writes, ". . . He seems to have wrestled with his own use of the 'n-word,' which he used publicly until at least 1862, and which most Lincoln scholars today find so surprising and embarrassing that they consistently avoid discussing it . . . "

The point?

"Far from diminishing Lincoln," writes Thomas, the new book Lincoln on Race and Slavery and PBS TV film Looking for Lincoln "deliver the real Lincoln as a man who struggled, along with his country and culture, over the inherent worth of black people. In short, he becomes fully human, not a mythical figure above the temptations and frailties of average mortals."

"Shadowlands" opens February 6 at Theatre Coppell.

Lisa Fabrizio examines the new church in town:

Many folks have pointed out that Barack Obama has been treated by his supporters in and out of the media like a new messiah, the savior, the chosen one.

Many other folks, including me, thought that this was not only sacrilegious but a case of downright overblown rhetorical politics.

Now I'm not so sure . . . .

A human being in England has been caught red-handed acting outside the box of secularism, and . . . she . . . must . . . pay:

Nurse Caroline Petrie has been suspended and could even be struck off. What was her offence? Did she turn up drunk? Did she dispense the wrong medicine or forget to empty a bedpan? Was she knocking out prescription drugs to the local pusher?

Perhaps she was guilty of neglect, of deliberate cruelty, or of practising a bit of freelance euthanasia.

No. Her 'crime' was to offer to say a prayer for one old lady on the ward. It's what we used to call an act of Christian charity.

But that was enough to bring her to the attention of the 'diversity' nazis at the North Somerset Primary Care Trust. . . .

"So what is so heinous about Mrs. Petrie praying for her patients?," asks columnist Richard Littlejohn. "The truth is that Christianity forms no part of the 'diversity' agenda."

Yes, that is the ugly, fanged truth about the "diversity is our strength" mantra and its empire of enforcers.

And that's why wherever "diversity" is god and the accepted state religion, Christians and Christianity must be liquidated. They are at the top of the list of threats to the established order of imposed tolerance. No verifiable information from our true Creator can be allowed inside the palace gates to challenge the status quo.

This kind of cruelty is transnational. It holds not just for England, but also for any nation in the grip of a dehumanizing and intolerant secularism, including the United States.

Secularism is a failed and dehumanizing program. Resistance in the name of God and man, freedom and dignity, is essential, lest "diversity" covers a multitude of sickness and pain. We may need more humane nurses than you could ever imagine.

* Update -- cross-posted at RedState.

Recently spotted in Facebook.

"Once one of the nation's most popular televangelists, the Rev. Robert H. Schuller is watching his life's work crumble," reports AP.

Assuming for the sake of discussion the basic accuracy of this report, let us ask: Is this kind of "crumbling" merely a personal matter internal to and limited to the Schuller organization?

Or might there be structural elements and methods of ministry that need to be examined?

And what lessons might be learned and applied in a culture increasingly dark and secularized, not just in its politics, etc., but also in its religion?

A pastor celebrates a man from whom we can still learn much, and whose distinct approach to people, ideas, and methods of ministry continues to challenge the cultural and religious secularism of the day.

Various kinds of machines chew up people today in the name of God, the state, and sometimes even ministry (especially sadly), but Schaeffer's life helps open a door to a better, far more humane alternative. He was born Jan. 30, 1912.

This watercolor titled Banjo Player is by artist Carol Kelly Dorn.

"I hope Obama fails," says Rush Limbaugh of President Barack Obama's goal of bringing more and more aspects of American life under the "hope," "change," and control of a centralized federal government.

In response, Democrats have launched a petition drive calling on Americans to "voice your outrage . . . to Limbaugh's outrageous Obama attack."

But this petition drive may have backfired, as "Rush fans pummel Democrat website."

Somehow or other, these Rush fans may be onto something.

They may realize that "success," like "change," needs to be evaluated before one jumps in with both feet. For one thing, one man's success may be another man's disaster -- or even a nation's disaster.

Meanwhile, in the midst of backfires and outrages, one wonders: Does President Obama hope Rush Limbaugh succeeds?

Udo Middelmann and gang have updated the website of the Francis A. Schaeffer Foundation. 

Below is an announcement (on their website) for Udo's latest book, titled Christianity versus Fatalistic Religions in the War Against Poverty:

Most literature and many aid efforts concerned with poverty relief and development function on mathematical assumptions. Those who have more should share with those who have less, thus creating equality. Some would add a moral component saying that those having more are morally wrong and must have gained their surplus from outright theft or unfair trade. But on the side of the needy, religious and secular efforts see only a material problem. Both neglect the devastating power of bad ideas based in religion and social customs. Yet what anyone believes about the building blocks of life will have results; their ideas are like eye glasses that either distort or bring into focus an objective reality. Development work must focus on developing people's ideas. Cultural change must precede material changes.  

If this book is anything like the lectures Middelmann has been delivering on this topic, this volume is a must read for anyone concerned about people triumphing over poverty.

That includes the current President of the United States.

The bio page of the website features Edith Schaeffer, for those of you who have asked where she is.

When I first met Nancy, she was living with Debby and Udo in their chalet at Swiss L'Abri.

Anyone who cares about an authentic expression of Christian worldview living and thinking should take a very close look at Middelmann's work.

It continues to be a refreshing and Biblical alternative to various religious marketing machines and utilitarian Big Nameism we witness here Stateside.

The Flag of Victimhood is one of the most powerful -- and manipulative -- propaganda tools waved today to win friends, influence people, and destroy opposition.

Ann Coulter refuses to salute.

She can see 2012 from Alaska.

"Former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has started a new political action committee," reports WorldNetDaily, "in a move that many are seeing as a precursor to a possible run for president in 2012."

Here's the official welcome at SarahPAC.com.

The good news is you are invited to attend an event featuring Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, one of the GOP's most articulate spokesmen.

The not-so-bad news is that the event sponsored by the John Locke Foundation is now sold out.

We're finalizing the brochure for a European Christian worldview tour titled "From Plato to Picasso to You," to be held this summer, June 10-18.

We expect this to be a tremendous time of fellowship, on-site examination of significant venues in Western cultural history, and discussion of the relationship of humane and Biblical living across the whole of thought and life.

There will be much more to share about this "worldview conference on wheels" in the brochure. Meanwhile, here's a preliminary announcement:

You are invited to join worldview scholar and author, Nancy Pearcey, and writer-editor Rick Pearcey for a nine-day excursion through Rome, Florence, and Paris.

You will learn to “decipher” the meaning of the art and cultural artifacts that have shaped the Western mind -- and that continue to influence our lives today.

You will visit the Sistine Chapel and the Colosseum, the David and the Uffizi, the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, and cruise the Seine in the City of Lights.

All of these will be illuminated by lectures and discussions led by the Pearceys. Cost of this 9-day tour is $3,899.

For more information, please call 215-702-4333. Or email Claire Johnson at cjohnson@pbu.edu.

Here is the announcement page for 2009 summer tours available via Philadelphia Biblical University, where Nancy is a professor of worldview studies.

Please stay tuned to Pro-Existence or The Pearcey Report for future updates.

* February 4 Update

This week (and next's), I've been helping out editorially over at CNSNews.com -- editing articles, posting stories and photos, and learning the ins-and-outs of their publishing system.

The CNSNews fun plus continued posting at The Pearcey Report and my page at Examiner.com make for a couple of rapid-fire weeks.

In a few minutes, I'm off to the "gym" (downstairs at the treadmill!) to make up for lost soccer time.

Consider yourself officially invited to check out CNSNews. Lots of great people there doing terrific -- and, I dare say, important -- reportorial work.

William Dembski of Intelligent Design fame questions the healing ministry of Todd Bentley down in Lakeland, Fla.

Such questioning is legitimate, Biblical, humane, and necessary. Humaness, worldview, and discipleship are cut from the single cloth of truth.

We await a reply to Dembski's question: "Faith and Healing -- Where's the Evidence?"

Meanwhile, one way to test the validity of an organization is to examine its methods. Not just the PR methods evidenced on websites with glossy pictures, wondrous bios, and a Herculean list of accomplishments and books, columns, etc., "by" the latest version of "renegade-turned-modern-day-St. Paul."

No, sadly, not the methods on display for public view, but the ones kept "in the basement," as it were. That's where, so often, in the dark, the real work is done.

In this regard, and in liberating contrast, the Lord's work is meant to be done the Lord's way, across the board, and with application to the nuts and bolts of organizations put forward as "Christian ministries."

This was a central concern of Francis Schaeffer, as seen in chapter 13 of the beloved True Spirituality. It is also the concern of chapter 13 of Nancy Pearcey's book Total Truth. The Lord's work is meant to be done in the light.

To follow truth is to embrace beauty. To fake it, "nuance" it, and spin it for "the sake of the Gospel" (i.e., fundraising, etc.) is to demean people and take the Lord's name in vain.

Dances with deception set forth in the service of Celebriantity and its hard-charging gods are a disaster, no matter how much noise is made about "worldview" or "reforming manners," no matter how much access to Big Media or the White House is gained, and so on.

You know the song and dance. It's underlined in hundreds of thousands of "Dear Friend" appeal letters strategically underlined in blue and signed by machines. One might be tempted to conclude that some evangelical marketers think Christians are idiots waiting to be led around by their noses.

"Test everything," says the real Apostle Paul (1 Thess. 5:21). "Testing everything" is key to embracing love and avoiding the cruelty and ugliness of a truncated Christianity and inhumane "ministry."

One more thing: If this isn't fixed, it matters little who wins the election. Politics follows culture. Methods matter. It's a warning and a promise.

* Update: See discussion at Dembski's site, here. "Dembski Questions Famed Healing Ministry" is referenced at response No. 44.

When asked on C-SPAN yesterday about the legitimacy of Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright as a campaign issue, author and social critic Os Guinness said that, from what "I know of Obama," the Democratic presidential hopeful is "better than his pastor."

The question arose as part of a more general discussion on religion, politics, and the culture war in relationship to Guinness's new book, The Case for Civility.

• Jeremiah Wright as a legitimate campaign issue
• The strengths and weaknesses of the Religious Right
• The meaning of the 1st Amendment

Quote: Civility is a "standing or falling issue for the American republic."

Speaking of the Bible, prostitutes, and the NY Governor, Cal Thomas asks:

"Shouldn't there be a law against the injured wife appearing with her husband at these media events?"

But if the humiliated wife is expected to show up, let us ask: Why not the children? That, at least, might have a positive impact on Dad in the days that come.

Seeing pain and injury in their downcast eyes might remind a hard-charging father and governor of who he is supposed to be.

Basic realities matter.

Being a father is more important than being a governor.

If he forgets that, not much else is worth remembering.

 A reader comments --

Now that we know the name of the organization -- Emperors Club -- I hope the investigation broadens (pardon the choice of words) to see who else has poor judgment and probably shouldn't be in power.

I had been a Christian only a few months in summer 1971, so I knew nothing about the young man a few feet away plucking his guitar except that his name was Larry Norman.

Tall, lanky, with sweeping blond hair, Norman was in town for a concert and had dropped by the Christian commune where I was staying. No one had invited him.

Apparently he had learned via the grapevine that our little household, known as His House, was the gathering place for Jesus Freaks in Albuquerque.

Only a few of us were in that night, so we sat comfortably on the floor quietly talking, praying, and singing in the soft lamp light.

Norman played a few of his trademark songs like “I Wish We’d All Been Ready” and “We Need a Whole Lot More of Jesus (and a Lot Less Rock and Roll).”

Larry Norman went on to be hailed as the founder of Christian Rock Music (and the owners of His House, Denis and Margie Haack, went on to found a ministry called Ransom Fellowship).

Norman defended his work as a musician by invoking a basic Christian worldview principle: “I think everybody should be a full time Christian, even if they work on cars or sell insurance” (quoted in American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon).

When Norman died last Sunday, the obits began pouring in. Here are some links:

Examiner.com today has published my tribute to William F. Buckley, Jr.

WASHINGTON -- "In St. Louis in the late 1970s, my wife Nancy and I were students at Covenant Seminary. Nancy was still in her 'feminist' stage, and when a fellow student gave her a copy of William F. Buckley Jr.'s magazine National Review as a source for a paper she was writing, she was too embarrassed to be seen carrying such a 'reactionary' publication. She hid it among her school papers. . . ."

To see the entire commentary at the Examiner, go here.

Novelist and son Christopher Buckley: Father died "with his boots on."

White House aide Timothy Goeglein has resigned over admitted plagiarism.

The links below contain facts and may suggest a few whys and wherefores:

• White House Aide Resigns Over Plagiarism
• Blogger Spots "Copycat" Goeglein
• Goeglein Column: "... Honesty of Reflective Thought"
• Goeglein: "I Am Entirely at Fault"
• WPost: 20 Out of 38 Columns Tainted
• NYT: "Familiar Figure" to "Evangelical Christians"

Meanwhile, a passage from this February 28 tribute to William F. Buckley seems apropos. Regarding Buckley:

In several respects one is reminded of Francis Schaeffer and C.S. Lewis -- deep, quick, sharp, but also humane in their brilliance, also caring for the human being next door, also real people doing real work. The contrast with the opportunistic 'mover and shaker' of Big Government, Big Celebrity, or, sadly, Big Christianity, encourages us to push forward to a higher calling,a nobler practice, a loving dream awalk in the world.

Here are two dreams -- doable, humane, inspired by God: 1) Real work by real people, 2) Market the truth truthfully.

Trot them out at the next big meeting of marketers, publishers, ghosters, blurbers, fundraisers, and other affiliates of Big Name, Inc.

Then duck.

Former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow will be joining the Radio Factor as Bill O'Reilly's permanent fill-in host.

* LoRiseAntlers over at Huffington Post digs deep: "It's really too bad there's no such thing as Hell, because these two morons would definitely have a special place reserved for them."

* Limpidglass at DailyKos is thankful for little things: "Well, one day of the week without O'Reilly is a start."

* Bigdadgib is glad it's snowing again.

* A humane being showed up over at Chickenhawk Express: "Thrilled ... great to see him doing so well after his cancer treatment."

Sen. John McCain may want to thank the New York Times for its attack story "For McCain, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risk." The story hit the net last night and the papers today.

I have read the Times report and watched coverage of this story by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, as well as the response of McCain lawyer Bob Bennett on Hannity & Colmes.

The explosive charge of a possible romantic relationship between McCain and lobbyist Vicki Iseman is not substantiated, in my view.

This does not mean it didn’t happen; it does mean the Times has taken an unfair swipe at McCain and thereby justly suffers another blow to its credibility.

Click here to continue reading "McCain Helped by NYT Attack."

While Obama was making it 10 in a row over Hillary last night in Wisconsin, I was in northwest Washington, D.C., for a baby shower in honor of Jai and Rene, who have little Isaiah on the way.

Jai and I are soccer teammates on 2 indoor teams. He was born in Ghana and educated in England and the U.S. (Atlanta), where he played on a championship high school soccer team. I have gotten to know sweet Rene through Jai, and both attend nearby Howard University.

Here they are, holding an autographed copy of what I've heard is a pretty good book. We await a review from young Isaiah. 

    

On the wall above Jai's piano and next to the kitchen: 

          

My 3 soccer amigos, all of Howard U. Left to right: Derrick (from Trinidad), Kyle (from Trinidad), and Jai.

           

A wonderful time with friends old, new, and yet to arrive.

On Feb. 23," writes Ken Walker, "a sister company of Walden Media -- the folks behind such films as Charlotte’s Web, Winn Dixie and Chronicles of Narnia -- will release its latest positive fare, Amazing Grace, the story of British abolitionist William Wilberforce."

* John Newton: The Wilberforce film, says Walker, "shines a light on John Newton, author to the words of the legendary hymn [Amazing Grace] that lives on and in recent years inspired a PBS television special on its impact."

* Newton's Inspiring Story: "John Newton? The slave ship captain caught in a powerful storm who struck a bargain with God, promising to set the slaves free if the Almighty saves their lives? And after God calmed the storm, Newton instantly converted to Christianity, freed the captives and quit the slave trade?"

* Oft-Told: "Over the years, you’ve probably heard (maybe preached) that story, or some modified version of it. I heard it early in my Christian life."

* But: "The only problem is none of it is true, according to Christine Schaub, author of The Longing Season, a best-selling historical novel that tells the story of Newton and his beloved hymn."

The rest of Walker's article at ChurchCentral.com is here.

News outlets are reporting that an artist has portrayed actress Angelina Jolie as the Virgin Mary. The following analysis by philosopher-theologian Francis Schaeffer of Fouquet's The Red Virgin provides background on the worldview dimension of this use of Marian imagery and on the modern problem of art divorced from meaning.

* Masaccio: "It is crucial to notice that with Masaccio [1401-1428?] and the others up to this point," writes Schaeffer, "art could still have moved toward either a biblical or a nonbiblical concept of nature and the particulars (that is, the individual things, including the individual man). Up to this time it could have gone either way."

* Nature's Proper Place: "It was good that nature was given a proper place. And there could have continued an emphasis on real people in a real world which God has made -- with the particulars, the individual things, important because God made the whole world. Masaccio . . . pictured Adam and Eve as the Bible portrays them -- as real people in a real world. Or at this point humanism could take over, with its emphasis on things being autonomous."

* Dilemma of Humanism: "Immediately after Masaccio, the die was cast and the movement went in this direction. Man made himself increasingly independent and autonomous, and with this came an increasing loss of anything which gave meaning, either to the individual things in the world or to man. With this we see the dilemma of humanism which is still with us today."

* Fouquet's Red Virgin: "This position and its dilemma is strikingly shown in a shift in art. In France, one sees this with Fouquet (c. 1416-1480) in his painting The Red Virgin (1450?)."

* King's Mistress: "The world red refers to the overall color used in part of the picture. The girl was shown with one breast exposed, and everybody who knew the situation knew that this was a picture of the king's mistress, Anges Sorel."

* Not the Madonna: "Was this the Madonna about to feed her baby? No, the painting might be titled The Red Virgin, but the girl was the king's mistress; and when one looked at the painting one could see what the king's mistress's breast looked like."

* Mary as a Real Person: "Prior to this time, Mary was considered very high and holy. Earlier she was considered so much above normal people that she was painted as a symbol. When in the Renaissance Mary was painted as a real person, this was an advance over the representations of Mary in the earlier age, because the Bible tells us that Mary was a real girl and that the baby Jesus was a real baby."

* Where Has All the Meaning Gone? "But now not only was the king's mistress painted as Mary with all of the holiness removed, but the meaning, too, was being destroyed. As first it might have seemed that only the religious aspect was threatened. But, as we can see in retrospect, gradually the threat spread to all of knowledge and all of life."

* Beyond Meaningless Mary: "All meaning to all individual things or particulars was removed. Things were being made autonomous, and there was nothing to which to related them or to give them meaning."

-- Francis Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?, pp. 68-71; for a fuller statement on Christianity and art, see Schaeffer's Art & The Bible