June 30, 2008
The Heller Misdirection
William Norman Grigg / Pro Libertate:Like the inhabitants of other formerly free societies, Americans are content to define "freedom" in terms of those liberties we are permitted to exercise. Yesterday's Supreme Court ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller (.pdf) is perfectly in harmony with this self-defeating concept of "freedom." It is entirely appropriate that the decision was written by Antonin Scalia, the most reliably authoritarian and consistently liberty-aversive member of the Court. With an air of regal condescension, Scalia allows that the Second Amendment acknowledges and protects an individual right to armed self-defense. He then explicitly limits the extent to which that "right" can be exercised, thereby redefining it as a State-conferred privilege. (Published by The Right Source)
Posted by Editor at 03:51 AM
Whistleblower: Spy Bill Will Create Police State
Ryan Singel / Wired.com:Mark Klein, the retired AT&T engineer who stepped forward with the technical documents at the heart of the anti-wiretapping case against AT&T, is furious at the Senate's vote on Wednesday night to hold a vote on a bill intended to put an end to that lawsuit and more than 30 others. "[Wednesday]'s vote by Congress effectively gives retroactive immunity to the telecom companies and endorses an all-powerful president. It’s a Congressional coup against the Constitution."
Posted by Editor at 03:50 AM
Who's Planning Our Next War?
Patrick J. Buchanan / Buchanan.org:Of the Axis-of-Evil nations named in his State of the Union in 2002, President Bush has often said, "The United States will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons." He failed with North Korea. Will he accept failure in Iran, though there is no hard evidence Iran has an active nuclear weapons program? William Kristol of The Weekly Standard said Sunday a U.S. attack on Iran after the election is more likely should Barack Obama win. Presumably, Bush would trust John McCain to keep Iran nuclear free.
Posted by Editor at 03:48 AM
Congress Approves Israel Aid Increase
AFP via Yahoo! News:The US Congress has approved a 170 million dollar increase in security assistance to Israel as part of its new 10-year, 30 billion dollar defense aid commitment to the Jewish state. The money for Israel was part of a larger supplemental spending bill that included 162 billion dollars for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The legislation gained final approval in a 92-6 Senate vote late Thursday. America's pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, welcomed the congressional action, saying it would increase US aid to Israel to 2.55 billion dollars in fiscal year 2009, up from 2.38 billion dollars this year.
Posted by Editor at 03:47 AM
Rogue Nation
Charley Reese / LewRockwell.com:One gets the impression that there are some people in Washington who believe that Israel or the U.S. can bomb Iran's nuclear reactors, fly home, and it will be mission complete. It makes you wonder if perhaps there is a virus going around that is gradually making people stupid. If we or Israel attack Iran, we will have a new war on our hands. The Iranians are not going to shrug off an attack and say, "You naughty boys, you." Consider how much trouble Iraq has given us. Some 4,000 dead and 29,000 wounded, a half a trillion dollars in cost and still climbing, and five years later, we cannot say that the country is pacified.
Posted by Editor at 03:39 AM
Christ-like Soldiers?
Laurence Vance / The LRC Blog:Since this is the Sunday before the Fourth of July, many churches held their patriotic services today. On the way to church this morning I passed by another church and saw this sign: The American soldier and Jesus Christ. One gives his life for your freedom. The other for your soul. I can't think of anything more blasphemous than mentioning Jesus Christ, the Lord, the Son of God, the Prince of Peace in the same breath as a U.S. soldier who bombs, maims, kills, and then dies for a lie.
Posted by Editor at 03:31 AM
Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature
Murray N. Rothbard / LewRockwell.com:For well over a century, the Left has generally been conceded to have morality, justice, and "idealism" on its side; the Conservative opposition to the Left has largely been confined to the "impracticality" of its ideals. A common view, for example, is that socialism is splendid "in theory," but that it cannot "work" in practical life. What the Conservatives failed to see is that while short-run gains can indeed be made by appealing to the impracticality of radical departures from the status quo, that by conceding the ethical and the "ideal" to the Left they were doomed to long-run defeat.
Posted by Editor at 01:40 AM
Bush Ended U.S. As a Republic
Gore Vidal / Press TV:Gore Vidal, US novelist, historian and social critic says the Bush regime has killed all of the constitutional links that made the US a republic. On early Friday morning Iran time, in an exclusive interview with Press TV, Vidal said that President Bush has rid the country of the Bill of Rights, habeas corpus and the entire legacy of the Magna Carta in the name of war on terror. He also criticized the House of Representatives for not impeaching President Bush, over a wide array of subjects such as disclosure of CIA agent Valerie Plame's covert status. Vidal did however single out Rep. Dennis Kuchinich for drawing up articles of impeachment against the president.
Posted by Editor at 12:45 AM
'Compassionate Conservatism' & Hog-Trough Faith
Dan Eggen / The Washington Post:President Bush focused attention on that signature phrase last week at a national conference for federal faith-based programs -- among his first, and still most controversial, policy initiatives. As he noted in his speech on Thursday, Bush began talking as long ago as 1999 about loosening restrictions on the participation of religiously affiliated groups in government programs. That led to his executive order creating the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives at the White House, and a proliferation of similar offices throughout the government. But controversies have erupted regularly, usually focused on allegations of improper favoritism for the religious right or improper proselytizing. Last week, the Justice Department fired an official under investigation for her role in doling out faith-based grants after she did not show up for a House hearing.
President Bush Attends Office of Faith-Based
and Community Initiatives' National Conference
Omni Shoreham Hotel - Washington, D.C.
White House Press Release
Posted by Editor at 12:32 AM
Disturbing Trends in the Evangelical Community
Rev. Jack Wyman / USA TODAY:Religious faith in this country isn't what it used to be, according to the recent Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life's survey ("Believers OK with many paths," Cover story, Life, Tuesday). While tolerance for diversity and the continued high levels of faith in God are encouraging, the data point to some disturbing trends within the evangelical community. It seems the church has struck an iceberg of disbelief in the sea of cultural postmodernism. Sound doctrine has become an anachronism. History and theology are ignored. Tradition is scoffed at. Evangelicals have been duped into allowing their faith to be politicized for partisan advantage, creating a widespread impression of bigotry, narrow-mindedness, self-righteousness and even hatred toward those who are different.
Posted by Editor at 12:31 AM
Evangelical movement touts 'Jesus for president'
Eric Marrapodi and Kate Bolduan / CNN.com:They're spiritual misfits. Rabble-rousers. They packed the shell of the old Baptist church on Negley Avenue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to hear author, Christian activist and fellow misfit Shane Claiborne stump on the campaign for a third party candidate, Jesus. The dreadlocked Christian activist from Philadelphia and his team parked a black school bus around the back. The hand-painted gold letters on the side read "Jesus for President." Claiborne is touring the country, packing churches and community centers, in support of the book he and Chris Haw co-authored, "Jesus for President."
Posted by Editor at 12:29 AM
PCUSA General Assembly Drops Ban on Gay Clergy
Eric Gorski / The Washington Times:The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), bitterly divided over sexuality and the Bible, set up another confrontation Friday over its ban on ordaining non-celibate gays and lesbians. The denomination's General Assembly, meeting in San Jose, Calif., voted 54 percent to 46 percent Friday to drop the requirement that would-be ministers, deacons and elders live in "fidelity within the covenant of marriage between and a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness."
Posted by Editor at 12:28 AM
Christian Teen Decapitated at Six Flags
Rhonda Cook / The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:The popular "Batman the Ride" rollercoaster at Six Flags Over Georgia remained closed Sunday while authorities continued investigating the death of a teenager who jumped over two fences and was struck by the ride. The 17-year-old South Carolina teen who died was identified as Asia Leeshawn Ferguson, of Springfield, S.C. He was on a church outing when the incident occurred about 2 p.m. Saturday. It was the second Batman ride-related death at the Cobb County park. Ferguson was decapitated when the ride struck him, police said. The teen was with a group from Oakley Spring Baptist Church in Salley, S.C., a small town about 50 miles east of Augusta. He had been in Six Flags earlier in the day, but he and another boy left the park property to get some lunch, according to Cobb County police spokesman Sgt. Dana Pierce.
Related:
Family Mourns Teen Hit by Roller Coaster in Ga.
The Associated Press
AUSTELL, Ga. -- The father of a South Carolina teenager decapitated by a roller coaster at a Georgia amusement park said Sunday that family members may never know why he hopped two fences to enter a restricted area. Police said Asia LeeShawn Ferguson IV, 17, of Columbia, S.C., died when he was hit by the Batman roller coaster at Six Flags Over Georgia on Saturday. The ride was to remain closed through Monday out of respect for his family.
Teen Was Taking Shortcut Back to Park
By Clif Leblanc / The State, SC
SPRINGFIELD -- The skies darkened and thundered, and raindrops fell on a pained Asia Ferguson as he gazed toward the cemetery where he buried his father in April and soon will inter his teenage son. Asia LeeShawn Ferguson IV, 17, died Saturday in a freak amusement park accident in Atlanta when he was struck by a roller coaster he was not riding and was decapitated. During the bus ride back Sunday to this Orangeburg County town where the Fergusons have attended Oakey Spring Missionary Baptist Church for five generations, the father said, "We still don't know what happened." All he could do was lament the gnawing loss.
Posted by Editor at 12:20 AM
June 29, 2008
A Trip to Gettysburg Raises Question
Michael Peroutka & Johon Lofton / The American View Radio:Michael and I discuss my first bus tour recently of the battlefield at the Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania -- a tour that completely ignored all the Confederate Memorials which made me something less than a happy camper -- though I did not actually camp out at the park. This tour did, however, make me wonder: Where does the Federal Government get the right to own or operate National Parks? Answer: There is no such right; such ownership is clearly un-Constitutional. Maybe, if the South had won, there would be no National Parks, no lawless land-grab by the national government; maybe, had the South won, there would be no national government, at least not as we have it now.
Posted by Editor at 03:45 PM
Prophecy, Secret Things, and Obedience
Chris Ortiz / Chalcedon Blog:Prophecy is typically seen in these terms, a foresight or prediction of a future event usually disconnected from any present circumstances. Nostradamus is the epitome of such wizardry. It is laughable that people are still curious to see if contemporary events fulfill this false prophet's soothsaying. Biblical prophecy does not function in that manner. The prophets of the Bible spoke in terms of the covenant, and each prophecy was the historical development of either the obedience or disobedience of the past. This is not an attractive definition in the age of Charismania where charlatans sporting prolific gifts of prophecy make both individual and national predictions as signs of their authority.
Posted by Editor at 03:15 PM
June 28, 2008
OUT Magazine Lists Top Sodomites
Peter LaBarbera / Americans for Truth:Below is the homosexual magazine OUT's list of its "Power 50" of influential homosexuals. OUT calls it "our first annual ranking of the homos who really make the world go round. These are queers you don't want to mess with.the 50 most influential homosexuals in America." We are intrigued by the fact that the same movement that once cried out for "privacy" and "to be left alone" feels free to publicly declare people's homosexuality for them (Anderson Cooper, No. 2, and Jodie Foster, No. 43). On the other hand, if OUT is right, it might explain Cooper's bias in his reporting on the homosexual issue: in a recent interview that the CNN host did with pro and con advocates on a "gay parenting" story, he blatantly favored the "gay" side in his questioning.
"And the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants."
"And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants. (For all these abominations have the men of the land done, which were before you, and the land is defiled;)" Leviticus 18
Editor's note: The solution to the homosexual problem will not be solved by banning, or attempting to ban, "gay marriage". The "gay marriage" issue is a Snipe Hunt. To solve the homosexual problem we must obey the commandments of God concerning this filthy abomination (Leviticus 18:22). We must turn from our wicked way and obey the commandments of God, or, America will continue to be cursed until she is no longer a people. Proverbs 28: 9 says, "He that turneth away his ear from hearing the law, even his prayer shall be abomination." When we apply this proverb to Christians' rebellion of the commandments of God concerning homosexuality, it means we do not have a prayer until we repent from our wicked rebellion. -- Jim Rudd
Posted by Editor at 09:40 AM
Who's to Blame for High Oil Prices?
Stefan M.I. Karlsson / LewRockwell.com:The long-term solution is to reduce or abolish taxation on oil production and to abolish all regulatory restrictions (whether motivated for environmentalist reasons as in the U.S. or nationalist reasons as in Mexico) on oil drilling. Opponents of drilling often reply to this that it won’t provide any short-term relief. But while that is true, but there won’t be any short-term relief without drilling either and the point of drilling is to provide long-term relief. Moreover, their preferred solution of having the government invest in research to invent more so-called renewable sources of energy is likely to take even longer to provide relief (if it ever provides relief). To provide short-term relief, different solutions are needed. This means, for example, that the U.S. government should start releasing the oil held in the so-called Strategic Petroleum Reserve, while the Fed should stop its inflationary policies.
Posted by Editor at 09:28 AM
Why Conspiracy Theories Should Exist
Bret McAtee / The Backwater Report:In what is already old news, last week in Michigan, two Muslim women at Barack Obama's rally were barred from sitting behind the podium by campaign volunteers seeking to prevent the women's head scarves from appearing in photographs or on television with the candidate. It seems the campaign was afraid of the image that such women would create for the Obama campaign. We already know how all of political theater manages the 'news.' This is something done by Republicans and Democrats alike. Images are arranged to communicate a particular spin.
Posted by Editor at 09:27 AM
Bush Pastor Linked to Dobson-Bashing
WorldNetDaily:A campaign worker for Barack Obama and the Texas Methodist pastor who advises President Bush have been linked to a website that bashes prominent Christian leader and Focus on the Family founder James Dobson. The site, called "jamesdobsondoesntspeakforme," appeared just days ago after Dobson criticized Obama's interpretation of the Bible during a 2006 speech and Obama responded essentially by calling Dobson a liar, accusing him of "making things up."
Posted by Editor at 08:44 AM
Anyone Can Cook, But Chefs Create
Eric Rauch / American Vision:With the opening of the new Pixar film, WALL-E, I thought we might revisit their last film, Ratatouille. Pixar has not only consistently raised the bar for feature and short-length animation films in terms of visual quality, their films are also extremely well-written and usually contain moralistic themes and dilemmas. WALL-E looks to be no different in this regard, especially in light of this interview with director/writer Andrew Stanton.
Posted by Editor at 08:39 AM
Fine for Preaching in Public Challenged
WorldNetDaily:A man arrested for preaching on a public sidewalk too close to the one of the nation's premiere representations of freedom, the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, is appealing his conviction and $400 fine. On Oct. 7, Michael A. Marcavage, director of the evangelistic organization Repent America, was arrested while preaching on the sidewalk outside the Liberty Bell Center and urging Americans to halt abortion. "We need to repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ," he told the crowd.
Posted by Editor at 08:16 AM
Boise Slaps Christian Duo With Lien
Fox 12 Boise:Two anti-abortion activists in Boise are asking supporters for $10,131 for legal bills, after the city of Boise slapped them with a lien on their property following their unsuccessful fight to return a Ten Commandments monument to a public park. Bryan Fischer, a lobbyist who heads up the conservative Idaho Values Alliance, and anti-abortion activist Brandi Swindell were ordered by a federal U.S. District Court judge to pay Boise's attorney fees in the 2004 case.
Related:
Cost of fighting for Ten Commandments: $10,000
A little more than four years ago, Brandi Swindell, Bryan Fischer and a group called Generation Life hoped to stop the city council of Boise, Idaho, from removing a Ten Commandments monument that had stood in a city park since 1965. The city council accepted no public input into its decision, so Generation Life was compelled to file a lawsuit seeking a temporary restraining order on the city's action.
Posted by Editor at 06:43 AM
GOA Hits the Airwaves on DC v. Heller Decision
Gun Owners of America:Yesterday was a historic day for the gun rights movement. For starters, Gun Owners of America is pleased that the U.S. Supreme Court, in the DC v. Heller opinion, struck down the handgun ban and trigger lock requirement in the nation's capital. As a result, GOA experts have spent the last two days using radio, TV and print media to explain the Court's decision and its impact upon the future of the gun debate in America.
Posted by Editor at 03:22 AM
NRA Sues Chicago, San Francisco Over Gun Bans
Chicago Tribune:A day after the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision striking down a gun ban in Washington, the National Rifle Association on Friday sued Chicago and three suburbs to have their firearm bans repealed. The separate federal suits by the NRA target gun bans in Evanston, Morton Grove and Oak Park in addition to Chicago. On Thursday, the Second Amendment Foundation and the Illinois State Rifle Association also sued Chicago to overturn its 26-year gun ban.
Related:
NRA Sues to Overturn S.F. Gun Ban in City Housing
The Associated Press:
SAN FRANCISCO -- The National Rifle Association sued the city of San Francisco on Friday to overturn its ban on handguns in public housing, a day after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a handgun ban in the nation's capital. The legal action follows a similar lawsuit against the city of Chicago over its handgun ban, filed within hours of Thursday's high court ruling.
Posted by Editor at 03:12 AM
June 27, 2008
A Review of The Shack
Susan Eby / The Chalcedon Foundation:It's troubling that anyone who actually reads and loves the Bible would find reason to be even remotely interested in pursing an introduction to New Age philosophy, but apparently it's currently sweeping evangelical Christianity with an insidious vengeance. I confess, I wasn't paying attention, so therefore, having received glowing reports of how "The Shack" by William P. Young would revolutionize my perception of God, I got myself a copy with the eager, albeit naive assumption that it might have something constructive to contribute to my ever-growing faith. What I found instead, however, might just as easily have been titled, "New Age 101" or even, "The Gospel According to John Lennon." (Okay now, everybody hold hands across the aisle and sing together, "All You NEED-IS-LOVE..." But I digress.)
Posted by Editor at 04:16 AM
What Would Jesus Steal?
Gary North / LewRockwell.com:If voters can be made to feel guilty about their economic success, they can be manipulated. This is why the politics of guilt manipulation is at the heart of the welfare state. In a systematic political program to make people feel guilty, the Social Gospel movement within Protestantism has played an important role for over a century. Economist-historian Murray Rothbard in a 1986 essay, "The Progressive Era and the Family," described this development.
Posted by Editor at 04:14 AM
Proud Pagan Witch Backs Obama's Poverty Bill
Cliff Kincaid / Accuracy in Media:While Senator Barack Obama struggles to keep the public in the dark about the nature of his pro-U.N. Global Poverty Act, a recent "Bay Area Interfaith Leaders' Luncheon" was held to lobby for Senate passage of the bill, whose cost has been estimated at $845 billion. An actual witch who spoke at a "Pagan Pride" festival in San Francisco was one of the listed participants. The witch, known as the "Elder Donald Frew" of the "Wiccan Community," was interviewed by the Reverend Don Lewis of “Witch School International” for a "reality" show called "Magick TV" and is shown talking about his involvement in the United Nations-backed United Religions Initiative. Magick TV features a "daily spell."
Posted by Editor at 04:13 AM
Father's Day Banned In Scottish Schools
Jim Kouri / NewsWithViews.com:Following the recent law in Britain prohibiting the use of the words mom ('mum') and dad in public schools, the politically-correct forces in Europe once again succeeded -- this time having fathers removed from their children's classrooms. According to reports coming out of Edinburgh, Scotland, children in public schools are prohibited from making Father's Day cards and related gifts as was customary in the past. The rationale given by school administrators for their action is their wish to avoid embarrassing school children who live with single mothers or lesbian partners.
Posted by Editor at 04:12 AM
Congress Passes Spending Bill for Bush's War
The Associated Press:The Senate passed a $162 billion war spending plan Thursday, sending to President Bush legislation that will pay for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan until the next president takes office. The spending bill will bring to more than $650 billion the amount Congress has provided for the Iraq war since it started more than five years ago. For operations in Afghanistan, the total is nearly $200 billion, according to congressional officials.
Related:
Senate Passes Broad War Funding Measure
By Paul Kane / The Washington Post:
In a 92 to 6 vote, the Senate yesterday approved unrestricted funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that allows continuation of the current military course of action through the end of President Bush's term and beyond. In the end, the $257.5 billion emergency spending bill, which had been the subject of two months of intense debate and negotiation, won overwhelming support in the Senate and the House, where it was approved last Friday by 416 to 12. Bush is expected to sign the bill next week.
Posted by Editor at 04:11 AM
Ron Paul Speaks Out Against War With Iran
Michael Nystrom / Campaign for Liberty:Ron Paul gave a speech on the House floor Thursday condemning the "virtual war resolution" soon to be considered by the House of Representatives. This bill already has 208 co-sponsors, and will likely be voted on after the 4th of July holiday. A related bill is being worked on in the Senate, with 29 Cosponsors. Many of the cosponsors are Democrats. Who says the Democratic Party is the anti-war party? You can see the video of Dr. Paul speaking out forcefully against this resolution here, sadly to a nearly empty House chamber.
Related:
U.S. Builds 4 Bases On Iran/Iraq Border
Press TV:
The US military has constructed four advanced bases 20 miles from Iraq's border with Iran, a senior Iraqi police officer has announced. al-Noor newspaper quoted the official as saying. He added that one of the bases has been located 30 km (20 miles) from the first border town with Iran and houses remote-controlled launching pads as well as radar systems similar to ones used in Kuwait during the first Persian Gulf war.
Posted by Editor at 04:02 AM
House Republicans Block Drilling on Federal Land
The Associated Press:House Republicans blocked Democrats on Thursday from requiring oil and gas companies to drill on the millions of acres of government land and water on which they already own federal leases. Seeking to counter a push by congressional Republicans to lift a long-standing drilling ban on most offshore U.S. waters, Democrat leaders maintained the industry should first go after oil and natural gas in areas where they hold leases. But the measure was defeated 223-195, short of the two-thirds vote required, with only a handful of Republicans voting for it.
Posted by Editor at 02:45 AM
Oil Hits $142 Over Weak Dollar
John Wilen / AP Business Writer:Oil futures climbed briefly to a new record above $142 a barrel Friday on expectations that the weakening dollar, a major factor in crude's stratospheric rise, will extend its decline and add to oil's appeal. Retail gas prices inched lower overnight, but are likely to resume their own trek into record territory now that oil futures have broken out of the trading range where they had been for nearly 3 weeks. Light, sweet crude for August delivery rose as high as $142.26 a barrel in premarket electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange before pulling back to trade up $1.46 at $141.10. On Thursday, the contract shot past $140 and rose more than $5 to a new settlement record.
Posted by Editor at 02:40 AM
Senate Postpones Vote on Illegal Wiretapping Bill
The Associated Press:The Senate on Thursday put off voting on controversial electronic surveillance legislation, in spite of what appeared to be overwhelming support for the bill. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and more than a dozen other senators who oppose telecom immunity threw up procedural delays that threatened to force the Senate into a midnight or weekend session. The prospect of further delays was enough to cause Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to postpone the vote until after the weeklong July 4 vacation. The bill provides legal immunity to telecommunications companies that helped the government wiretap American phone and computer lines without court permission after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
Related:
Senate Debates Rewrite of '78 Law
That Created Secret Intelligence Court
By Paul Kane / The Washington Post:
The Senate, clearing a key parliamentary hurdle, yesterday voted to begin debating a broad revision of U.S. intelligence laws that includes a controversial plan to grant immunity to telecommunications companies that assisted in the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program. On a vote of 80 to 15, the Senate officially began debate on a sweeping rewrite of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, with an eye toward final passage of the bill as early as today. The large margin demonstrated that the bill's opponents -- the American Civil Liberties Union and other privacy rights organizations -- do not have enough support to derail the measure through a filibuster, which Sens. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) and Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) had threatened.
Posted by Editor at 01:48 AM
June 26, 2008
Chuck Baldwin Tours Border Outposts
Constitution Party / News Wire:Chuck Baldwin will visit California's southern border with Mexico in an effort to call attention to the need for ending the open borders policy that threatens our nation. "America's back is breaking from the burden of immigration policies that demand taxpayers pay to educate, incarcerate, medicate and house those who have broken into our country," said Baldwin. "There can be no compromise. While Obama and McCain are pandering for the Hispanic vote by promising more taxpayer-funded benefits for illegal aliens, Americans are clear they want the borders sealed, and they want the gravy train to come to a screeching halt", Baldwin added.
Posted by Editor at 05:56 AM
Supreme Court Strikes Down D.C. Gun Ban
Todd J. Gillman / The Dallas Morning News:The Supreme Court tossed out a handgun ban in the nation's capital on Thursday, holding for the first time that the Second Amendment does protect an individual right to self-defense and gun ownership. But in its first hard look at gun rights in nearly 70 years, the court also held – in a narrow, 5-4 ruling – that the right is subject to some reasonable limitations.
Posted by Editor at 05:52 AM
Maintaining Our Right to Keep and Bear Arms
Judge Roy Moore / Gun Owners of America:When Washington, D.C., decided to pass a law essentially banning the ownership of handguns, even in one's own home, the stage was set for one of the most controversial issues to be considered by the United States Supreme Court in many years -- "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" as protected in the Second Amendment. The decision in District of Columbia v. Heller later this year promises to be a landmark ruling that will affect the lives of all Americans regarding one of the most basic liberties we enjoy under the United States Constitution: gun ownership.
Posted by Editor at 05:51 AM
How 'Human Rights' Commissions Erode Freedom
Lee Duigon / The Chalcedon Foundation:A recent decision by the New Mexico Human Rights Commission, to punish a Christian photographer for not taking pictures of a lesbian "commitment ceremony," raises the specter of a Canadian-style "human rights" regime being imposed on the United States. As humanists labor to reconstruct society under a secular theocracy, an invaluable weapon in their arsenal will be the "human rights commission." "These commissions are being used more and more, definitely, as the weapon of choice against Christians," said Jordan Lorence, an attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund.
Posted by Editor at 05:05 AM
A Naked Public Square?
Bret McAtee / The Backwater Report:"In more popular parlance, however, all three words, - 'secular,' 'secularization,' and 'secularism,' - have to do with the squeezing of the religious to the periphery of life. More precisely, secularization is the process that progressively removes religion from the public arena and reduces it to the private realm; secularism is the stance that endorses and promotes such a process. Religion may be ever so important to the individual, and, few secular persons will object. But if religion makes any claims regarding policy in the public arena, it is viewed as a threat, and intolerant as well."Before getting to this quote I want to make it clear that I always find reading and listening to Carson stimulating. My posts here continue to critique him but that shouldn't be interpreted as meaning that I disagree with him at every point.
D. A. Carson
Christ And Culture Revisited – pg. 116
Posted by Editor at 05:05 AM
ACLU 'Threatens' Naval Academy Over Daily Prayer
Jacqueline L. Salmon / The Washington Post:The American Civil Liberties Union is threatening to sue the U.S. Naval Academy unless it abolishes its daily lunchtime prayer, saying that some midshipmen have felt pressured to participate. In a letter to the Naval Academy, Deborah Jeon, legal director for the ACLU of Maryland, said it was "long past time" for the academy to discontinue the tradition. She said the practice violates midshipmen's freedom to practice religion as their conscience leads them. The Naval Academy rejected the ACLU's request that the prayer be eliminated.
Posted by Editor at 04:52 AM
America Needs Some Pioneers
Coach Dave Daubenmire / NewsWithViews.com:Let me ask you something. What has happened to America? Where is that pioneer spirit? It flows through our blood, it is in our DNA, and we are a nation of achievers. What has become of our spunk? I remember a phrase that one of my coaches used on me one time. "If you think you can...or if you think you can't...you're right."
Posted by Editor at 04:43 AM
'Cleaning Toilet' E-Mailer Responds
Gary DeMar / American Vision:The response to Monday's article was a hit! We've received nearly 200 replies from homeschool students and parents from all over the country, and they keep coming in. It's also been picked up by other web sites and homeschool organizations and distributed widely. I am amazed at the wonderful accomplishments of so many young people and the dedication of their parents. The e-mailer who made the "cleaning toilets" remark has no idea how diverse, accomplished, and hard working the homeschool community is. None of this matters to him.
Posted by Editor at 04:31 AM
Do Threats Make You Nervous?
Don Bacon / LewRockwell.com:Randolph Bourne: "Wartime brings the ideal of the State out into very clear relief, and reveals attitudes and tendencies that were hidden. In times of peace the sense of the State flags in a republic that is not militarized. For war is essentially the health of the State. The ideal of the State is that within its territory its power and influence should be universal. As the Church is the medium for the spiritual salvation of man, so the State is thought of as the medium for his political salvation. Its idealism is a rich blood flowing to all the members of the body politic. And it is precisely in war that the urgency for union seems greatest, and the necessity for universality seems most unquestioned." Part of American militarization is the expanded US Border Patrol, which operates fixed and roving checkpoints, as well as random vehicle stops, within the United States and its territories. You may not see them where you live, but in the Southwest they have a highly visible presence, and no doubt they will be coming to a community near you eventually.
Posted by Editor at 03:16 AM
Senate to Pass Illegal Wiretapping Bill
The Associated Press:The Senate signaled an end Wednesday to months of rancorous debate over surveillance legislation that would protect from civil lawsuits the telecommunications companies that helped the government wiretap American lines. By an 80-15 vote, the Senate turned back a last-ditch effort to kill the bill, setting up a vote to approve the measure on Thursday. Critics of the bill argue that immunizing the companies from lawsuits amounts to letting the Bush administration off the hook for nearly six years of warrantless tapping of phones and computer lines inside the United States following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Posted by Editor at 02:44 AM
FISA Flippers See More Telecom Cash
Chris Frates / CBS News - The Politico:House Democrats who flipped their votes to support retroactive immunity for telecom companies in last week's FISA bill took thousands of dollars more from phone companies than Democrats who consistently voted against legislation with an immunity provision, according to an analysis by MAPLight.org. In March, the House passed an amendment that rejected retroactive immunity. But last week, 94 Democrats who supported the March amendment voted to support the compromise FISA legislation, which includes a provision that could let telecom companies that cooperated with the government’s warrantless electronic surveillance off the hook.
Posted by Editor at 02:43 AM
SCOTUS: No Death Penalty for Raping Children In Louisiana
AFP / Yahoo! News:The US Supreme Court rendered an opinion Wednesday that a Louisiana man convicted of raping a child cannot be sentenced to death, saying capital punishment must be reserved for murder cases. By a one-vote majority of 5-4 the justices said the US constitution which prohibits "cruel and unusual punishment" bars the imposition of the death penalty "for the rape of a child where the crime did not result, and was not intended to result, in the victim's death." The case before the Supreme Court involved an appeal by lawyers for Patrick Kennedy, 43, who was sentenced to death in Louisiana in 2003 for raping his girlfriend's daughter five years earlier, when she was eight years old. In a dissenting opinion, justice Samuel Alito and backed by Chief Justice John Roberts and justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, denounced the decision as too "sweeping." The Supreme Court was banning the death penalty "no matter how young the child, no matter how many times the child is raped, no matter how many children the perpetrator rapes, no matter how sadistic the crime," Alito wrote.
Posted by Editor at 01:30 AM
Unbowed, Officials Vow to Execute Child Rapists
Deborah Hastings / The Associated Press:Angry politicians vowed to keep writing laws that condemn child rapists to death, despite a Supreme Court decision saying such punishment is unconstitutional. "Anybody in the country who cares about children should be outraged that we have a Supreme Court that would issue a decision like this," said Alabama Attorney General Troy King. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal called the ruling "incredibly absurd,""a clear abuse of judicial authority" and said officials will "evaluate ways to amend our statute to maintain death as a penalty for this horrific crime." Oklahoma officials said they, too, weren't ready to give up, and would "certainly look at what options we have," state senator Jay Paul Gumm said. "I think the people of Oklahoma have spoken loudly that this is one of the most heinous of crimes."
Posted by Editor at 01:29 AM
Senate Agrees to Unconstitutional AIDS Bill
Jim Abrams / The Associated Press:Senate negotiators said Wednesday they had reached a tentative agreement on a key obstacle to one of the most ambitious federal health initiatives ever, a $50 BILLION act to combat AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis in Africa and other countries hard-hit by those diseases. The agreement sets the stage for the Senate to vote in the near future on the five-year bill that would more than triple the size of the $15 billion global AIDS bill that Congress, at the urging of President Bush, passed in 2003. The current act expires at the end of September.
Posted by Editor at 01:20 AM
Russia Frees US Pastor Jailed for Importing Bullets
The Associated Press:An American pastor walked free Tuesday after spending nearly five months in a Russian jail for bringing hunting-rifle ammunition into the country. The release of Phillip Miles, 58, came a day after the Moscow City Court reduced his three-year sentence for smuggling and ordered him set free. Miles, a pastor at Christ Community Church in Conway, South Carolina, said he was well treated in custody.
Posted by Editor at 01:16 AM
June 25, 2008
Obama: Dobson Is 'Making Stuff Up'
The Associated Press:Barack Obama said Tuesday that evangelical leader James Dobson was "making stuff up" when he accused the presumed Democrat presidential nominee of distorting the Bible. Dobson used his Focus on the Family radio program to highlight excerpts of a speech Obama gave in June 2006 to the liberal Christian group Call to Renewal. Speaking to reporters on his campaign plane before landing in Los Angeles, Obama said the speech made the argument that people of faith, like himself, "try to translate some of our concerns in a universal language so that we can have an open and vigorous debate rather than having religion divide us." Obama added, "I think you'll see that he was just making stuff up, maybe for his own purposes."
Posted by Editor at 08:10 AM
Old Keynesian Dogs, Old Fiscal Tricks
Gary North / LewRockwell.com:As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly (Proverbs 26:11). We are about to be thrown back into the tender mercies of Keynesian economists. In the current setting, this will push the economy lower rather than higher. The main Keynesian solutions to a faltering economy are federal budget deficits and monetary inflation. This two-part program assumes unemployment at 25% and annual deflation at 10%: the Great Depression in America. Problem: it's not 1936 any more. ... Keynesianism is based on two fundamental ideas: (1) sellers do not learn that something is better than nothing, and therefore will not lower their selling prices; (2) economists do not learn that government spending that is financed by debt is accomplished in one of only two ways: (a) money lent by savers, which could have been lent to businesses or consumers; (b) money lent by a central bank, which lowers the purchasing power of the currency unit. This is a philosophy of something for nothing.
Posted by Editor at 07:51 AM
$300 Billion Housing Bailout Passes Senate Test
Julie Hirschfeld Davis / The Associated Press:A massive foreclosure rescue bill cleared a key Senate test Tuesday by an overwhelming margin, with Democrats and Republicans both eager to claim election-year credit for helping hard-pressed homeowners. The mortgage aid plan would let the Federal Housing Administration back $300 billion in new, cheaper home loans for an estimated 400,000 distressed borrowers who otherwise would be considered too financially risky to qualify for government-insured, fixed-rate loans.
Posted by Editor at 07:21 AM
Elites Seek Control Over Cashless Society
Lee Rogers / Rogue Government:The terrorists in the federal government are continuing their push to implement a cashless economic enslavement system. According to a legislative notice from the U.S. Senate, a new Housing Bill (HR 3221) contains a provision that will require nearly every online credit card transaction to be reported directly to the Internal Revenue Service.
Posted by Editor at 07:01 AM
U.S. Army General: Bush Guilty of War Crimes
USA TODAY:The U.S. general who led the Army's investigation of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal says the Bush administration "has committed war crimes" as a result of what happened to detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay "when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture." Those declarations, by retired Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, are contained in the preface he wrote for a new report by Physicians for Human Rights, "Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and Its Impact."
Posted by Editor at 06:59 AM
Pentagon Official: Test Weapons on Americans First
Jim Kouri / NewsWithViews.com:An American military commander is advocating the testing of so-called nonlethal weapons on American citizens prior to using them on our enemies in the Global War on Terrorism. Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne told a Houston Chronicle reporter that nonlethal weapons such as high-powered microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before they are used on the battlefield.
Posted by Editor at 06:58 AM
The Homeland Security State: Boyz With Lethal Toyz
William N. Grigg / Pro Libertate:Couldn't the county simply have paid him for the damage to his well? That's the question that urges itself upon me as I sift through the rubble of last Spring's confrontation in rural Wisconsin between Robert Bayliss and ... well, at last count, roughly two dozen local, county, and state agencies. The anti-Bayliss coalition included elements from no fewer than six SWAT teams and the prominent use of three BearCat (Ballistic Engineered Armored Response and Rescue Counter Attack Truck) military assault vehicles.
Posted by Editor at 06:58 AM
Preparing For Battles to Come
Larry Pratt / Gun Owners of America:For years Gun Owners of America (GOA) and its sister organization Gun Owners' Foundation (GOF) have worked tirelessly in support of a robust Second Amendment guarantee of the right of individual Americans to keep and bear arms. Fighting against gun control in the trenches -- in the state and federal courts, in the court of public opinion, in state legislatures, city councils and Congress -- every step of the way is a dog fight. And GOA has become known as the "no compromise" gun lobby. Our Supreme Court brief in the Heller case was recognized by USA Today as so distinctive that our GOF legal team was invited recently to write the counter-point to that paper's pro-gun control position. In our battle to defend the Second Amendment, we have encountered opposition of two types.
Posted by Editor at 06:57 AM
The Obama Campaign Racial Strategy
Bret McAtee / The Backwater Report:Anybody who has ever worked in a affirmative action work environment has seen this Obama campaign technique a million times. A member of a minority community is caught in some kind of error or malfeasance and the immediate response on their part is the cry of 'racism,' thus seeking to shift the blame on the person who revealed their error. This premeditated technique moves the focus off of their error or malfeasance and makes the issue the motives of the one who revealed their error. The ‘post-racial candidate’ who is supposed to take us beyond race has now officially introduced race into the campaign.
Posted by Editor at 06:52 AM
Ron Paul Statement on FISA
Rep. Ron Paul, MD. / News Wire:The main reason I oppose this latest version is that it still clearly violates the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution by allowing the federal government to engage in the bulk collection of American citizens’ communications without a search warrant. That US citizens can have their private communication intercepted by the government without a search warrant is anti-American, deeply disturbing, and completely unacceptable. In addition to gutting the fourth amendment, this measure will deprive Americans who have had their rights violated by telecommunication companies involved in the Administration’s illegal wiretapping program the right to seek redress in the courts for the wrongs committed against them.
Posted by Editor at 06:48 AM
Obama Supports Telecom Amnesty Bill
Ryan Singel / Wired.com:Presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Barack Obama supports the spy bill compromise passed by the House Friday, despite having opposed retroactive amnesty to telecoms that helped with the President's secret, warrantless wiretapping. The measure expands the government's ability to install blanket wiretaps inside domestic communication infrastructure and frees the nation's phone and internet companies from lawsuits accusing them of massive violations of their customers' privacy. The Senate is expected to take up and pass the Bush-approved bill next week.
Posted by Editor at 06:46 AM
Feingold & Dodd Fillbustering Wiretap Bill
David Edwards and Nick Juliano / The Raw Story:In a last-ditch attempt to fix a surveillance bill critics say would essentially legalize President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program, Sens. Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Chris Dodd (D-CT) have promised to filibuster the bill as long as it offers telecommunications companies retroactive immunity.
Posted by Editor at 06:43 AM
Toll Roads Mean Billions in Extra Costs for Motorists
The Newspaper.com:Revenue collection with toll roads is twenty-five times less efficient than the gas tax. With the promise of federal taxpayer subsidies, many states are rushing to embrace public-private toll road partnership deals as a means of boosting existing state transportation budgets. Our analysis shows, however, that when tolls are used to replace traditional funding sources like the gas tax, the out-of-pocket costs for motorists jumps by a factor of twenty-five.
Posted by Editor at 04:15 AM
June 24, 2008
Bush Ignores Supreme Court's Guantanamo Ruling
AFP Yahoo News:Hearings for terror suspects before US military tribunals in Guantanamo are going ahead despite a Supreme Court ruling that affirmed detainees have a right to challenge their detention in a civilian court. Legal experts had described the high court's decision as the death knell of the special tribunals created by President George W. Bush and his Republican allies in Congress to try "war on terror" suspects. But Justice Department chief Michael Mukasey said the controversial tribunals at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba would continue their work and last week, two preliminary hearings were held as scheduled.
Posted by Editor at 10:06 AM
Antonin Scalia is Un-American
Thomas R. Eddlem / LewRockwell.com:The following is my concurring opinion in the case recent Supreme Court case Boumediene et al. v. Bush et. al. ... or it would have been, had I been on the court. ``The dissents in this case by four Justices (Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Chief Justice Roberts) reveal a vital truth, that they vigorously disagree with Thomas Jefferson's fundamentally American proposition that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." All men, the Chief Justice's and Justice Scalia's dissents assert, are not equal. Some are more equal than others. And men's rights to liberty are not "inalienable," but rather quite alienable.' '
Related to "all men are created equal"
$10,000 Offer to Name 'One' Pro-Life Justice
DENVER -- "American Right To Life is offering attorney James Bopp $10,000 for National RTL," said the group's president Brian Rohrbough, "if he can name a single justice on the current U.S. Supreme Court who has ever acknowledged that the unborn child has a right to life, whether in a majority opinion or a dissent."
Posted by Editor at 09:55 AM
A License to Loot, a Permit to Plunder
William N. Grigg / Pro Libertate:Digging up the planted axioms that litter our ordinary conversations can be a revealing exercise. We learn how deeply rooted our supposedly free society has become in collectivist and militarist assumptions. For example: How often do we hear or read language that draws a distinction between "police" and "civilians"? Our republican framework of government supposedly prohibits the use of the military in domestic law enforcement. Yet if a police officer isn't a civilian, he of necessity must be considered some variety of soldier: He bears arms, belongs to a force organized in a military hierarchy, issues orders, and expects immediate obedience to his demands.
Posted by Editor at 08:08 AM
Ron Paul: A Major Victory for Texas
Rep. Ron Paul, MD. / Texas Straight Talk:I am pleased to report that last week we received notice that the Texas Department of Transportation will recommend the I-69 Project be developed using existing highway facilities instead of the proposed massive new Trans Texas Corridor/NAFTA Superhighway. According to the Texas Transportation Commissioner, consideration is no longer being given to new corridors and other proposals for a new highway footprint for this project. A major looming threat to property rights and national sovereignty is removed with this encouraging announcement.
Posted by Editor at 08:00 AM
Stephen Mansfield's Coming Book On Obama's Faith
Bret McAtee / The Backwater Report:Steve Mansfield has written a book entitled "The Faith Of Barack Obama." On his blog he complains that people are consigning him to the nether realm for writing this book. He claims that this is unjust since nobody has yet read the book. But, even given his blog explanation for the book, one wonders what Mr. Mansfield was thinking unless he intended to write a book telling us about the pagan faith of Barack Obama.
Posted by Editor at 07:42 AM
Dobson Takes A Shot At Obama
Eric Gorski / The Associated Press:As Barack Obama broadens his outreach to evangelical voters, one of the movement's biggest names, James Dobson, accuses the likely Democrat presidential nominee of distorting the Bible and pushing a "fruitcake interpretation" of the Constitution. The criticism, to be aired Tuesday on Dobson's Focus on the Family radio program, comes shortly after an Obama aide suggested a meeting at the organization's headquarters, said Tom Minnery, senior vice president for government and public policy at Focus on the Family.
Posted by Editor at 07:23 AM
Pew: Most Americans Have A 'Pagan' Faith
Jacqueline L. Salmon / The Washington Post:Most Americans believe that angels and demons are active in the world, and nearly 80 percent think miracles occur, according to a poll released yesterday that takes an in-depth look at Americans' religious beliefs. The study detailed Americans' deep and broad religiosity, finding that 92 percent believe in God or a universal spirit -- including one in five of those who call themselves atheists. More than half of Americans polled pray at least once a day. But Americans aren't rigid about their beliefs. Most of those studied -- even many of the most religiously conservative -- have a remarkably nonexclusive attitude toward other faiths. Seventy percent of those affiliated with a religion believe that many religions can lead to eternal salvation.
Related:
Religious Americans: My Faith Isn't The Only Way
By Eric Gorski / The Associated Press:
America remains a nation of believers, but a new survey finds most Americans don't feel their religion is the only way to eternal life -- even if their faith tradition teaches otherwise. The findings, revealed Monday in a survey of 35,000 adults, can either be taken as a positive sign of growing religious tolerance, or disturbing evidence that Americans dismiss or don't know fundamental teachings of their own faiths. Among the more startling numbers in the survey, conducted last year by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life: 57 percent of evangelical church attenders said they believe many religions can lead to eternal life, in conflict with traditional evangelical teaching.
Posted by Editor at 07:14 AM
It's Not An Oil Problem
Paul Proctor / NewsWithViews.com:As I was driving around town the other day, running errands and taking care of business, I noticed trucks, vans and SUVs, very similar in size to mine, absolutely everywhere -- many jammed full of kids, soccer moms, businessmen and blue collar workers, sitting in traffic between red lights with cell phones hanging off their heads. Knowing that their urban assault vehicles required at least as much gas as mine, I wondered: How in the world does a family paying a mortgage and a couple of car payments get by these days with prices being what they are? I’m not a tightwad by any stretch of the imagination, but I scratched one of the things I needed that day off my shopping list for one reason and one reason only -- it wasn't worth the gasoline it would take to drive across town and buy it.
Posted by Editor at 05:38 AM
Is Reflection & Rethinking Overdue?
Joan E. Battey / Ether Zone:Life today is fast-paced. We resort to variations of the Mad Hatter's lament: "Hello/Goodbye, I'm late, I'm late, I'm late." We're led from fad to fad, excitement to excitement, by experts directing our focus. We're too busy to notice the downside of sales pitches -- particularly those "for the children." Isn't reflection and re-thinking long overdue, if it isn't too late? "For the children," hasn't been all good. It's been questioned, but fast-ticking clocks left little time to notice. Where have good intentions led us -- especially the children meant to be the beneficiaries? Sometimes reflection is triggered by noting the daily news aggregate from multiple sources. It can spur recall of similar news, hastily skimmed and forgotten. But, once remembered, it's easier to see cause/effect possibilities. Two recent news items might illustrate that.
Posted by Editor at 05:06 AM
The White Male Vote Swung The Democrat Race
Carey Roberts / NewsWithViews.com:The 16-month Hillary-palooza has finally gone bust. Her website bravely instructs us to "Support Senator Obama Today." Mrs. Clinton's staff has been pared down to a skeleton crew. And she's finally getting around to paying off the health insurance bills. But Hillary’s campaign wasn't a presidential nomination effort in the usual sense. It was a massive exercise in feminist consciousness-raising foisted on an unsuspecting American public. Take Clinton’s June 7 concession speech that was billed as an endorsement of rival Barack Obama. In reality it was a neo-Marxist rant lightly disguised as a feminist pep talk.
Related:
Clinton to Join Obama As He Courts Female Vote
By Shailagh Murray and Anne E. Kornblut / The Washington Post:
ALBUQUERQUE -- As Hillary Rodham Clinton prepared to return to life in the Senate and announced that she will campaign with Sen. Barack Obama in New Hampshire on Friday, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee began reaching out to female voters who had formed the backbone of Clinton's support in the primary season. The Obama-Clinton event will take place in the town of Unity, in the southwest corner of a swing state that Obama hopes to carry in November. The symbolism goes beyond the town's name, as Clinton and Obama each won 107 votes there in the January primary.
Posted by Editor at 04:31 AM
Washington Post's Top Editor to Step Down
Howard Kurtz / The Washington Post:Leonard Downie Jr. said yesterday he is stepping down as The Washington Post's executive editor, ending a 17-year tenure in which the paper became a major online force and won a slew of prizes for high-profile investigations, including one that Downie published over President Bush's objections.
Posted by Editor at 01:28 AM
June 23, 2008
'Homeschoolers Are Only Good for Cleaning Toilets'
Gary DeMar / American Vision:The title for today's article is taken from a response to one of American Vision's daily articles. The respondent is an atheist who claims he can refute any argument raised in defense of the Christian faith. I have irritated him so much by answering his poorly researched responses he sends to me that his true character is spilling out in a public way. His personal emails to me are worse than what I have reproduced here.
Posted by Editor at 10:53 AM
The State of Iowa is Under Assault
Uncle Raisin:The state of Iowa is under assault: four Boy Scouts killed by tornado, weeks of ravaging storms, Cedar Rapids, Iowa City and Des Moines, IA, along with dozens of smaller towns are under water, 83 of 99 counties given federal emergency status, roads and highways throughout the state are closed, water ways, railroads and airports cannot serve the transport needs of the people, courts and government services closed, and much more in addition. Does this mean anything beyond the obvious intrusions into the lives of the people in this region?
Posted by Editor at 06:52 AM
A Totally Lawless Regime
Paul Craig Roberts / LewRockwell.com:Think about this question: In the 21st century what regime is more lawless than the Bush Regime? Everyone is entitled to his own answer. The only answer I can come up with is the Zimbabwe regime of Robert Mugabe. Voted out of power in the last election, the great man hasn’t left. Zimbabweans are going to have to vote again, and the great man has said that any vote that is not for him will be cancelled by a bullet. Does anyone remember how determined the British and the Americans and everyone else was to turn Rhodesia over to Mugabe in order to save Rhodesia from the evil Ian Smith? What a fool everyone was. But before we laugh at those fools, we had best laugh at ourselves, or cry.
Posted by Editor at 06:08 AM
FISA Is Only the Prelude to Nightmare
Arthur Silber / Power of Narrative:I indicated the other day that, as odious and destructive of liberty and privacy as the new FISA "compromise" bill is, there is one perspective from which the momentous to-do about this legislation is very badly misplaced. The selective focus on FISA misses the crucial larger picture in a way that ensures that the ruling class's hold on increasingly tyrannical power will never be consistently or seriously challenged -- which is, of course, precisely what the ruling class wants. In one sense, I certainly won't criticize those who protest the FISA legislation so vehemently, because I favor almost anything that throws a monkey wrench into the operations of our monumentally awful and oppressive federal government.
Posted by Editor at 04:17 AM
McClellan: Bush Must Blame Himself for Mistrust
Laurie Kellman / The Washington Times:If the nation doesn't trust the Bush White House, it's the president's and Dick Cheney's own fault, Bush's former spokesman told Congress Friday. From life-and-death matters on down _ the rationale for war, the leaking of classified information, Cheney's accidental shooting of a friend _ the government's top two leaders undermined their credibility by "packaging" their version of the truth, former press secretary Scott McClellan said.
Related:
McClellan Testifies About Bush Team
By Dan Eggen / The Washington Post:
Scott McClellan, the former White House spokesman turned Bush administration critic, took to Capitol Hill Friday to decry an insular and secretive White House that he said lied about the leaking of a CIA officer's name and "overstated" intelligence in the rush to war in Iraq. McClellan, who served as President Bush's press secretary from 2003 to 2006 and is the author of a controversial new book, also said Bush squandered the public's trust by not following through on promises to fire those involved in disclosing the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson and to publicly divulge details about the case.
Posted by Editor at 03:32 AM
Government Sued Over Seizure Of Liberty Dollars
Joseph Goldstein / The New York Sun:A dozen people around the country filed suit in U.S. District Court in Idaho this week demanding the return of all the copper, silver, gold, and platinum coins -- more than seven tons of metal in all -- that the FBI and Secret Service seized in November during raids of a mint in Idaho and a strip mall storefront in Indiana. The Justice Department had decided that the coins, many of which bear the familiar symbol of Lady Liberty and the phrase "TRUST IN GOD," were being illegally marketed as government-sanctioned currency, according to the sworn affidavit of an FBI agent.
Posted by Editor at 03:22 AM
June 21, 2008
Exclusive Interview With Vince Bugliosi - Part II
John Lofton / The American View:Vince Bugliosi Discusses God/Government, His Agnosticism, Our Constitution, Jesus & The Golden Rule - In Part I, Mr. Bugliosi discussed his new book "The Prosecution Of George W. Bush For Murder" (Vanguard, 2008). In this concluding part of our interview, we shift gears and discuss his views on a variety of topics including why, as an "agnostic," he thinks murder is wrong.
Posted by Editor at 04:24 PM
The Congressional Betrayal That Launched a War
David Brownlow For U.S. Senate:You owe it to yourself to take a few minutes to read the "Authorization For Use Of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution Of 2002," the sorry excuse for a war declaration that was passed by Congress in October of 2002. This unconstitutional resolution essentially took the power to declare war - a power that Congress alone possesses - and turned that power over to the President. And we wonder why the occupation of Iraq has turned into such a bloody mess.
Posted by Editor at 04:15 PM
Veteran Guinea Pigs
Jon Christian Ryter / NewsWithViews.com:The US government has a questionable history of using military personnel as guinea pigs to determine the potential health risks soldiers experience when they are exposed to caustic and sometimes deadly agents. During the period between the two world wars soldiers were deliberately exposed to mustard gas. Between 1945 to 1955 military personnel were exposed to radiation from nuclear bomb tests. In experiments conducted by the CIA and the US Army Biomedical Laboratory (under Project MKUltra), veterans were given the psychedelic drug Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, more commonly known as LSD.
Posted by Editor at 04:01 PM
Spy Bill Destroys Fourth Amendment
RawStory.com:"Never appease political bullies, President Bush admonished at the Israeli Knesset," MSNBC's Keith Olbermann opened. "Oddly, House Democrats chose to ignore him on the subject of dealing with him." Constitutional expert Jonathan Turley sees a "very frightening bill" in a proposed "compromise," currently in the House, that would update the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to effectively grant immunity from civil lawsuits to telecommunications companies that agreed to spy on their customers as part of the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program, starting shortly before the World Trade Center attacks in 2001. If the White House asked a phone company to spy with its assurance that it was legal, the measure says, that's enough to dismiss a case.
Posted by Editor at 11:01 AM
Robo Cop On Rails
Kurt Nimmo / Infowars:Noah Shachtman, writing for Wired, tells us the latest police state technological marvel may be used to secure the border. More than likely, it will be used to surveil you and me. Linceus GmbH is looking to turn miniature monorail cars into camera-equipped sentries, zipping around at nearly 50 miles per hour. And unlike human guards, Defense News’ Barbara Opall-Rome reports, these rail-riding robo-watchers are "impervious to bad weather; operate around the clock; and come equipped with dazzling spotlights, high-decibel acoustics and other nonlethal means of warning the unwitting." A demonstration at Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion Airport is planned for next week.
Posted by Editor at 10:11 AM
McCain's Posturing On Guantanamo
George F. Will / The Washington Post:The day after the Supreme Court ruled that detainees imprisoned at Guantanamo are entitled to seek habeas corpus hearings, John McCain called it "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country." Well. ... No state power is more fearsome than the power to imprison. Hence the habeas right has been at the heart of the centuries-long struggle to constrain governments, a struggle in which the greatest event was the writing of America's Constitution, which limits Congress's power to revoke habeas corpus to periods of rebellion or invasion. Is it, as McCain suggests, indefensible to conclude that Congress exceeded its authority when, with the Military Commissions Act (2006), it withdrew any federal court jurisdiction over the detainees' habeas claims?
Posted by Editor at 09:10 AM
June 20, 2008
Hanson Savages Buchanan - A Response
Bret McAtee / The Backwater Report:Victor Davis Hanson is a neo-conservative historian. Recently, he took aim at Buchanan's book 'Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War.' This is my interaction with his critique.
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Normandy, France -- Questioning the past is a good thing, but rewriting it contrary to facts is quite another. In the latest round of revisionism about the Second World War, the awful British and naive Americans, not the poor Germans, have ended up as the real culprits.
Posted by Editor at 07:42 AM
Deal Struck to Extend Warrantless Wiretap Power
Dan Eggen and Paul Kane / The Washington Post:Congress agreed yesterday on surveillance legislation that could shield telecommunications companies from privacy lawsuits, handing President Bush one of the last major legislative victories he is likely to achieve. The agreement extends the government's ability to eavesdrop on espionage and terrorism suspects while effectively providing a legal escape hatch for AT&T, Verizon Communications and other telecom firms. They face more than 40 lawsuits that allege they violated customers' privacy rights by helping the government conduct a warrantless spying program after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The sharpest critics of the administration's surveillance policies were not mollified. Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) said the legislation "is not a compromise; it is a capitulation." "Allowing courts to review the question of immunity is meaningless when the same legislation essentially requires the court to grant immunity," he said. Caroline Frederickson, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union, said, "The telecom companies simply have to produce a piece of paper we already know exists, resulting in immediate dismissal."
Related:
House Prepares to Debate New Warrantless Surveillance Law
The Associated Press
For months the debate over whether telecommunications companies should face lawsuits for cooperating with the government's warrantless wiretapping program has been the sticking point for updating a surveillance law. With a compromise at hand, the House prepared Friday to vote on a measure that effectively protects telecoms from civil lawsuits but also sets out steps for investigating the wiretapping program to determine its scope and legality.
Posted by Editor at 07:41 AM
John Yoo, Totalitarian
Paul Craig Roberts / LewRockwell.com:John Yoo stands outside the Anglo-American legal tradition. His views lead to self-incrimination wrung out of a victim by torture. He believes a president of the US can initiate war, even on false pretenses, and then use the war he starts as cover for depriving US citizens of habeas corpus protection. A US attorney general informed by Yoo’s memos even went so far as to tell the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Constitution does not provide habeas corpus protection to US citizens. Yoo’s animosity to US civil liberties made him a logical choice for appointment to the Bush Regime’s Department of Justice (sic), but his appointment as a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, shatters that university’s liberal image. Habeas corpus is a centuries-old British legal reform that stopped authorities from arbitrarily throwing a person into a dungeon and leaving him there forever without presenting charges in a court of law. Without this protection, there can be no liberty.
Posted by Editor at 07:39 AM
Treasury Secretary to Urge New Fed Powers
Neil Irwin / The Washington Post:Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. plans to call for the Federal Reserve to be given new, explicit powers to intervene in the workings of Wall Street firms to protect the financial system, adapting his vision of how the financial world should be regulated to reflect the lessons of the collapse of Bear Stearns. "We should quickly consider how to appropriately give the Fed the authority to access necessary information from highly complex financial institutions and the responsibility to intervene in order to protect the system," Paulson plans to say, "so they can carry out the role our nation has come to expect."
Related:
Administration Calls for Giving Fed More Powers
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON -- Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson says the government must move quickly to give the Federal Reserve more powers to regulate the financial system. Paulson said Thursday that the central bank's powers should be expanded in the wake of the near collapse earlier this year of Bear Stearns, the giant Wall Street investment firm. He said there was a need to consider quickly how to give the Fed the power it needs to obtain information from investment banks and the responsibility to intervene to protect the overall financial system. His comments were provided by the Treasury Department as excerpts from a speech he was to give later in the day.
Posted by Editor at 07:19 AM
Prosecuting the Wrong People
William L. Anderson / LewRockwell.com:When I heard that federal authorities had arrested the people that the government tells us were responsible for much of the subprime meltdown, I anxiously awaited the perp walk that would befall some notorious characters. Would we see Ben Bernanke wearing handcuffs, still dressed in his cams after having thrown even more money from the helicopter? Would the person shuffling before the media be Alan Greenspan, the architect of 18 years of legal counterfeiting? Had the federal authorities finally come to their senses and arrested the people most responsible for the chicanery and outright theft of the savings and investments of millions of people?
Posted by Editor at 07:16 AM
Now You Know Why Your Gas Is So Expensive
Chris Ortiz / Chalcedon Blog:As I suggested back in November of 2007, the likely motive behind the rising oil prices was to convince the majority of Americans and their lawmakers to allow domestic drilling. This should have been a simple prediction for anyone. Crises of this magnitude don't just happen overnight. One day you're paying $1.50 per gallon, and two years later you're over $4.00 per gallon. C'mon folks, smarten up! The game is rigged. The push is on. Out of nowhere President Bush is calling on Congress to lift the ban on off-shore drilling; John McCain wants 45 new nuclear reactors; and now Newt Gingrich is compounding Bush's demand--although with a twist. He's placing the blame on Congress, not oil companies, or the Saudis.
Posted by Editor at 07:15 AM
Deals With Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back
Andrew E. Kramer / The New York Times:Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power. Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP -- the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company -- along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.
Posted by Editor at 07:13 AM
Extreme Environmentalism Is Stealing Our Land
Dr. Laurie Roth / NewsWithViews.com:The terms "environmentalism" "carbon emissions" "global warming" "heritage areas" "scenic areas" "historical areas" "water ways" are really the front words and terms for global elitists and Government control regarding our land, our food supply and our guns. Over the last few years alone we have seen our Government try and swoop in and seize millions of acres of privately owned land. Much of this aggression and distortion has fallen under the headings of “national trails and parks."
Posted by Editor at 06:31 AM
Group Files Suit Over 'I Believe' Plates in SC
The Associated Press:A group that advocates separation of church and state filed a federal lawsuit Thursday to prevent South Carolina from becoming the first state to create "I Believe" license plates. The group contends that South Carolina's government is endorsing Christianity by allowing the plates, which would include a cross superimposed on a stained glass window. Washington-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State filed the lawsuit on behalf of two Christian pastors, a humanist pastor and a rabbi in South Carolina, along with the Hindu American Foundation.
Posted by Editor at 06:18 AM
Oral Arguments Loom in Homeschool Case
Pacific Justice Institute:California's Second District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles will hear oral arguments this coming Monday in the Rachel L. homeschool case that has attracted nationwide attention. The court has set aside two hours for oral argument -- significantly more time than is typically allotted at the appellate level.
Posted by Editor at 03:17 AM
June 19, 2008
The Greatest Threat Facing America
Bobby Franklin / The American View:Recently a friend asked me to listen to a debate that he had just heard concerning the "war on terror." One side took the view that we need to fight the terrorists over there so that we won't have to fight them over here. The other side took the view that while Islam is a threat, and that possibly someday we will be fighting them over here, we have no business nation-building and besides, there has been no constitutional declaration of war against either Iraq or Afghanistan. I believe that both sides ignored the main issue. If Islam is a new threat to us, how has it changed from its founding principles? It hasn't. Islam is no more violent or militant today than it was 1300 years ago. Islamic terrorism is not the greatest threat facing America. God is.
Posted by Editor at 06:24 AM
'Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War'
Bret McAtee / The Backwater Report:A Book Review: I just finished Pat Buchanan's recent release entitled Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. It is not the first book on this subject I have read, though I am certainly no expert on the subject. One thing that Buchanan does is to take off the halo from above Winston Churchill's head. One doesn't have to do much reading to realize that it is usually a fool's delusion that invests itself with inventing heroes out of leaders of nation states or mammoth organizations.
Posted by Editor at 06:23 AM
Don't Let Critics Make the Rules
Gary DeMar / American Vision:Critics of the Bible begin with the premise that they know more about the geography and times of the Bible than those who actually lived during the history of the period. Dogmatic claims are often made based on incomplete archeological evidence. This has been happening for a long time. How many years have we heard there was no mention of David outside the Bible? In 1987 archeologist Kathleen Kenyon claimed, “To many people it seems remarkable that David and Solomon still remain unknown outside the Old Testament or literary sources derived directly from it.
Posted by Editor at 06:20 AM
Hispanosupremacists Infiltrate Evangelical Movement
Frederick Meekins / Ether Zone:Minority activists and other guiltmongers often whine that 11 am Sunday morning is often the most segregated hour of the week. I wonder what the we-are-all-one-big family agitators have to say about the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, which bills itself as the National Hispanic Association of Evangelicals. While prominent Christian leaders are correct that all of mankind descends from one set of parents, interesting, isn’t it, how these speakers only expect Whites of a more Northern European extraction to abide by such radical color-blindness. For if a group of Caucasians a little to wrapped up in their pigmentation ratios established the Nordic Christian Association, it would not be tolerated in contemporary Evangelical circles, and rightfully so.
Posted by Editor at 06:00 AM
Foreign Corporation Gets US Money for Toll Road
The Newspaper.com:The US Department of Transportation announced last Thursday that it had issued $589 million in tax-free bonds for the benefit of a foreign corporation that will use them to create High Occupancy Toll lanes on the Capital Beltway in Northern Virginia, just outside Washington, DC. This represents the first time that federal transportation officials have used private activity bonds, a controversial funding method created by state governments to provide tax exemptions to private entities developing public projects.
Posted by Editor at 05:55 AM
Politicking Time Bombs
Morris Beschloss / The Desert Sun:Farm, Energy and Housing Bills Will Blow Up Deficit: With the next five months providing the twilight zone of Congressional inactivity, indiscriminate expenditures may reach a peak as congressmen and senators attempt to maximize the programs they can display to the voters back home during electioneering. With the $160 billion fiscal stimulus safely tucked away in recipients' accounts, a $500 billion 2008 fiscal budget deficit (first of October) is a sure thing. But with a presidential veto easily overridden by re-election seeking members of both parties, there are three major bills that could cost hundreds of billions (if not trillions) of dollars of debt added to the near $10 trillion accumulated by the end of the year.
Posted by Editor at 05:47 AM
Congress to OK $165 Billion for Bush's War
The Associated Press:Democrat and GOP leaders in the House announced agreement Wednesday on a long-overdue war funding bill they said President Bush would be willing to sign. The agreement on the war funding bill, announced by Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., and Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, provides about $165 billion to the Pentagon to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for about a year. That's enough time for Bush's successor to set Iraq policy. [It] also paves the way for a quick infusion of emergency flood relief for the Midwest, an extension of unemployment payments for the jobless and a big boost in GI Bill college for veterans.
Posted by Editor at 05:47 AM
Socially Engineering the Public for Martial Law
Lee Rogers / Rogue Government:The terrorists in the federal government are continuing their push to have a fully functioning martial law apparatus. The city of Denver was recently invaded by a large number of military helicopters without any sort of warning given to the general public. It was originally speculated that this training exercise had something to do with the upcoming Democratic National Convention, but a spokesman with Special Operations said that it wasn’t related and that the exercises would last all week. It is interesting that this spokesman said it had nothing to do with the upcoming DNC. If that’s the case, than what is the real purpose of this exercise?
Posted by Editor at 05:46 AM
June 18, 2008
The Rise of the New Spirituality
Gary DeMar / American Vision:"Is God Dead?" With a black background and bright red lettering, Time magazine's April 8, 1966 cover dared to question the existence of God in a nation where "In God We Trust" is its motto. Screenwriter Edward Anhalt, quoted in the Time issue, sums up the worldview of the God-is-dead worldview: "God is an infantile fantasy, which was necessary when men did not understand what lightning was. God is a cop-out." The materialists tell us that God is dead because we no longer need Him to explain our world and the way it works. The God-is-dead theologians claim that "God is Man. Or God is the Universe." The results are the same: With the death of God, man becomes God. As James Herrick argues in The Making of the New Spirituality, "The fall of one god is often the precondition for the rise of another". There is nothing new under the sun (Gen. 3:5).
Posted by Editor at 06:27 AM
Joan Veon Speaks to 'Institute On The Constitution'
John Lofton / The American View:Speaking to a packed house at "Institution On The Constitution's" monthly "First Friday" lecture series, Joan Veon urged her audience to reject fear and instead walk in Christian faith to fight plans by the United Nations and others to control our lives. She has attended more than 100 U.N. meetings all over the world. Veon said that according to the U. N.'s "sustainable feudalism" ideas, "you and I are responsible for pollution. We are subordinate to the earth and all other living creatures. All of this is a perversion of God's Word and our Constitutional principles."
Posted by Editor at 06:25 AM
Ron Paul Applauds Chuck Baldwin, Bob Barr
YouTube.com CNN.com / News Wire:CNN's Wolf Blitzer talked to Ron Paul about a rally he has planned in the same city as the Republican convention. Paul told Blitzer that his rally would pose a philosophical challenge to the Republican's convention. Paul told Blitzer that he had no intention of supporting John McCain. Paul said, "I don't plan to endorse John McCain unless he changed his views on the war and was interested in the Federal Reserve and all these other things, which is not likely to happen."
Posted by Editor at 06:24 AM
Return of the Censors
Patrick J. Buchanan / Buchanan.org:Freedom of the press is on trial in Canada. The trial is before a court with the Orwellian title of the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal. The accused are Maclean's magazine and author Mark Steyn. The crime: In mocking and biting tones, they wrote that Islam threatens Western values. Had Steyn written that, given the Crusades, colonial atrocities in Africa and the slave trade, Christianity had been on balance a curse, he would not be in the dock. In the United States, these charges would have been tossed out by any federal judge, who would have admonished the plaintiffs that, here in America, we have a First Amendment.
Posted by Editor at 06:23 AM
Patriotism vs. the Military Industrial Complex
Jim Quinn / LewRockwell.com:"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hope of its children." These must be the words of some liberal Democrat Senator running for President in 2008. But no, these are the words of Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander during World War II, five decades ago. The United States, the only superpower remaining on earth, currently spends more on military than the next 45 highest spending countries in the world combined. The U.S. accounts for 48% of the world’s total military spending. Where did the peace dividend from winning the Cold War go?
Posted by Editor at 06:10 AM
Obama Grovels to Lobby - GOP Grovels to Tyranny
Paul Craig Roberts / VDARE.com:As articles by John Pilger, Alexander Cockburn and Uri Avnery make clear, by groveling before the Israel Lobby, Obama has dispelled any hope that his presidency would make a difference. Obama told the Lobby that, in order to protect Israel, he would use all the powers of the presidency to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon. As in the case of Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction," the conclusion whether or not Iran is making a nuclear weapon will be determined by propaganda and not by fact. Therefore, there is no difference between George W. Bush, John McCain, Obama and the Lobby with regard to the Middle East.
Posted by Editor at 05:29 AM
McCain's at War With Himself
Paul Mulshine / NJ.com:Now that Hillary Clinton has conceded the Democratic contest, we are faced with the prospect of another round of boring, scripted party conventions. The only sign of life is the alternative convention scheduled for September in St. Paul, Minn., by Ron Paul. The losing candidate for the Republican nomination has hired a hall so he can put on a show for the libertarian wing of the party as the big GOP show goes on nearby. This promises to be fun. But it would be more fun if the Republicans had simply given the Texas congressman a speaking role at the convention and thereby brought his supporters into the fold. John McCain certainly needs them in what promises to be a close election. But why doesn't he want them?
Posted by Editor at 05:18 AM
CFR: Preparing Kids For The New World Order
GlobalPolitician.com:America is still preparing our children for life in a unipolar world, and as described by Richard Haass and Fareed Zakaria in separate essays which appeared in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, we are living in an emerging nonpolar world. The ability of the United States to adjust, survive, and prosper in this new world order will depend upon successful preparation of the next generation for the evolution of the international power structure already happening.
Posted by Editor at 05:04 AM
Comments At 4th Annual North America Forum
News Blaze:Remarks As Prepared for Delivery for U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman. The way I see it, this event could not come at a better time. With its focus on enhancing cooperation among the United States, Canada and Mexico -- and on bringing together representatives of our governments and the private sector -- you are helping to develop and achieve real and lasting solutions to some of our world's most significant challenges. And when it comes to the global energy landscape, the challenges we face are certainly massive and pervasive. I don't need to remind you of where we stand.
Posted by Editor at 05:03 AM
Congress Pushes Another Federal Land Grab
Juliet Eilperin / The Washington Post:With little fanfare, Congress has embarked on a push to "protect" as many as a dozen pristine areas this year in places ranging from the glacier-fed streams of the Wild Sky Wilderness here to West Virginia's Monongahela National Forest. By the end of the year this drive could place as much as 2 million acres of unspoiled land under federal control, a total that rivals the wilderness acreage set aside by Congress over the previous five years. The administration has generally favored expanding wilderness acreage, letting Congress determine which areas should be protected and how. Part of this stems from the fact that nearly all of these bills have broad constituencies, which include local faith, business and hunting groups as well as GOP officeholders. And as Bush approaches the end of his second term, he is eyeing opportunities to leave his mark on the nation's landscape.
Posted by Editor at 02:40 AM
Vatican Accuses Jewish Groups on WWII Archives
Philip Pullella / Reuters:Jewish groups have no cause to complain of the Vatican restricting archives on Pope Pius XII, accused by some of ignoring the Holocaust, and should open all their own files, a Vatican official said on Tuesday. Jewish organizations expressed surprise and said there was nothing secretive about their archives. Critics accuse Pius, who reigned from 1939 to 1958, of turning a blind eye to Nazi persecution of the Jews and have asked that more Vatican archives for the period before and during World War II be opened up.
Posted by Editor at 02:07 AM
Sgt. Matthis Chiroux, True American Patriot
YouTube.com:ABS-CBN News.com -- A month after US army reservist Matthis Chiroux publicly refused to deploy to Iraq, the former sergeant on Sunday (Father's Day) set himself up for possible prosecution by failing to report for active duty with his unit in South Carolina. "Tonight at midnight, I may face further action from the army for refusing to reactivate to participate in the Iraq occupation," Chiroux told reporters in Washington.
US Military Journalist Refuses Redeployment
Reclaim The Media:
A U.S. Army soldier who served as a military journalist in Afghanistan, Japan, Europe and the Philippines announced Thursday his intent to refuse orders to deploy to Iraq. "As an Army journalist whose job it was to collect and filter service members' stories, I heard many stomach-churning testimonies of the horrors of the crimes taking place in Iraq," said Sergeant Matthis Chiroux, 24, in an announcement under the rotunda of the House of Representative's Cannon Office Building. "For fear of retaliation from the military, I failed to report these crimes, but never again will I allow fear to silence me. Never again will I fail to stand," he said. Chirioux said he's aware he will likely face prosecution for refusing the deployment, but said, "I choose to remain in the United States to defend myself from charges brought by the Army if they are willing to pursue them. I refuse to participate in the occupation of Iraq."
Posted by Editor at 01:44 AM
June 17, 2008
SBC Caves: No 'Exodus' from California Schools
Lee Duigon / The Chalcedon Foundation:Once again, the Southern Baptist Convention has failed to stand up for Christian children. Once again, the nation's largest Protestant denomination has agreed to leave Christian children in anti-Christian schools. At the SBC's annual meeting last week, the church's Resolutions Committee stifled a resolution calling on the SBC to urge the removal of Christian children from California public schools. The resolution was not allowed out of committee for a vote on the convention floor. The SBC has rejected similar resolutions at recent annual meetings. But this time the resolution addressed specific circumstances in a specific state.
Posted by Editor at 05:47 AM
A Perfect Gift For Independence Day
Chuck Baldwin / The Covenant News:A few years ago, I sadly discovered that it was next to impossible to find our nation's great historic documents together in one volume, so we decided to fix that problem. It took us a full year to research and compile over 50 of our country's greatest historical documents, but we did it! Now, just in time for Independence Day, you can have these great documents at your fingertips in one beautifully bound, easy to read format. These are the documents that gave birth to the greatest free nation on earth. Nowhere else that we know of can you find these documents, complete in one volume, under one title. We call this magnificent collection THE FREEDOM DOCUMENTS.
Posted by Editor at 05:45 AM
Ron 'The Poseur' Paul
Nathanael / Ether Zone:This writer, like millions of others, was caught up and emotionally invested in his candidacy. Ron Paul seemed to be a man who took his oath of office seriously, was fully committed to the rule of law and restoration of the Constitution. He knew that the odds were high, the battle uphill the whole way, the personal costs to be heavy and the scorn of many guaranteed. Supplanting the socialist FedGov tyranny of well over 100 years would be nothing less than a fight to the end, to the last day, to exhaustion. The ending, not suspending, of the Ron Paul campaign came this past week. The MainStreamMedia gave fringe acknowledgement of the man and the message that had struck fear in their hearts and of its controllers.
Posted by Editor at 05:41 AM
Surprise! McCain Sees Results of His First Term
John Lofton / The American View:John McCain has jumped into his time-machine, seen the future, and likes what he saw - which is no surprise since what he saw was all the good things he believes he would have done in his first term as President. No, seriously, he did this, really. In a recent speech, McCain told us some of the things he sees having happened by the year 2013. He saw things he had accomplished and declared them to be very good.
Posted by Editor at 05:36 AM
Linguistic Playtime
Bret McAtee / The Backwater Report:[T]he news reported that California has actually begun to dispense 'marriage' licenses for homosexuals. In the news report it was noted that State officials, being the clever bunch that they are, had changed the licenses which previously had spaces for the names of the 'bride' and 'groom' to provide spaces for the names of 'partner A' and 'partner B.' I thought that odd.
Posted by Editor at 05:26 AM
The March to Folly on the Afghan Border
Eric Margolis / LewRockwell.com:The killing of 11 Pakistani soldiers by US air strikes last week showed that the American-led war in Afghanistan is relentlessly spreading into Pakistan, one of America's oldest, most faithful allies. Pakistan's military branded the air attack "unprovoked and cowardly." However, the unstable government in Islamabad, led by the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), which depends on large infusions of US aid, later softened its protests. This is in good part because the PPP leader, Asif Zardari, is being shielded from judicial corruption investigations through a quiet deal with President Pervez Musharraf and Washington to thwart reinstatement of Pakistan's ousted supreme court justices.
Posted by Editor at 05:05 AM
VA Testing Drugs on War Veterans Like Lab Rats
Audrey Hudson / The Washington Times:The government is testing drugs with severe side effects like psychosis and suicidal behavior on hundreds of military veterans, using small cash payments to attract patients into medical experiments that often target distressed soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, a Washington Times/ABC News investigation has found.
Posted by Editor at 04:07 AM
Bush 'May Convert to Catholicism'
Peter Popham / The Independent:President George Bush was given such a splendid welcome by Pope Benedict XVI that rumours started flying that the President, like Tony Blair before him, was on the verge of converting to Catholicism. It was a Vatican visit such as no other head of state has ever enjoyed. Instead of greeting him, like all previous high-ranking visitors, in the papal library of the Apostolic Palace, the Pope took Mr Bush round the medieval St John's Tower then gave him a tour of the Vatican gardens, culminating in a brief open-air concert by the Sistine Chapel Choir.
Related:
Bush Becoming a Catholic?
By Jim Meyers / NewsMax
President Bush may follow in the footsteps of his brother Jeb and convert to Catholicism, several European papers are reporting. In the wake of the president’s visit to see Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican, Italian newspapers, citing Vatican sources, said Bush was open to the idea of converting to Catholicism.
Posted by Editor at 02:14 AM
Ireland Rejects EU Treaty
Paul Tatlor / Today's Zaman:Ireland's rejection of the European Union's reform treaty plunged the bloc into a new crisis of confidence on Friday but other member states appear determined to plough ahead with ratification. The resounding "No" vote in the only one of the 27 members to put the Lisbon treaty to a referendum highlighted again the EU's inability to make itself attractive to citizens, three years after the French and Dutch rejected the EU constitution.
Related:
EU in Crisis After Irish Vote 'NO' to Reforms
The Herald
Europe was plunged into political turmoil last night after Ireland decisively rejected the Lisbon Treaty. David Cameron, the Conservative leader, insisted the public had clearly said no to further EU integration and called on the "elites in Brussels" to heed its message. However, Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, defiantly insisted the treaty was "not dead" and urged member states to continue the ratification process.
Posted by Editor at 01:25 AM
June 16, 2008
Police Threaten to Arrest Pastor for Anti-Islamic Tract!
Don Boys, Ph.D. / The Covenant News:The police detective who headed the city/county Hate Crimes Division entered the office of a Baptist pastor, sat down and laid a tract (with the church's imprint) titled "Allah Had No Son" on the pastor's desk. (Allah may not have a son but he has three pagan daughters -- al-'Uzza, al-Lat and Manah!) The detective told the pastor that the content of the tract and the church imprint was enough evidence to charge him right there and then. The pastor and church were guilty of a hate crime: telling the truth about Islam.
Posted by Editor at 08:33 AM
Allocating The Hours
Al Cronkrite / The Covenant News:One of my uncles was a well known professor at a large university. He lived into his late 80s and was active when most men of his age were sedentary. His intention was to "wear out rather than rust out". I am trying to appropriate his mantra. In the tedium of my rapidly progressing age I decided it would be a good idea to plan a motorcycle trip around the country doing some interviews in medium sized cities that have large unemployed or underemployed citizens as a result of globalization. I began shopping for a motorcycle and listing potential visits.
Posted by Editor at 08:12 AM
Russert's Death and Cultural Analysis
Bret McAtee / The Backwater Report:"[T]he Hollywood and Media elite are overwhelmingly comprised of people who have no use for Christian notions of God and religion. As such, when a sudden death like this hits them they have no way to handle it. They are a people without God and without hope. When a death of a comparatively young colleague comes suddenly, like Russert’s has, they are brought face to face with their own mortality and like children scared of the night they have to yell out."
Posted by Editor at 08:01 AM
Government and Press/Media Cover-Ups
Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D. / NewsWithViews.com:People are wondering why oil prices continue to rise, not appreciating how the global economy works. As Gary Dorsch (editor of GLOBAL MONEY TRENDS) explains, the Federal Reserve would like to inflate the money supply further and lower interest rates to cushion the U.S. housing market and help relieve pressure on the subprime credit crisis. However, if the Fed cuts interest rates, it risks sending the value of the dollar lower which leads to higher oil prices, which in turn lead to higher food, etc. prices (inflation).
Posted by Editor at 07:41 AM
Agreement Reached on Spy Bill, Immunity
Reuters:White House and congressional negotiators have reached a tentative agreement on a [surveillance] bill that would permit court dismissal of potentially billions of dollars in lawsuits against phone companies, sources familiar with the talks said on Friday. Under the possible accord, a federal court could immunize a company by ruling it had been given written assurances that its participation in the U.S. government's warrantless domestic spying program was legal and authorized by President George W. Bush, one source said.
Posted by Editor at 07:15 AM
Sic Semper Tyrannis
Becky Akers / LewRockwell.com:Poetic justice is rare in this world, which makes what happened recently at Mineta San Jose International Airport all the more satisfying. A passenger suffering one of the Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) unconstitutional searches suddenly remembered the canister of pepper spray in his bag and warned his assailant about it. "The TSA agent took it out and was going to put it into the hazardous waste disposal...'' said Rich Dressler, the airport's spokesman. But that would have been too easy, and anyway there’s the TSA’s tradition of incompetence to uphold. So the screener "accidentally discharged" the thing instead. He took out nine of those happy, helpful Americans the TSA pays to paw us (presumably including himself, though reports weren't clear).
Posted by Editor at 06:29 AM
Texas Corridor Detour: Officials Nix Land Grab
WorldNetDaily:Opponents of a plan to build a Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC) road and rail system from Mexico to Oklahoma received welcome news, as Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) officials announced their strategy would no longer include building new highway routes southwest of Houston, a plan that would have annexed huge tracts of private land. The $184 billion TTC project originally called for a 4,000-mile network of transportation corridors, 1,200 feet wide, to be built across Texas. The plan would have taken about a half million agricultural acres out of private hands, leading to a maelstrom of objections from Texas landowners.
Posted by Editor at 06:28 AM
National Hero Refuses to Report for Active Duty
AFP via Yahoo! News:A month after US army reservist Matthis Chiroux publicly refused to deploy to Iraq, the former sergeant on Sunday set himself up for possible prosecution by failing to report for active duty with his unit in South Carolina. "Tonight at midnight, I may face further action from the army for refusing to reactivate to participate in the Iraq occupation," Chiroux told reporters in Washington. "I stand here today in defense of those who have been stripped of their voices in this occupation, the warriors of this nation...", Chiroux read from a statement as his father Rob, who had travelled to Washington from Alabama to support his son on Father's Day, stood beside him.
Posted by Editor at 05:42 AM
Will Churches Be The Next Gun-Free Zones?
Doug Newman / The Fountain of Truth:A chilling article appeared in Friday's Denver Rocky Mountain News. The headline read "More Churchgoers Carrying Firearms." The opening paragraph read: "Ever since a gunman went on a deadly shooting rampage at a missionary training center in Arvada and a Colorado Springs megachurch, law enforcement and security officials are encountering what they believe is a growing dilemma - people packing firearms when they go to worship." There is no "dilemma" at all for those who can read and think.
Posted by Editor at 05:41 AM
Pro-Life Evangelist Found 'Guilty' for Preaching
Repent America:On Friday, June 13, 2008 in the case of United States of America vs. Michael A. Marcavage, U.S. Magistrate Judge Arnold C. Rapoport found Repent America (RA) director Michael Marcavage "guilty" for preaching to those waiting in line to see the Liberty Bell. Marcavage had been arrested by the National Park Service in October of last year for continuing to preach on public property after refusing to move to a so-called "free speech zone," and then charged under the Code of Federal Regulations. During Repent America’s annual pro-life evangelism tour on October 6, 2007, RA was reaching out to those visiting the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall with the Word of God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ as park rangers continuously harassed the ministry team for refusing to relocate to a "free speech zone".
Posted by Editor at 04:15 AM
At the Foot of the Capitol, Capital Pride
Michelle Boorstein / The Washington Post:Gay Justice Department employees. Gay Orthodox "Christians". Gay antique car collectors. If you were gay and on Pennsylvania Avenue yesterday, there was a booth for you at the Capital Pride festival, which has grown into a merry street party during its 33 years. The festival, which began with the national anthem and an all-lesbian rock band from Maryland, was the finale of Capital Pride, a 10-day affair that began June 6 and included concerts, an interfaith service, a parade and a town hall about the economic standing of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.
Posted by Editor at 03:22 AM
June 14, 2008
'The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder'
John Lofton / The American View Radio:On this program Mr. Vince Bugliosi talks about his new book which has been (surprise!) totally ignored by the major, managed media. He is a well-known Los Angeles attorney and the author of other books including "Helter Skelter," a book about the murders committed by Charles Manson and some of his followers; and he wrote a book about the murder of JFK titled "Reclaiming History: The Assassination Of President John F. Kennedy."
Posted by Editor at 09:45 AM
Our President Is Not a King or An Emperor
Charley Reese / LewRockwell.com:Telling the Truth - The Constitution does not give the president power over any of the topics the candidates like to talk about. The president can't raise or lower taxes; can't legislate on any matter, including Social Security and health care; can't declare war; and can't make treaties or appoint Supreme Court justices without the advice and consent of the Senate. The authors of the Constitution had just finished a long and bitter war with Great Britain, whose king they saw was a tyrant. The last thing they were going to do is give kingly powers to their own chief executive.
Posted by Editor at 09:44 AM
Lawmakers Near Deal on Surveillance Bill
Carrie Johnson / The Washington Post:A bipartisan group of congressional negotiators neared a deal yesterday on controversial wiretapping legislation that could be unveiled as early as next week, according to Capitol Hill sources and civil liberties advocates monitoring the talks. Lawmakers have been wrangling for months over how to extend warrantless surveillance that Bush administration officials consider central to national security. Agreement has proved elusive because of privacy concerns as well as questions about telecommunications companies seeking immunity from lawsuits over their role in helping the government monitor phone calls and e-mail after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Posted by Editor at 09:43 AM
Critics Study Possible Limits to Habeas Corpus Ruling
Michael Abramowitz / The Washington Post:The White House and allies in Congress have begun exploring how to limit the scope of this week's Supreme Court ruling that says suspected terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay have the right to challenge their detentions in federal court. Administration lawyers were digesting the ramifications of a decision they condemned as an unjustified judicial usurpation of federal and congressional prerogatives in waging war. They said the court provided little guidance for the standards judges should use in evaluating the claims of detainees seeking release, and suggested that they might press Congress to spell out new rules.
Posted by Editor at 09:42 AM
Bush meets with Pope
Reuters:Pope Benedict gave George W. Bush an unprecedented welcome in the tranquility of the Vatican Gardens on Friday before the U.S. president resumed his campaign to rally European support for sanctions against Iran. Under tight security, Bush was driven from the bustle of Rome into the idyllic setting. As birds chirped, the two entered a restored medieval tower and held 30 minutes of private talks.
Posted by Editor at 09:41 AM
McCain meets with Pavone
Deal W. Hudson / Catholic.org:The meeting, held at the venerable Union League on South Broad St., is one in an ongoing series being held nationwide by McCain and his Catholic surrogates -- Sen. Sam Brownback, Gov. Frank Keating, and former Vatican ambassador Jim Nicholson. Before his remarks, McCain met privately with Rev. Frank Pavone, president of Priests for Life. Father Pavone's organization promotes voter education and registration throughout the nation, and his "pro-life" advocacy has been crucial in bringing the non-negotiable life issues to the attention of Catholic voters.
Posted by Editor at 09:41 AM
The Government Wrecks the Economy
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. / LewRockwell.com:At this point it is just a waiting game for the National Bureau of Economic Research to declare that we have been in recession. Of course they work from past data; we all do. But the data will show what has been true from months. Investment is falling. Unemployment is rising. The trends are consistent with every single recession on record. All that is bad enough. Maybe your job is secure. Maybe you are out of the stock market. Maybe you aren’t waiting for a return on some real estate investment. The problem that hits everyone is inflation, which is roaring out of control in all the sectors we care about. We have entered the double digits, and if producer prices forecast consumer prices, we are in for tougher times ahead. So what does Washington do? In an act of incredible stupidity, Congress has passed an extension of unemployment benefits.
Posted by Editor at 09:20 AM
Science in the Crosshairs
Lee Duigon / The Chalcedon Foundation:If there's anything in the world today that's still a sacred cow, it's "science." Against the argument, "Scientific studies prove...," there is no winning answer: one can only hope to find a more compelling scientific study that proves the opposite. And yet for all its wide authority, who can even say what "science" is? The word means whatever the speaker wants it to mean.
Related example
Intelligent people 'less likely to believe in God'
By Graeme Paton / London Telegraph:
Professor Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University, said many more members of the "intellectual elite" considered themselves atheists than the national average. A decline in religious observance over the last century was directly linked to a rise in average intelligence, he claimed. But the conclusions - in a paper for the academic journal Intelligence - have been branded "simplistic" by critics. Professor Lynn, who has provoked controversy in the past with research linking intelligence to race and sex, said university academics were less likely to believe in God than almost anyone else.
Posted by Editor at 09:19 AM
Distraught Lady Arrested at Planned Parenthood
ABC 17 TV News:Planned Parenthood Attack: The woman entered
clinic behind a staff member coming to work.
Columbia, Missouri -- A Columbia woman is free after an attack at the local Planned Parenthood this morning. 42-year-old Alexis Keiser violated a restraining order against the business for the second time Wednesday, causing considerable damage and injuring staff. Keiser was released on a summons. The woman entered the Planned Parenthood behind a staff member coming to work. Keiser went unnoticed until she started throwing tables and chairs, ransacking clinic rooms and destroying medical equipment. Three staff members restrained her until police arrived. Two patients were asked to come back later and the clinic carried on business as usual. Keiser is a frequent protestor and has continued to cause problems over the past year. ABC 17 has learned she spent time as a patient at Mid-Missouri Mental Health earlier this year.
Posted by Editor at 09:13 AM
Father Knows Best
Carey Roberts / NewsWithViews.com:Father Knows Best was one of the most widely-viewed and long-running TV shows of the 1950s. True, the program played to a romanticized image of middle-class Americana. But that beats the modern-day alternative of a raging epidemic of sexually-transmitted diseases, safe havens for abandoned infants, and 11-year-old girls wearing thong underwear.
Posted by Editor at 09:12 AM
Pro-Love.org: Drinking The Kool-Aid
Pro-Love.org:Welcome to the official Pro-Love website! Pro-Love is an inclusive initiative purposed to bring people of all faiths, cultures and backgrounds together. The Pro-Love Organization hosts a yearly march in the city of Atlanta that unites: Jew and Muslim, Gay and Straight, Atheist and Christian, and all others... We believe the Pro-Love Movement is part of the continuation of Dr. King’s dream. (Sponsored by Cathedral at Chapel Hill)
Posted by Editor at 01:06 AM
ExxonMobil to Sell Its Gas Stations
Alan Chernoff / CNN.com:Oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp. plans to sell its company-owned gas stations, saying they aren't profitable enough even with gasoline selling at $4 per gallon. The nation's largest oil company, which earned nearly $41 billion last year, says it will sell more than 2,000 stations over the next few years.
Posted by Editor at 12:45 AM
June 13, 2008
Dipped, Rolled, & Deep Fried
Bret McAtee / The Covenant News:God's word teaches us that we are to teach our children in the ways of the covenant. In Deuteronomy 6 the description of that teaching process clearly communicates that this teaching is to be intense, thorough, and deliberate. Clearly God understood that He made us in such a way that if we were to eventually be adults that loved Him and walked in His ways we would have to start as children who were taught to love Him and walk in His ways. Clearly God understood that covenant community survives by passing the tradition down to the children. So what do most American Christians do?
Posted by Editor at 06:23 AM
GOP Is The Mark on The Beast
John Lofton / The American View:The email message begins with an insulting slander -- a strange way to solicit a donation. It is from Sue Gazdo, Director, RNC Membership Services, Republican National Committee. She even ends it "Sincerely" which, I fear, she, alas, is. The insulting, slanderous greeting? The email begins with these words: "Dear Republican."
Posted by Editor at 06:05 AM
Bush: Collect Biometric Data on U.S. Citizens
Jerome R. Corsi / WorldNetDaily:Presidential Directives Establish New Authority With No Congressional Involvement. Two new directives signed by President Bush establish sweeping authority for federal executive departments and agencies to establish a coordinated "framework" to collect and retain biometric data on U.S. citizens identified as "known and suspected terrorists," without requiring public or congressional disclosure of the procedures. The directives also do not specify any procedures for citizens to challenge their inclusion in the biometric database or any resulting consequences, such as restricted travel or additional government surveillance.
Posted by Editor at 06:00 AM
Have Pity For the Bullies
William N. Grigg / Pro Libertate:Despite a consistent string of legal defeats and a resounding loss in the court of public opinion, the State of Texas and its child-abduction auxiliary are continuing their jihad against the families of Eldorado's FLDS community. In doing so the criminals in this matter -- the child "protection" officials who kidnapped the children, and the law enforcement officers who acted as armed accomplices -- are, with the timely help of officials in Utah, making a desperation play for public sympathy by accusing the FLDS of plotting some variety of violent revenge.
Posted by Editor at 05:59 AM
FDLS Raid And The NAFTA Super Highway
Devvy Kidd / NewsWithViews.com:I looked up Eldorado on my DeLorme Atlas, and sure enough, its location is right on the intersections of Hwys 190 and 277, just 10 miles North of major rte, U.S.10. Nearest populated town that I see on the map is San Angelo, Tx. some 60 miles due north of Eldorado..It appears to be right in the path of the planned NAFTA superhighway, which is supposed to connect to a major seaport to be built on the Mexican coast, just across the inlet from Cabo San Lucas at the southern tip of Baja, Calif (Mexican territory).
Posted by Editor at 05:58 AM
Feds Stop Reporting on Foreign Investments in U.S.
Jerome R. Corsi / WorldNetDaily:Foreign investment in the United States is on the rise and key U.S. businesses and infrastructures such as roads and airports are being sold to foreign investors. WND reported earlier on a decision by the Federal Reserve to quit publishing M3 data, a money-supply measure watched closely by economists. Charles McMillion, president and chief economist at MBG Information Services in Washington, D.C., also has expressed concern over the recent decision by the Department of Commerce to discontinue publishing foreign investment data and warned that may forecast an unprecedented surge in foreign investment anticipated by the Bush administration.
Posted by Editor at 05:52 AM
Court Restores Habeas Corpus
Glenn Greenwald / Salon.com:In a major rebuke to the Bush administration's theories of presidential power -- and in an equally stinging rebuke to the bipartisan political class which has supported the Bush detention policies -- the U.S. Supreme Court today, in a 5-4 decision (.pdf), declared Section 7 of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 unconstitutional. The Court struck down that section of the MCA because it purported to abolish the writ of habeas corpus -- the means by which a detainee challenges his detention in a court -- despite the fact that the Constitution permits suspension of that writ only "in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion."
Posted by Editor at 05:12 AM
Court Says Detainees Have Rights, Bucking Bush
The Associated Press:In a stinging rebuke to President Bush's anti-terror policies, a deeply divided Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign detainees held for years at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba have the right to appeal to U.S. civilian courts to challenge their indefinite imprisonment without charges. Bush said he strongly disagreed with the decision - the third time the court has repudiated him on the detainees - and suggested he might seek yet another law to keep terror suspects locked up at the prison camp, even as his presidency winds down.
Posted by Editor at 05:10 AM
Voters Ready For Baldwin
Baldwin2008:Sixty-seven percent (67%) of voters say the federal government is now a special interest group that looks out primarily for its own interests.* An unprecedented number of Americans have concluded that the two major parties have morphed into one entity which exists to advance what is essentailly the same agenda. That is why, this November, more voters will be ready for a candidate who does not represent ‘politics as usual’. That candidate is Chuck Baldwin.
Posted by Editor at 05:07 AM
SC First to Get 'I Believe' License Plates
Seanna Adcox / The Associated Press:South Carolina's lieutenant governor announced Thursday that he is willing to put up $4,000 of his own money so his state can become the first in the nation to issue "I Believe" license plates with the image of a cross and a stained glass window. The legislation allowing the plates was one of several religious-themed bills to became laws in the closing days of the state's legislative session. The bills mean South Carolinians attending local government meetings could soon see the Ten Commandments and the Lord's Prayer posted on walls, pray without fear of being sued and drive home in cars with the "I Believe" plates.
Posted by Editor at 05:00 AM
June 12, 2008
No Preachers As Props, Please
John Lofton / The American View:Whew! That was close, real scary -- I mean yell-out-loud, both-hands-to-the-head-clutch-your-cheeks-and-scream-scary! I am, of course, talking about how, for a while there, it looked like John McCain was not going to meet with Billy Graham! But, we can all breathe easier now that it looks like the two men will get together and that an earlier report about McCain stiffing Graham was, in the words of the Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody, who was told this by a McCain aide: "BOGUS. TOTALLY NOT TRUE" (caps in the original).
Posted by Editor at 07:13 AM
Southern Baptists Remain Wary of McCain
Eric Gorski / AP Religion Writer:Four years ago, the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign hosted a reception for Southern Baptist pastors at a hotel across the street from their annual meeting. The country is electing a president again, the Baptists are meeting again and John McCain's campaign is nowhere to be seen at a gathering of 7,200 people, most of them staunch Republicans. The absence has some Southern Baptists wondering whether the Arizona senator wants their vote.
Posted by Editor at 07:12 AM
Christianity and War
Laurence M. Vance / LewRockwell.com:I would like to speak to you today about Christianity and War. I don't suppose there is anything I write and speak about with more fervor than the biblical, economic, and political fallacies of religious people. This is especially true regarding the general subject of Christianity and war. If there is any group of people that should be opposed to war, torture, militarism, the warfare state, state worship, suppression of civil liberties, an imperial presidency, blind nationalism, government propaganda, and an aggressive foreign policy it is Christians, and especially conservative, evangelical, and fundamentalist Christians who claim to strictly follow the dictates of Scripture and worship the Prince of Peace. It is indeed strange that Christian people should be so accepting of war.
Posted by Editor at 07:11 AM
NAFTA Superhighway and North American Union
Jeff Bennett / Conservative Heritage Times:The NAFTA Superhighway is not a myth, but instead represents a road leading to a troubled future. In an attempt to facilitate and create a North American trade bloc, quickly transporting cheap imported goods from China to America's many Wal-Marts -- our leaders are creating a North American Union and a massive highway -- four football fields wide -- running from Mexico to Canada. The highway promises to import a surplus of goods, destroy any country-side in its path and ease a process of outsourcing American jobs south-of-the-border to cheaper rates of pay and lower environmental standards.
Posted by Editor at 07:09 AM
Out-of-Control FBI Surveillance
Ryan Singel / Wired:Does the FBI track cellphone users' physical movements without a warrant? Does the Bureau store recordings of innocent Americans caught up in wiretaps in a searchable database? Does the FBI's wiretap equipment store information like voicemail passwords and bank account numbers without legal authorization to do so? That's what the nation's Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court wanted to know, in a series of secret inquiries in 2005 and 2006 into the bureau's counterterrorism electronic surveillance efforts, revealed for the first time in newly declassified documents.
Posted by Editor at 06:11 AM
Living Water
Coach Dave Daubenmire / NewsWithViews.com:Whether you want to believe it or not, my heart hurts for those trapped in homosexuality. I really don't know if I can imagine anything worse. Certainly no one would choose to live in that sin, but we know that it is incompatible with Christianity. Telling them that Jesus loves them in their sin is not love. We go to tell them that He came to seek and to save that which is lost. Not everyone will go, and I understand why, but many of us will. It is here that we need your help.
Posted by Editor at 03:52 AM
June 11, 2008
Reward Offered in Deaths of 2 Oklahoma Girls
Charles Montaldo / About.com:Authorities were desperately seeking clues and a motive in the deaths of two young girls whose bodies were found along a rural, dirt Oklahoma road. The two best friends -- Taylor Paschal-Placker, 13, and Skyla Whitaker, 11 -- had walked down that road many times before they were shot to death there Sunday. Their deaths sent shock waves through the small community of Weleetka where less that 1,000 residents rarely lock their doors and windows. Investigators said both girls suffered multiple gunshots to the head and chest. Sexual assault is not suspected, said Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Ben Rosser. The girls were fully clothed and were only missing for 30 minutes.
Posted by Editor at 12:10 PM
Very Inconvenient Facts About Climate Change
Phil Brennan / Ether Zone:"Lord what fools these mortals be" says Puck in Shakespeare's "A Midsummer-Night's Dream." Would that the Bard of Avon were around today. He surely would have looked at the global warming fiasco with the same amused view he had Puck express. He wouldn't be alone. We are made in the image and likeness of God, and that being so, we inherit our sense of humor from the God who made us. Given that fact it's almost a certainty that every time the acolytes of Mr. Gore plot to take nature into their own puny hands and alter its laws with some of their own, Divine laughter rocks Heaven. How else could God react to the absurd notion that mankind can enact laws to over-ride the immutable laws of nature, one of which proposed man-made laws would decree that Carbon Dioxide (CO2) a basic building bloc of all life that living beings exhale thousands of times every day, is, for heaven's sakes, a pollutant.
Posted by Editor at 07:11 AM
A Bible Preference for Homeschooling? Part 3
Dr. Richard A. Jones / American Vision:History shows that nearly every nation has ultimately caved in to a very counter-intuitive (satanic?) temptation: That the only sensible way for 4 and 5-year-old children to begin their life-education journey is that they be ripped away from the care of Mom and Dad at home and turned over to “professional specialists” in state-controlled classrooms.
Posted by Editor at 07:11 AM
'Stimulus' Spending: Making The Dead Parrot Twitch
William N. Grigg / Pro Libertate:Last week, published comments by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert regarding the likelihood of war between the U.S. and Iran caused the price of oil to surge to roughly $138 a barrel -- and the Dow to shed nearly 400 points. Delphic utterances delivered today by Federal Reserve commissary Ben Bernanke, and Timothy Geithner of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York prompted a mild market rally and lent some transient luster to the ever-depreciating greenback. Rarely have we been able to witness, within such a compressed time-frame, such a compelling illustration of the fact that the economic destiny of our respective households is controlled by people over whom we exercise no controlling authority. (Published by The Right Source)
Posted by Editor at 07:10 AM
Treasury Dept. Rolling Out Social Security Debit Card
Lori Montgomery / The Washington Post:No bank account? No problem. Now you can have your Social Security benefits loaded directly onto an electronic debit card that works like a gift card from Uncle Sam. The card is part of a push by the U.S. Treasury Department to encourage the 10.5 million people who still get a paper Social Security check once a month to switch to electronic payments.
Posted by Editor at 06:16 AM
No Excuse for Lack of Bilderberg Coverage
Lee Rogers / Rogue Government:With the U.S. mainstream media failing to cover the 2008 Bilderberg Meeting that took place this past weekend, it has become obvious that they are simply not interested in covering real news. When hundreds of entertainers got together for the 2008 MTV Movie Awards, there were all sorts of articles and press coverage on this event when in reality it has very little significance to the lives of average Americans. With that said, it is incredible that when over a hundred of the most powerful people in Europe and North America got together in Chantilly Virginia for the Bilderberg Meeting, we see a complete media blackout.
Related:
New World Order Gathering Off Limits to Media
News Blaze:
A press corps recently scourged by former White House Press Secretary, Scott McCellan, as being "too deferential," have once again bowed to pressures, and decided not to report the largest gathering of corporate, banking, governmental and royal power ever assembled on American soil this past weekend. Over 140 of the world's most elite powerbrokers gathered in a high class hotel in Chantilly, Virginia, June 5-8, not far from this nation's capital for the annual Bilderberg Conference. First held in 1954, the Bilderberg Group has, until recently, never even acknowledged its own existence and attendees, who even today, will not admit they attended or what they actually discussed.
Posted by Editor at 04:09 AM
The Barack Referendum
Bret McAtee / The Backwater Report:The 2008 election cycle isn't really an election. It is a referendum on Barack Hussein Obama. Consider that all indicators now suggest that being a Republican in this election cycle is like being a white guy at a Nation Of Islam rally. President Bush's disapproval ratings are sky high. The dollar and gas prices are sinking and rising like they are on the opposite ends of some giant global playground teeter totter. The war in Iraq remains unpopular with a large segment of the US population. So here we have the Democrat party breaking records in terms of fund raising, and with the state of the economy and the reality of a major foreign policy blunder by the Bush administration the Democrats can run not only one but two issues that historically have been the means that the out of power party has used to turn the party in power out of office. Given this election scenario the Democrats should be able to run Donald Duck at the top of their ticket and win going away. Yet, though we are still five long months away from the election, current polls indicate that Barack Hussein Obama is only 5 or so percentage points ahead of John "I'm the Democrat in this election you can trust" McCain.
Posted by Editor at 02:39 AM
Baptists Reluctantly Embracing 'Liberal' McCain
Ed Stoddard / Reuters:Some Southern Baptists feel they have no choice but to vote for a liberal in the November US presidential election: presumptive Republican nominee John McCain. "It's basically a choice between a liberal and an ultra-liberal," Jodie Sanders, a Southern Baptist church-goer from Fairfield, Texas, said about the choice between McCain and his Democratic rival Barack Obama. Sanders' pastor, Benny Mize, agreed but said he would ultimately if reluctantly vote for McCain, the Arizona senator who must woo conservative Christians like these men to his candidacy.
Posted by Editor at 01:21 AM
Southern Baptists Elect New Leader
Jacqueline L. Salmon / The Washington Post:The Rev. Johnny M. Hunt, the pastor of an Atlanta area megachurch, was elected yesterday as president of the Southern Baptist Convention, and will take over as head of the nation's largest Protestant denomination as it is struggling with declining membership and decreasing number of baptisms. Hunt beat out five other candidates for the unpaid job, which will transform him into the denomination's public face for the next year. His election, at the SBC's annual meeting in Indianapolis, is seen as a victory for the more fundamentalist wing of the denomination, which led the conservative resurgence that began in the late 1970s and which takes a hard line on the inerrancy of scripture.
Posted by Editor at 01:15 AM
Christian 'Leaders' Meet Privately With Obama
Charles Babington / AP Religion Writer:Barack Obama discussed Darfur, the Iraq war, gay rights, abortion and other issues Tuesday with Christian leaders, including conservatives who have been criticized for praising the Democratic presidential candidate. Bishop T.D. Jakes, a prominent black clergyman who heads a Dallas megachurch, said Obama took questions, listened to participants and discussed his "personal journey of faith." The discussion "went absolutely everywhere," Jakes told The Associated Press, and "just about every Christian stripe was represented in that room."
Posted by Editor at 01:04 AM
Internet Providers Agree to Block Child Porn
Peter Whoriskey / The Washington Post:Three of the nation's major Internet service providers have agreed to block customer access to newsgroups and Web sites that offer child pornography, according to an agreement announced yesterday by the New York attorney general's office. Under the deals with Sprint Nextel, Verizon Communications and Time Warner Cable, which are expected to hold nationwide, the companies agreed to shut off access to newsgroups believed to traffic in child pornography and to remove from their servers any Web sites offering such images.
Posted by Editor at 12:42 AM
June 10, 2008
Throwing the Elephant
Gary DeMar / American Vision:What does it mean to "throw the elephant"? A person responds to an argument by dumping loads of seemingly relevant information on it, calls it a "refutation," and declares himself the winner, all the while hoping his opponent won't notice how faulty much of the information is. The internet has made throwing the elephant a favorite tactic of anti-Christian bigots.
Posted by Editor at 06:10 AM
Lifeway Says: Read With Discernment
Paul Proctor / NewsWithViews.com:At the bottom of the LifeWayChristian Stores website, there are a couple of hyperlinked subjects that need to be addressed. One is titled: Read With Discernment and the other is Third-Party Distribution - the latter of which contains a press release from Mark Scott, LifeWay Christian Stores' vice president - a message that was posted as a result of some problematic publications they were found to be offering for sale early last year.
Posted by Editor at 05:58 AM
Canadian Pastor Fined, Ordered to Remain Silent
LifeSiteNews.com:On Friday, the Alberta Human Rights Commission ordered Alberta pastor Stephen Boissoin to desist from expressing his views on homosexuality in any sort of public forum. He was also commanded to pay damages equivalent to $7,000 as a result of the tribunal's November decision to side with complainant and homosexual activist Dr. Darren Lund. The tribunal has also called for Boissoin to personally apologize to Lund via a public statement in the local newspaper.
Related:
Canadian Government's Anti-Christian Bigots
WorldNetDaily:
The Canadian government has ordered a Christian pastor to renounce his faith and never again express moral opposition to homosexuality, according to a new report. In a decision handed down just days ago in the penalty phase of the quasi-judicial proceedings run by the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal, evangelical pastor Stephen Boisson was banned from expressing his biblical perspective of homosexuality and ordered to pay $5,000 for "damages for pain and suffering" as well as apologize to the activist who complained of being hurt.
Posted by Editor at 05:52 AM
Some Call It 'Counterinsurgency'
Don Bacon / LewRockwell.com:It is widely reported that the US military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, continuing on for over five years, have been "counterinsurgencies" (COIN) led in Iraq by the expert on COIN General David Petraeus. Petraeus has been highly praised for his COIN abilities and soon will be able to expand his influence to Afghanistan, the almost-seven-year quagmire.
Posted by Editor at 05:51 AM
Bilderberg Seeks Bank Centralization Agenda
Lee Rogers / Rogue Government:Fresh off of the 2008 Bilderberg Meeting, it looks as if New York Federal Reserve president Timothy Geithner is set to push a new agenda in the world of central banking that was likely decided upon at Bilderberg. Geithner yesterday, wrote an article in the Financial Times calling for a global regulatory banking framework. In addition, Geithner called for the Federal Reserve to have an instrumental role in this new framework.
Posted by Editor at 05:17 AM
Castrated Media Remains Silent On Bilderberg
Paul Joseph Watson / Prison Planet:The mainstream American corporate press has once again proven itself to be no better than the state controlled media in places like Communist China or Zimbabwe, by steadfastly refusing to print even a mention of over a hundred global power brokers meeting in secret to discuss the future of the planet. Based on this precedent, the Bilderberg Group may find it more convenient to abandon their European roots and permanently confine their meetings to a country where they can count on the silent obedience of the cowardly, castrated and complicit U.S. corporate media.
Related:
The Bilderberg 'Blackout'
Jack Shafer / Slat.com:
About this time each year, the Bilderberg group convenes a weekend conference in a hotel or resort somewhere in North America or Europe in which 120 or so billionaires, bankers, politicians, industrialists, scholars, government officials, influentials from labor and education, and journalists assemble to discuss world affairs in private. This year, the 56th Bilderberg meeting took place over the weekend at the Westfields Marriott in Chantilly, Va., seven miles from Washington Dulles International Airport. As in previous years, Bilderberg critics are berating the mainstream press for observing a "blackout" of a group they believe directs a secret, shadow government.
Posted by Editor at 05:16 AM
Intelligence Capabilities at Risk Amid Impasse?
Eric Lichtblau / Minneapolis Star Tribune:With Congress at an impasse over the government's spy powers, congressional and intelligence officials are bracing for the possibility that the government might have to revert to the old rules of terrorist surveillance, a situation that some officials predict could leave worrisome gaps in intelligence. Though congressional negotiators and the White House say they are hopeful of reaching a deal, officials have been preparing classified briefings for Congress on the intelligence "degradation" they say could occur if there is no deal in place by August.
Posted by Editor at 05:15 AM
Obama Supports National Fingerprint Registry
Heritage Foundation:Sens. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) authored a bill (with 11 co-sponsors, including Sen. Barack Obama) that was incorporated into a housing bill passed by the Senate Banking Committee 19-2 before the Memorial Day recess -- a bill that creates a national fingerprint registry. One of the standards, John Berlau of the Competitive Enterprise Institute says, may "require thousands of individuals working even tangentially in the mortgage and real estate industries -- and not suspected of anything -- to send their prints to the feds."
Posted by Editor at 05:00 AM
The Faith Healer for Our Time
Wesley Pruden / The Washington Times:Barack Obama, without a church since he abandoned the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's congregation of addled bigots, racists and conspiracy nuts, ought to consider starting his own. Having never been inside a church, many of his disciples regard him as the messiah. He's ready to rock. "A light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany," he told a raucous rally of the rapt in Lebanon, N.H., back in January. "You will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Obama." Some of the Obama faithful think it's necessary to amend the Bible. "I cried all night," Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois told Politico, the Capitol Hill newspaper. "I'm going to be crying for the next four years. What Barack Obama has accomplished is the single most extraordinary event that has occurred in the 232 years of the nation's history ... The event is so extraordinary that ... another chapter could be added to the Bible to chronicle its significance."
Posted by Editor at 04:44 AM
Senate Votes to Privatize Its Failing Restaurants
Paul Kane / The Washington Post:Year after year, decade upon decade, the U.S. Senate's network of restaurants has lost staggering amounts of money -- more than $18 million since 1993, according to one report, and an estimated $2 million this year alone, according to another. In a letter to colleagues, Sen. Dianne Feinstein said that the Government Accountability Office found that "financially breaking even has not been the objective of the current management due to an expectation that the restaurants will operate at a deficit annually." But Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), speaking for the group of senators who opposed privatizing the restaurants, said that "you cannot stand on the Senate floor and condemn the privatization of workers, and then turn around and privatize the workers here in the Senate and leave them out on their own."
Posted by Editor at 03:59 AM
June 09, 2008
Rising Energy Prices and the Falling Dollar
Rep. Ron Paul, MD. / Texas Straight Talk:Oil prices are on the minds of many Americans as gas hits $4 a gallon, and continues to surge. How high can prices go? How can we solve these problems? What, or who, is to blame? Part of the answer lies in understanding bubbles and monetary inflation, but especially the Federal Reserve System. The Federal Reserve is charged with controlling inflation through interest rate manipulation, however, many fail to realize that creating money, and therefore inflation, is really its only tool.
Posted by Editor at 02:14 PM
Our Enemy, the Fed: War and Inflation
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. / LewRockwell.com:You can line up 100 professional war historians and political scientists and talk about the twentieth century, and not one is likely to mention the role of the Fed in funding U.S. militarism. And yet it is true: the Fed is the institution that has created the money to fund the wars. In this role, it has solved a major problem that the state has confronted for all of human history. A state without money or a state that must tax its citizens to raise money for its wars is necessarily limited in its imperial ambitions.
Posted by Editor at 08:27 AM
The Depraved Majesty of Totalitarian Democracy
William N. Grigg / Pro Libertate:After four Blackwater mercenaries were killed and their lifeless, butchered bodies publicly displayed by gleeful insurgents in March 2004, George W. Bush was handed one of those "leadership moments" so earnestly lusted after by incorrigible narcissists of his variety. Summoning every resource of eloquence and inspiration at his disposal, Bush -- according to the newly published memoir by Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq -- disgorged what he probably thought was a masterpiece of Churchillian oratory in a videoconference with his national security team and commanding generals in Iraq. (Published by The Right Source)
Posted by Editor at 08:25 AM
Why Obama Won't Win
Charley Reese / LewRockwell.com:Barack Obama may have secured the Democrat nomination for president, but I don't think he will ever see the inside of the White House except as a visitor. He has two things going against him. He's African-American, and he's way too liberal for most Americans. Barring a gargantuan blunder by the Republican candidate, John McCain, those two factors will put Obama on the short end of the vote count.
Posted by Editor at 05:14 AM
Are Christians Selling Their Soul For Promises?
Devvy Kidd / NewsWithViews.com:The alleged final vote count for Marxists Hillary Clinton and Barrack Hussein Obama are: 17,493,836 (C) and 17,535,458 (O). Those totals include the illegals who flocked to Comrade Clinton of the "No woman is an illegal!" fame. What did thirty-five million Americans vote for? Family values we heard so much about from those two? Both Clinton and Obama are fierce advocates of killing unborn babies via abortion. Both of them try to pass off murder as "protecting a woman's reproductive rights" and the "right to choose."
Posted by Editor at 05:13 AM
Baldwin: Antidote to Voter Discontent
Baldwin2008.com:A Zogby poll shows 42% said McCain "will never" get their support. The poll also shows an overwhelming 86% of self-described "very conservative" voters said they are displeased with who the presumptive nominee will be - and 65% of these voters said they are "very unsatisfied". Fertile ground for Chuck Baldwin. This November, the race is up for grabs!
Related:
Baldwin rescheduled to appear on Revolution Broadcasting
Independent Political Report:
Constitution Party presidential nominee Chuck Baldwin was scheduled to be interviewed on Revolution Broadcasting last night, however, he was unable to appear due to the fact he had lost his voice on the campaign trail. According to IPR reader "inDglass," Baldwin has been rescheduled for Tuesday, June 16, "most likely at the same time" (7:30 p.m., Eastern).
Posted by Editor at 05:12 AM
Dabney on the Requirement of Christian Ministry
Chalcedon Blog:[T]he first great requisite for the Christian minister is fervent piety; and that to cultivate this should be the chief aim of his training; that there is no royal road to mental improvement, but the faculties are only improved by honest and diligent labor; that the doctrines, government and mode of worship of the Presbyterian Church in the United States compose the wisest and most scriptural set of religious institutions known to us; that the sacred Scriptures, interpreted according to the fair and customary sense of human language, all philosophy, all speculations, and all inferences must implicitly bend; and that the Holy Spirit, to be obtained by constant prayer and holy living, is the only sufficient interpreter of God's word.
Posted by Editor at 05:01 AM
June 07, 2008
SBC Urged to Support 'Exodus' from Calif. Schools
Lee Duigon / The Chalcedon Foundation:Now that state law requires California public schools to promote a positive view of homosexuality, will the Southern Baptist Convention finally proclaim it's time for Christian children to be removed from those schools? Once again, Bruce Shortt and Dr. Voddie Baucham have submitted a resolution to the SBC's annual meeting, scheduled for June 10–11 in Indianapolis, Indiana—this time specifically calling for Southern Baptist parents to withdraw their children from California's public schools. The SBC is the most numerous Protestant denomination in the United States and is represented in California by half a million members in 2,000 churches.
Posted by Editor at 08:32 AM
Legislating Tyranny
Paul Craig Roberts / LewRockwell.com:The George W. Bush administration responded to the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon with an assault on U.S. civil liberty that Bush justified in the name of the "war on terror." The government assured us that the draconian measures apply only to "terrorists." The word terrorist, however, was not defined. The government claimed the discretionary power to decide who is a terrorist without having to present evidence or charges in a court of law.
Posted by Editor at 08:31 AM
Israeli Minister Threatens to Attack Iran
BBC News:A top Israeli official has said that if Iran continues with its alleged nuclear arms programme, Israel will attack it. Speaking to Yediot Ahronot newspaper, Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz said sanctions on Iran were ineffective. Mr Mofaz is one of three deputy prime ministers and the transport minister. Earlier this week, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Iran's nuclear programme must be stopped by what he termed all possible means.
Posted by Editor at 08:27 AM
Franklin Graham: Quisling Pawn for Red China
The Charlotte Observer / News Wire Service:Graham Discourages 'Illegal' Evangelizing in China: Despite fierce criticism from some Christian activists, N.C.-based "evangelist" Franklin Graham said he's sticking by his opposition to any "illegal" missionary work during this summer's Beijing Olympics. "I would be against any groups that would be coming in and encouraging people to break Chinese law," said Graham, who has no plans to attend the Olympics or send any missionaries.
Related:
'Evangelist' Franklin Graham Opposes
Missionary Work at Beijing Olympics
The Associated Press:
BEIJING -- The son of American evangelist Billy Graham said he is opposed to missionary work at this summer's Beijing Olympic Games. Franklin Graham, also an evangelist, was speaking to reporters during a visit to Beijing for meetings with the Communist Party-controlled Protestant church movement. While some Christian groups have said they plan to proselytize during the August games, Graham said he was against that because Chinese law does not permit such actions. "I would not support any illegal activity at all," Graham said.
Posted by Editor at 05:37 AM
Duty and Honor
Dr. R.C. Sproul / Ligonier.org:Today, the word honor has all but disappeared from the English language. I speak about honor because the dictionary lists the term honor as the chief synonym for the word integrity. My concern in this article is to ask: "What is the meaning of integrity?" If we use the pedestrian definitions given to us by lexicographers, such as we find in Webster's dictionary, we read several entries. In the first instance, integrity is defined as "uncompromising adherence to moral and ethical principles." Second, integrity means "soundness of character." Third, integrity means "honesty." Fourth, integrity refers to being "whole or entire." Fifth and finally, integrity means to be "unimpaired in one’s character."
Posted by Editor at 03:29 AM
Should We Teach Evolution?
John UpChurch / Answers in Genesis:In lieu of our normal Friday feedback, we thought a response to a recent New York Times piece was in order. The article appears to be an effort to foment outrage against teaching the "strengths and weaknesses" of evolution in Texas schools, framing the creation-evolution controversy as a battle over censorship. That is, creationists (and any who believe that the universe is created) are out to keep children from hearing about Darwin’s dangerous idea. However, when we take a closer look at the Times’ arguments, we again find a basic lack of understanding concerning the issue over origins.
Posted by Editor at 02:35 AM
June 06, 2008
Remembering D-Day
Chuck Baldwin / The Covenant News:Back on June 6, 1994, I was privileged to be invited to speak at the 50th anniversary of D-Day celebration at the National Cemetery, Naval Air Station, Pensacola, Florida. Today's column is an edited copy of that address. If December 7, 1941, was the day that would live in infamy then June 6, 1944, was the day that would live in infinity. On this date fifty years ago the invasion of France by Allied Forces began under the code name, "Operation Overlord."
Posted by Editor at 05:55 AM
John Lofton on God, Government & Politics
John Lofton / The American View:Exclusive Interview: Libertarian Prez Candidate Bob Barr on God & government, his atheist mentor Ayn Rand, abortion, homosexuality, Terri Schiavo - not his favorite subjects. These topics, as I say, are NOT Bob Barr's favorite topics of conversation, as you will hear. And this, in my judgment, is what is wrong with modern Libertarianism - it is a Godless, bread-alone philosophy which, because it ignores God, is predestined to failure.
Posted by Editor at 05:54 AM
Congress Passes $3 Trillion Budget
Lori Montgomery / The Washington Post:Congress yesterday gave final approval to a $3 trillion spending plan that proposes increases for domestic programs such as education, energy and veterans benefits -- and marks the first time in eight years that lawmakers have managed to adopt a budget in an election year. Under the budget framework adopted yesterday, congressional leaders would increase spending in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 by about $21 billion over Bush's request, with total spending on government agencies expected to top $1 trillion for the first time. The extra funds would go to education and renewable energy programs, as well as transportation infrastructure.
Posted by Editor at 05:52 AM
When to Quit: Guidelines
Gary North / LewRockwell.com:Hillary Clinton is bowing out of her 2008 race for the Presidency. She can't seem to make her departure, so she is making moves toward making her departure. I vowed 15 years ago not to write much about her, and I haven't. I thought she got a bum steer from a bum husband, who treated her about as badly as any man can treat his wife without physically brutalizing her. So, I did my best to ignore her. She is not easy to ignore.
Posted by Editor at 05:19 AM
What Makes McCain Tick?
Robert Scheer / Truthdig:Will the real John McCain stand up? Actually, I don't expect him to, now that he is the Republican presidential candidate, pandering to the irrationalities that drive his party. Nor is it likely that the fawning mass media will pressure him to the point of clarity. But I remain genuinely confused as to what makes him tick.
Posted by Editor at 04:14 AM
Hollow Men
Dr. Eugene Narrett, Ph.D / NewsWithViews.com:We mention initially that freshly prominent hollow man, B. H. Obama, a collectivist terror that will 'enrage' feminists (part of his task), further fracturing and fouling already broken family structures and perverted gender roles; and serve to elect Senator McCain. It is overkill: feminists need no cause to be enraged; it is the medium in which they 'live' and grows with their empowerment, per the script. They marry the god-State.
Posted by Editor at 03:30 AM
Secret Plan to Keep Iraq Under US Control
Patrick Cockburn / The Independent:A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November.
Posted by Editor at 02:50 AM
Bush Inflated Threat from Iraq, Report Says
Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus / The Washington Post:President Bush and top administration officials repeatedly exaggerated what they knew about Iraq's weapons and its ties to terrorist groups as the White House pressed its case for war against Iraq, the Senate intelligence committee said yesterday in a long-awaited report.
Related:
Bush Overstated Evidence on Iraq, Senators Report
By Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane / The New York Times:
WASHINGTON -- A long-delayed Senate committee report endorsed by Democrats and some Republicans concluded that President Bush and his aides built the public case for war against Iraq by exaggerating available intelligence and by ignoring disagreements among spy agencies about Iraq’s weapons programs and Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaeda.
Posted by Editor at 02:16 AM
Bush's War
Frontline / PBS:From the horror of 9/11 to the invasion of Iraq; the truth about WMD to the rise of an insurgency; the scandal of Abu Ghraib to the strategy of the surge -- for seven years, FRONTLINE has revealed the defining stories of the war on terror in meticulous detail, and the political dramas that played out at the highest levels of power and influence.
Posted by Editor at 02:10 AM
Teddy The Tumor
Alan Stang / Ether Zone:The announcement of Ted Kennedy's cancer problem launched a typhoon of hosannas -- especially in government -- singing the qualities and accomplishments of the man from Taxachusetts, including comments by el presidente Jorge W. Boosh, John "the McChurian Candidate" McCain, and a typically maudlin performance by the only senator who has been there longer, Robert Byrd. What do we know about this man? You find out what someone is made of under stress. By now, Chappaquiddick is almost forty years old. Few Americans remember it. What happened? Teddy and his pals were boozing and maybe fornicating with some ladies not their wives. Teddy drove off a bridge with one of them, Mary Jo Kopechne. Was he drunk? The car turned upside down in the water.
Posted by Editor at 02:04 AM
Video Shows Bystanders Ignore Hit-and-Run Victim
Stephen Singer / The Associated Press:In Hartford, Connecticut, a 78-year-old man is tossed like a rag doll by a hit-and-run driver and lies motionless on a busy city street as car after car goes by. Pedestrians gawk but appear to do nothing. One driver stops briefly but then pulls back into traffic. A man on a scooter slowly circles the victim before zipping away. The chilling scene -- captured on video by a streetlight surveillance camera -- has touched off a round of soul-searching in Hartford, with the capital city's biggest newspaper blaring "SO INHUMANE" on the front page and the police chief lamenting: "We no longer have a moral compass."
Posted by Editor at 01:27 AM
June 05, 2008
Thumb Suckers
Coach Dave Daubenmire / NewsWithViews.com:A coach and pastor are kindred spirits. They both deal with people, exhort people to be more than they think they can be, and take the heat during bad times. A good Pastor/Coach is not afraid of criticism. Some of my greatest growth has occurred when a friend was honest with me. God bless the real shepherds. You are heroes! I hear from them often. Several encouraged me to write this piece. But the hireling is a different story. He is more dangerous than the Devil because he gives the sheep a sense of security that does not exist. Sadly, hirelings fill many of our pulpits. It is to them that I write.
Posted by Editor at 11:49 AM
Self-Hating Father Pfleger Gets Disciplined
Chris Ortiz / Chalcedon Blog:An extremely offensive display of anti-white preaching--posted on YouTube--has gotten Father Michael Pfleger in hot water with Francis Cardinal George who temporarily removed Pfleger from his post at St. Sabina Roman Catholic Church in Chicago. Father Pfleger, who feigns sounding like a Black preacher, mocked Hillary Clinton for her white sense of entitlement and shock that an almost Black man was taking the presidency from her.
Posted by Editor at 11:42 AM
Judge Hot About 'Sexual Orientation' Clause
Jay F. Marks / NewsOK.com:Suggested changes regarding language on "sexual orientation" in the state's Code of Judicial Conduct are inconsistent with the beliefs of Oklahomans, according to an Oklahoma County judge. "These policies are not based on laws enacted by Congress or the State Legislature, but on proposals of the liberal, pro-homosexual American Bar Association," District Judge Bill Graves wrote in a letter dated April 8 to Oklahoma Bar Association members. "Sexual orientation" would protect pedophiles, polygamists and homosexuals who practice anal sodomy, defined in state law as "the detestable and abominable crime against nature," the judge wrote. "Since homosexual groups cannot succeed in persuading the Legislature to provide such protection, they are making an end run around the constitutional lawmaking processes," Graves wrote.
Posted by Editor at 09:28 AM
Communist China gets U.S. Security Help
Bill Gertz / The Washington Times:The Bush administration has approved the export of sensitive equipment and expertise to China's military and police forces to bolster security at the Beijing Olympics, according to a number of private and public interviews and documents. The support includes security and military equipment that is restricted for export under the Export Administration Act, prompting some critics of the policy to question its legality.
Posted by Editor at 07:37 AM
The Fed's War on the Middle Class
Mark Thornton / Ludwig von Mises Institute:Multimillionaires like Hillary Clinton and Lou Dobbs butter their bread by defending middle-class Americans. They are correct about the problem, but their suggested remedies -- protectionism, welfare, regulation, subsidy, and tax reform -- would only make the problem worse. The middle class actually faces many important economic problems, but in reality they boil down to three current problems and one that looms large in our future. All four problems stem from a common cause -- the Federal Reserve. History tells us that we either root out this cause or face economic demise.
Posted by Editor at 07:15 AM
The Enemy-Combatant Attack on Freedom
Jacob G. Hornberger / LewRockwell.com:Since an attack on Iran could result in heightened "war-on-terrorism" emergencies here in the United States, this would be a good time to review the issue of "enemy combatants," especially as the concept applies to American citizens. To analyze the critical importance of the "enemy-combatant" doctrine, we will examine the cases of two people who were incarcerated as "enemy combatants" – Jose Padilla, an American citizen, and Ali al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar. Both were taken into custody on American soil, labeled "enemy combatants," and incarcerated by the U.S. military.
Posted by Editor at 06:44 AM
McCain: I'd Secretly Spy on Americans Too
Ryan Singel / Wired:If elected president, Senator John McCain would reserve the right to run his own warrantless wiretapping program against Americans, based on the theory that the president's wartime powers trump federal criminal statutes and court oversight, according to a statement released by his campaign Monday. McCain's new tack towards the Bush administration's theory of executive power comes some 10 days after a McCain surrogate stated, incorrectly it seems, that the senator wanted hearings into telecom companies' cooperation with President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program, before he'd support giving those companies retroactive legal immunity.
Posted by Editor at 06:43 AM
'Media Reform' Targets Conservatives
Cliff Kincaid / Accuracy In Media:Led by a Muslim Democrat, members of the Federal Communications Commission, and Bill Moyers, Phil Donahue, and Dan Rather, a well-funded campaign to move the media in a more left-wing direction will gather in Minneapolis from June 6-8. Thousands of “progressive” activists are expected to attend. Accuracy in Media will cover the event.
Posted by Editor at 04:03 AM
DC Police to Set Roadblock Checkpoints
Michael Neibauer and Bill Myers / The Examiner:D.C. police will seal off entire neighborhoods, set up checkpoints and kick out strangers under a new program that D.C. officials hope will help them rescue the city from its out-of-control violence. Under an executive order expected to be announced, police Chief Cathy L. Lanier will have the authority to designate "Neighborhood Safety Zones." At least six officers will man cordons around those zones and demand identification from people coming in and out of them. Anyone who doesn’t live there, work there or have “legitimate reason” to be there will be sent away or face arrest, documents obtained by The Examiner show.
Posted by Editor at 03:03 AM
Texas Backs Off from Toll Road Agenda
TheNewsPaper.com:Responding to an increasing number of protests and other displays of public opposition, the Texas Transportation Commission agreed to scale back the most unpopular elements of its toll road agenda. The commission adopted a "minute order" setting forth guidelines governing all future tolling contracts. The commission may modify the order at any time.
Related:
Texas DOT Slammed by Sunset Panel
TheNewsPaper.com:
The Texas state legislature's Sunset Advisory Commission released a report yesterday slamming the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) and its high-level focus on toll financing. In a blistering 157-page report, the commission condemned the agency's attitude and argued for shakeup in the way the department does business.
Posted by Editor at 03:02 AM
Climate Bill Stalls in Senate After Dispute
The Associated Press:A Senate debate over a bill to combat global warming came to a halt Wednesday after Republicans demanded a reading of the 492-page document because of a partisan dispute over judicial nominations. The partisan squabble spilled over to a disagreement over how many amendments should be allowed, threatening to cut short likely consideration of the legislation once it gets back on track.
Posted by Editor at 02:51 AM
Army: Sun Not Man Causing Climate Change
Noah Shachtman / Wired:The Army is weighing in on the global warming debate, claiming that climate change is not man-made. Instead, Dr. Bruce West, with the Army Research Office, argues that "changes in the earth's average surface temperature are directly linked to ... the short-term statistical fluctuations in the Sun's irradiance and the longer-term solar cycles."
Posted by Editor at 02:49 AM
June 04, 2008
John Lofton interviews Bob Barr
John Lofton / The American View Radio:Exclusive interview by John Lofton with Libertarian Presidential Candidate Bob Barr on God, government, his atheist mentor Ayn Rand, abortion, homosexuality, Terri Schiavo -- not his favorite subjects.
Posted by Editor at 04:20 AM
What Should Christians Do When Under Oppression?
Gary DeMar / American Vision:How should Christians respond to reform efforts under political regimes where they have no rights, no freedom of religion, speech, press, or assembly? For the most part, prior to the fall of most of Eastern Europe’s Communist governments and the former Soviet Union, Christians behind the iron curtain had little say in the way their nation operated. This was true of nearly all citizens. Christians often were specifically signaled out for persecution.
Posted by Editor at 04:19 AM
Fanatical Yankee Utopians
Thomas J. DiLorenzo / LewRockwell.com:In his brilliant LRC article, "The Yankee Problem in America," Clyde Wilson describes how America came to be ruled by a peculiar sect of religious, statist fanatics that originated in New England and became known as "Yankees." Not all Northerners are/were "Yankees," Professor Wilson wrote, for many are obviously fine people. He was referring to "that peculiar ethnic group descended from New Englanders, who can be easily recognized by their arrogance, hypocrisy, greed, lack of congeniality, and penchant for ordering other people around." They "have never given up the notion that they are the chosen saints whose mission is to make America, and the world, into the perfection of their own image." Today we would call them "neocons" or "Hillary Clinton supporters."
Posted by Editor at 04:18 AM
The Child Snatchers Win (Updated)
William N. Grigg / Pro Libertate:According to police in Austin, Texas, Billy Dan Carroll spent the better part of the past three decades assaulting and raping dozens of victims -- from girls as young as two years of age to adult women whom he lured to his home and then drugged into unconsciousness. His alleged acts ("alleged" because Mr. Carroll has yet to be convicted of a crime) are reportedly documented on videotapes kept in his possession. Austin police Sgt. Brian Lloyd, a 22-year veteran child abuse investigator, has rarely seen the like of Mr. Carroll, who he describes as "the worst of the worst.... Several of these children were abused multiple times." One six-year-old girl was allegedly raped twenty-three times.
Posted by Editor at 04:14 AM
Case Against Sect May Not Be Over
David A. Fahrenthold / The Washington Post:The state of Texas's case against members of a polygamist sect is damaged but not dead, legal experts said -- even after a series of court defeats that ended with the return of hundreds of children who had been seized at the group's compound. On Tuesday, as members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints continued to pick up their children from foster homes, some in Texas said that the court rulings proved the state had overreacted when it removed more than 400 children from their parents.
Posted by Editor at 04:02 AM
Educating The Enemy
Patrick Wood / NewsWithViews.com:Do we have a responsibility to shell out some $8 billion per year in taxpayer money to educate over 60,000 communist Chinese students in American universities? That is, the very students who return to China to take jobs, factories and even entire industries away from American workers? Apparently so, according to the U.S. State Department division that panders to wannabe Chinese students. In a 2005 speech given by Donald Bishop, attached to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, China, Bishop eagerly told prospective students how to game the American educational system for an essentially free education at taxpayer expense.
Posted by Editor at 03:46 AM
June 03, 2008
In Praise of Marriage and Parenting
Chuck Baldwin / The Covenant News:How is it that when it comes to leadership expectations, most people ignore a man's leadership at home? It is almost as if parental leadership is a complete non-factor in judging a person's fitness for anything. I am only saying that real leadership is established and proven in the home first. Yet, it does not appear that too many people give parental leadership a second thought anymore. Perhaps this explains much as to what has gone wrong in our society.
Posted by Editor at 09:31 AM
Sowing More Big Government with the Farm Bill
Ron Paul / Texas Straight Talk:Recently Congress sent the latest Farm Bill to the president. The bill features brand new federal programs, expansion of existing subsidies, more food stamps and more foreign food aid. This bill hits the taxpayer hard, while at the same time ensuring food prices will remain elevated. The president vetoed the bill, citing concerns over its costs and subsidies for the wealthy in a time of high food prices and record farm income. Nevertheless, this over-reaching, government-expanding Farm Bill will soon be law.
Posted by Editor at 09:26 AM
How Academic Guilds Police Higher Education
Gary North / LewRockwell.com:The textbook must conform to certain standards. Those ideas within the guild that are considered representative touchstones of the guild's positions must not be violated. These ideas are used to screen textbooks. In economics, the universal screening rule is affirmation of central banking in general and the Federal Reserve System in particular. The editors pay close attention to this chapter. . . . This chapter serves the economics guild in much the same way that the local altar to the emperor's genius served Rome. Every adult resident of the empire had to publicly worship the State by placing a pinch of incense on this altar.
Posted by Editor at 04:52 AM
The Cause That Won't Go Away
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. / LewRockwell.com:The first conference hosted by the Mises Institute was on the gold standard. How well I can recall the names we were called in Washington, DC. Reactionaries, Neanderthals, irrelevant to the modern debate, worshippers of a barbarous relic, throwbacks, pipe dreamers, and the rest: all designed to make us all shut up about the most important issue in modern political life.
Posted by Editor at 04:51 AM
Gene Epstein on Gold, the Fed, and Money
Gene Epstein / EconTalk:Gene Epstein, Barron's economics editor, talks to EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the virtues of the gold standard relative to fiat money. Epstein argues that privately issued money, backed by gold, would lead to an economy with much greater price stability and fewer and milder recessions.
Posted by Editor at 04:50 AM
It's Costly to Be the World's Sheriff
Christopher Preble / The Providence Journal:Worried that double digit increases in military spending might soon come to an end, some commentators have concocted a scheme for ensuring that the nation's defense budget never falls below a certain percentage of gross domestic product. Former Missouri Sen. James Talent and others at the Heritage Foundation would establish "a rule that the core defense budget should never sink below 4 percent of the nation's GDP (gross domestic product)." Gary Schmitt at the American Enterprise Institute would see Heritage's offer and raise it to 5 percent of GDP. The editors of The Wall Street Journal recently proposed spending between 5 and 6 percent. The overarching question for Americans should not be whether we should spend more on defense, but rather why we spend so much.
Posted by Editor at 04:31 AM
The Counterfeit Treaty
James Love / Business News:Today in Geneva Switzerland, at an undisclosed location, the US government, the European Commission, Japan and a handful of other countries will meet in a secret negotiation on a new treaty. The working name is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a name that masks the much broader subject matter, and one that was deliberately chosen to intimate and discourage politicians from expressing opposition to provisions that undermine civil rights and privacy, and which many say will change the substantive rights the public has to use copyrighted works or inventions. What member of Congress or Parliament wants to be accused of protecting counterfeiters?
Posted by Editor at 04:26 AM
The Boy Scouts' Free-Speech Fight
Sean Scully / TIME:The City of Philadelphia wants the Boy Scouts to be prepared -- prepared, that is, to change their views on homosexuality or get out of the city-owned building they have occupied for 80 years. "As a city government we cannot allow discrimination in the delivery of services on public property; that is the issue," said Mayor Michael Nutter. "The Boy Scouts, they have some options here — they can change their policy, they can pay full-market rent, or they cannot be on public property."
Posted by Editor at 03:34 AM
Leader Says Southern Baptists Must Change
Bob Smietana / The Tennessean:The Rev. Frank Page has a warning for Southern Baptists. Change or die. The outgoing Southern Baptist Convention president predicts that unless drastic measures are taken, more than half of the Southern Baptist churches will die in the next two decades. "If we don't start paying attention to the realities … by the year 2030, we will be proud to have 20,000 rather than 44,000 Southern Baptist churches,'' Page said. Page believes the 16.2 million-member convention faces the same challenges that bedeviled other Protestant denominations -- lower birthrates, aging demographics and a culture increasingly hostile to Christianity.
Posted by Editor at 01:53 AM
June 02, 2008
Judge: Return FLDS Kids Now
The Associated Press:A Texas district judge on Monday ordered the immediate return of more than 400 children taken from a polygamist sect's ranch, bringing an abrupt end to one of the largest custody cases in U.S. history. Texas District Judge Barbara Walther, responding to a state Supreme Court ruling last week, signed an order filed by attorneys for the parents and Child Protective Services, allowing the parents to begin picking their children up from foster care facilities around the state on Monday. The first emotion-filled reunions came Monday afternoon, as parents trickled into foster care facilities to pick up their children.
Posted by Editor at 05:42 PM
The Need for Consensus
Al Cronkrite / The Covenant News:Using scripture from Genesis 1:28 (take dominion) and Matthew 28:18-20 (make disciples of all nations) American Vision has a new initiative called Mandate 28. It seeks a thousand year vision that will create Christian "Servanthood Dominion" over God's creation by teaching Christians to be salt and light and by educating them in Christian History, Apologetics, Ethics, and Eschatology. Good vision.
Posted by Editor at 06:25 AM
A True Memorial
Charley Reese / LewRockwell.com:OK, here is my post-Memorial Day gripe. Memorial Day is not the Fourth of July, Flag Day, Armed Forces Day or Veterans Day. It is a day to remember the war dead. You don't do that with picnics, brass bands, parades, pompous speeches and hype for the current war. "Memorial" and "celebration" are not synonyms. The day was intended for visiting cemeteries, not beaches or amusement parks. The great cheapening of the event began some decades ago when the federal-employee unions persuaded Congress to make federal holidays into three-day weekends. It was a crass decision that cheapened the concept of patriotism.
Posted by Editor at 06:21 AM
The Grand Illusion: The Two Party Charade
David Brownlow / Ether Zone:It is hard to believe we will soon be suffering, once again, through the indignity of another presidential election. We should be used to this swindle by now, as the same thing happens every four years. It is the old "right is good, left is bad" version of the classic good cop/bad cop scam. And the American breed of lapdog known as "the conservative" falls for it every time.
Posted by Editor at 06:15 AM
The Global Economy and School-to-Work
Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D. / NewsWithViews.com:One of the power elite's most powerful control devices is to get nations in debt, as they did with Britain via the Bank of England in the late 17th century. When the American colonies started printing their own money in the 1760s, Britain began a campaign against them (e.g., Stamp Act). This resulted in the American Revolution, which caused the power elite to plot how it could destroy this new independent republic. Philip Freneau in AMERICAN MUSEUM (July 1792) explained that the power elite's "grand nostrum" was the creation of debt "made as big as possible, as perpetual as possible, in as few hands as possible."
Posted by Editor at 04:25 AM
Martial Law on the Installment Plan
William N. Grigg / Pro Libertate:A a forceful and principled defender of individual liberty, George Mason was the irritant in the constitutional oyster that eventually created the pearl we call the Bill of Rights. During the June 14 session of the convention, Mason -- ably assisted by his fellow Anti-Federalist Patrick Henry -- conducted a critical examination of the congressional power to call out the state militias to enforce the laws of the union. Their eyes, keenly perceptive of the potential for government to abuse any powers alloted to it, discerned in the womb of that delegated power an embryonic rough beast that could eventually destroy any semblance of liberty in America.
Posted by Editor at 03:10 AM
Ralph Reed to McCain: You Can Fool the Sheeple
Jonathan D. Salant / Bloomberg:John McCain should stop seeking endorsements from evangelical pastors and instead appeal directly to their church members, said Ralph Reed, the former Christian Coalition executive director. ``John McCain doesn't need to be standing at a bank of microphones next to a particular leader,'' Reed said in an interview on Bloomberg Television's ``Political Capital With Al Hunt,'' to be broadcast today. ``My advice would be stay away from endorsements and stick to the issues.''
Posted by Editor at 02:33 AM
Obama Quits Church Over Inflammatory Comments
Derek Kravitz and Keith B. Richburg / The Washington Post:Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and his wife, Michelle, announced that they have left their longtime Chicago church, Trinity United Church of Christ, after racially charged comments by a visiting pastor last week dragged them into yet another controversy over religion and race. The resignation came Friday in a letter Obama sent to the church's head pastor, the Rev. Otis Moss III. The Democrat presidential candidate said he and his wife had been discussing leaving the church since his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., made a theatrical and controversial April 28 appearance at the National Press Club.
Posted by Editor at 02:29 AM
June 01, 2008
Wisdom the Principal Thing
Christopher J. Ortiz / The Chalcedon Foundation:The Scripture declares, "[T]he children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light" (Luke 16:8). The Greek term for wiser used here is phronimos, and it means "prudent, sensible, and practically wise." It's the same word used in Matthew 7:24 when our Lord considers a man wise "which built his house upon a rock." It's this practical wisdom that is often lacking among the "children of light," and it's due largely to the fact that we don't accept the created order in the same way as the "children of this world." Whereas the non-Christian will build his house upon a rock because it will simply better resist a storm, the Christian will build his house upon the sand and then pray for God to stop the wind.
Posted by Editor at 01:39 PM
Know the Enemy
Paul Hein / LewRockwell.com:In the parable, the master was not confused when his servants reported that weeds had sprung up with the wheat. He knew he had sown good seed. "This is the work of an enemy," he declared, and, of course, he was right. Today, our society is riddled with weeds. Have you bought gasoline lately? Or food – especially rice? What’s the value of your home? Is it holding its own? Have you taken a trip by plane recently? Can you smoke in your favorite tavern? Are you being photographed at the bank, the supermarket, the department store? Does the lady in Bombay who is helping you get your cable-modem up and running want to know your social security number? Are your children prohibited from saying a prayer at school? Can you be arrested for saying something that offends a person belonging to some minority group? If you’re a landlord, can you discriminate between prospective tenants?
Posted by Editor at 01:35 PM
Atheism and the Religious Need
Joel McDurmon / American Vision:Once the atheist throws out the Pearl of Great Price of the kingdom of God, what fills the void? Does lack of faith make one vulnerable to dangerous ideologies that mimic the spiritual needs we are created with? To ask the question is to answer it. Fred Schwarz is an influential Christian speaker and writer and a noted anti-Communist of previous generations who has dealt continually with the issues of atheism and Communism for decades. We have seen that these two sets of beliefs form a nearly inseparable pair as they resurface throughout history, most recently in the rantings of author Michael Chapman which I covered in a post on my blog. Why does atheism seem to produce communistic ideas in history?
Posted by Editor at 01:31 PM