Is Britain Dying?

Hat Tip to Gates of Vienna and Beer N Sandwiches for the following video showing the suicidal depravity of the multiculturalism and political correctness that are destroying Great Britain and other western nations. In Britain we see a nation that has lost the moorings of its Christian heritage, and forgotten its own rich history and the patrimony it has shared with the world.

Having had a maternal grandfather who was English, and having spent many beautiful summer days on the North Sea coast of Norfolk, it is shocking how quickly this disease of self-loathing and self-destruction has permeated British life. One would like to think that a new government would be enough to change the course of things. Unfortunately, the problem is not merely one of policy, but of spirit. Let us pray that God in His mercy will change hearts and save a nation that has given the world so much.

An eleventh century Archbishop of Canterbury offered a sure path for the people of his time and ours. In The Proslogian St. Anselm wrote:

I will seek you by desiring you, and desire you in seeking you.
I will find you by loving you, and love you in finding you.
I praise and give thanks to you that you have made me in your image,
so that I can remember you, think of you, love you,
But so darkened is your image in me by the smoke of my sins,
that it is useless unless you restore it.
I do not seek, O Lord, to search out your depths, but only in some measure to understand your truth, which my heart believes and loves.
I do not seek to understand so that I may believe, but believe that I may understand.
For this I know to be true: that unless I first believe I shall not understand.

Evangelicals Warn Against Romney On Ticket

From The Washington Times
By Ralph Z. Hallow

Prominent evangelical leaders are warning Sen. John McCain against picking former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney as his running mate, saying their troops will abandon the Republican ticket on Election Day if that happens.

They say Mr. Romney lacks trust on issues such as outlawing abortion and opposing same-sex marriage and because he is a Mormon. Opposition is particularly powerful among those who supported former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in the Republican presidential primaries earlier this year.

"McCain and Romney would be like oil and water," said evangelical novelist Tim LaHaye, who supported Mr. Huckabee. "We aren't against Mormonism, but Romney is not a thoroughgoing evangelical and his flip-flopping on issues is understandable in a liberal state like Massachusetts, but our people won't understand that."

The Rev. Rob McCoy, pastor of Calvary Chapel in Thousand Oaks, Calif., who speaks at evangelical events across the country, told The Washington Times, "I will vote for McCain unless he does one thing. You know what that is? If he puts Romney on the ticket as veep.

"It will alienate the entire evangelical community - 62 million self-professing evangelicals in this country, half of them registered to vote, are going to be deeply saddened," Mr. McCoy added.

Mr. Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, was the favorite of evangelical voters in the Republican presidential nomination contest earlier this year and won more delegates per dollar spent than any other candidate in either party.

Other well-placed Christian conservatives say that although many evangelical leaders could accept and work for a McCain-Romney ticket, Mr. Huckabee's supporters tend to be "rabid" in their views against Mr. Romney because of his faith: They do not regard Mormonism as a Christian denomination.

The McCain campaign will say officially only that the choice hasn't been made and that the wealthy former governor of Massachusetts is just one of several options for the Republican ticket.

In conversations with The Times, several Republican officials close to the McCain campaign also played down anti-Romney sentiment among conservative evangelicals. They cited an online poll of evangelicals by 2000 presidential primary candidate Gary Bauer that found Mr. Romney is the top vice-presidential choice of born-again Christians.

But in an interview with The Times, Mr. Bauer, who was a domestic policy adviser in the Reagan administration, described the results of his poll as more ambiguous than that.

"In our online poll, Romney won a plurality, and Mike Huckabee ran a strong second," said Mr. Bauer, who also told The Times that he does not think Mr. Romney ought to be a drag on the ticket. "But a lot of the Huckabee supporters said if Romney is McCain's choice, they would bail out in November."

An evangelical leader who, though he has close ties to Mr. McCain, confided to The Times that polling suggests that putting Mr. Romney on the ticket likely would cost Mr. McCain 7 percent to 10 percent of the evangelical vote - enough to spell defeat for Mr. McCain in a close race with Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee.

White evangelicals have become the Republican bedrock in recent elections, providing President Bush with 35 percent of his votes in 2004. Even in 2006, white evangelicals backed Republicans overwhelmingly - by a margin of 70 percent to 28 percent. Depending on the survey and the precise wording of the question, polls typically show that evangelical or "born-again" Christians make up between 30 percent and 40 percent of the U.S. population.

David Barton, a former vice president of the Republican Party of Texas, said, "The key for Mr. McCain is to pick someone who opposes abortion but doesn't alienate any part of the general Republican voting coalition" as Mr. Romney does.

Longtime social-conservative leaders such as Phyllis Schlafly, Phil Burress, Donald P. Hodel and Mathew Staver said earlier this month that they can rally their voters around Mr. McCain largely on the issues of abortion and the judiciary, as long as they are confident that the vice-presidential candidate is pro-life. They are skeptical about Mr. Romney's views.

Mr. Barton, founder of the national pro-life group WallBuilders, said the downside for picking either Mr. Romney or Mr. Huckabee is that evangelicals still would vote for Mr. McCain on Nov. 4 - given the alternative of Mr. Obama - but not work as hard organizing and getting out the vote.

"Romney would bring to the ticket as much enthusiasm from supporters as Huckabee would bring, but Romney's would be from fiscal conservatives and Huckabee's would be evangelicals," he said.

Similarly, a Huckabee choice would leave fiscal conservatives voting for Mr. McCain but otherwise sitting on their hands. Mr. Romney has long been a successful fundraiser - a skill needed because Mr. Obama is expected to raise hundreds of millions of dollars.

Republican strategists close to the Romney camp are promoting the former presidential contender behind the scenes.

"Romney really doesn't think he will be chosen, and that there are far better veep choices for McCain. But in my view, Mitt checks a lot of boxes: He's vetted, he's a Washington outsider, he's conservative, he's a proven vote-getter in Michigan, and he can raise a ton of cash fast for the McCain campaign. He can be the economic voice for the McCain campaign," a conservative Republican strategist close to the Romney organization told The Times.

• Donald Lambro contributed to this report.

Say It Isn't So, Barack

From The Cascade Policy Institute

By Matt Wingard

Presidential candidate Barack Obama promises voters that he is a different kind of politician. There hasn’t been much proof of that yet, but Obama did hint early on that education reform might be the issue where voters actually would see "Change."

It would have been a perfect fit for Obama. As an African-American, he would know better than most whites just how poorly America’s inner-city school districts perform. The national dropout rate for African-Americans is 45 percent.

In addition, African-Americans (Obama’s strongest constituency) support school choice at a rate higher than any other ethnic group. A recent Harvard poll showed 67% of blacks support school choice for low-income students and 52% support vouchers for all children in failing public schools.

One would think that Obama, as an African-American, has some room to break from the education special interest groups on this issue. It would be hard for white liberals who support the status quo to criticize a black presidential candidate championing the right of every black child in America to get a decent education. The statistics and the emotional rhetoric would appear to provide candidate Obama a great deal of political cover.

So imagine the disappointment in the African-American community in Washington, D.C. when Barack Obama recently refused to stand up for their voucher program as Congress threatened to end it. Nineteen hundred students and their families were facing the prospect of having to leave the schools where they were succeeding and being forced to return to one of the worst performing inner-city school districts in the country.

Public pressure from many African-American leaders has saved the program for one more year (although with reduced funding), but Barack Obama was not one of those who stood up. Bear in mind that the primary fight with Hillary Clinton was over, and Obama was free to take positions that might upset those on the political Left.

In fact, he put out a statement opposing the program. According to ABC News (June 16, 2008):

On the same day that he was extolling the need to shake up the "status quo" in education, Obama also defended his opposition to school vouchers.

"We don’t have enough slots for every child to go into a parochial school or a private school. And what you would see is a huge drain of resources out of the public schools," Obama said… .

"But what I don’t want to do is to see a diminished commitment to the public schools to the point where all we have are the hardest-to-teach kids with the least involved parents with the most disabilities in the public schools," he said. "That’s going to make things
worse, and we’re going to lose the commitment to public schools that I think have been so important to building this country."

Barack Obama’s "commitment" to public schools might seem sincere if it weren’t for the fact that his two daughters attend a very exclusive private school, the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where elementary tuition is $17-20,000 per child per year.

On the issue of educational choice, Obama is a hypocrite and, as it turns out, not a very different kind of politician at all.

Matt Wingard is Director of the School Choice Project at Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon’s free market think tank.

"If That Is Not Faith...”: An Eyewitness Report From Zimbabwe

An eyewitness from Zimbabwe, who for safety reasons must remain anonymous, has sent the following report to Aid to the Church in Need (ACN):

"Two weeks ago we celebrated the opening of the Year of Saint Paul in our parish with a solemn Holy Mass -- at exactly the same time as the Holy Father was celebrating the Vespers of the vigil of the feast in the Church of Saint Paul's-Outside-the-Walls in Rome. As always in Africa, the Mass was very well attended, and despite the immense transport difficulties, the Catholic faithful had travelled from far and wide, some overnight on open trucks, in a biting cold wind. Needless to say, we also prayed for Zimbabwe. During his sermon, the priest told how shortly before, a woman had been snatched from a church during the middle of Mass. After Mass, he went looking for her and found her lying in a ditch just a few hundred yards away. She is now lying in a coma.

It almost seems to me that on such occasions, in praying and singing, the people are able to forget not only their worries but even their aching limbs and open wounds, at least for a few hours. After Mass, I met an acquaintance, a young woman somewhere in her mid-20s. Just a few days before, she had been brutally beaten up in her own home by ZANU PF thugs. Two of her fingers were broken, as she attempted to protect her head and her face from the blows of the clubs, and several of her ribs were cracked. Her back and legs were covered in black angry bruises. But despite her pain, she was determined to attend the Mass, and she did in fact come -- barefoot and limping on one foot, because her feet were so swollen that she could not even get them into her very wide, worn pair of sandals. If that is not faith... I thought to myself that evening that St. Paul himself would have been very pleased and proud if he could have seen and heard what these Christians have made of his words and how they are quite literally living out what he taught.

Yesterday they buried a young man. He had originally wanted to become a religious and a priest, but then changed his mind. He was very active in the Catholic youth movements and most recently he worked as a driver for the opposition party. Just about four weeks ago he was abducted at night time. Ten days ago they found his body, maimed and burned, on a farm belonging to an army general. He had obviously been horribly tortured before his death. They had put out both his eyes and poured burning plastic over his back. Photographs of his body were shown to Gordon Brown during the G8 summit in Japan, and he showed them to the other heads of state at the summit. If these pictures have contributed to the summit statement on Zimbabwe, then the death of this courageous young Christian will not have been entirely in vain. Despite this, the people here are very, very angry.

It is not easy to describe the situation in Zimbabwe. Alongside the unbelievable violence of the past few weeks, there are the countless absurdities of daily life which lead one to suspect that the end is near. Take the exchange rate last Friday, for example, when one Euro was worth 165 billion Zimbabwe dollars -- and in a week it will be worth three times this. The result is that commercial companies like our Internet service provider ZOL will no longer accept Zimbabwe dollars, because they are worthless. At the same time they will not accept US dollars either, because they are not allowed to, but only Old Mutual shares -- which we don't have -- or diesel coupons -- which we somehow have to find on the black market...

Still more ludicrous are the absurdities of the political situation. Now that Robert Mugabe has had himself crowned once more as president, following the second round of voting on 27 June, and with Bible in hand and the invocation of divine assistance on his lips has promised to observe the constitution and laws and to serve the people as a good president, the barbaric political cleansing campaign continues. (Mugabe himself likes to use the word "barbaric" when speaking of his terror campaign, while at the same time blaming it on the opposition). A British reporter, who tried to elicit details about the run-off election at the African Union summit in Egypt a week ago, was actually physically attacked by our president. Here, too, one can see the very dangerous side of this man, who now only breathes violence, talks violence, does violence -- so compulsively that for a brief moment he himself can forget his dignity as a head of state – for the sake of which he has after all declared war on his own people. This unpredictability, accompanied by an almost total lack of scruple, marks out almost all the decisions to which the people here are so defenselessly exposed. Since yesterday even Thabo Mbeki, the South African president, has spoken of the real possibility of a civil war. Anyone who lives here knows that the civil war has already begun, three months ago. Many people have failed to notice it merely because it is only one side that has the clubs, the knives and the guns. But for all that, and despite the madness around us, life continues -- somehow."

Iran: Sixteen Christian Converts Arrested

From Adnkronos

Sixteen Iranians who converted from Islam to Christianity were arrested on Tuesday in Malakshahr, on the outskirts of the central Iranian city of Isfahan.

The six women, eight men and two adolescents who were arrested were assisting in a conversion ceremony and baptism of three new members of the church at a private house that had been transformed into an evangelical church.

The owners of the home, an elderly couple, were allegedly beaten up before they were locked up in an unmarked lorry.

In April, 10 Christian converts were arrested in Shiraz.

The official evangelical churches in Isfahan received orders not to allow any Muslims to attend their ceremonies and not to facilitate in any way the conversions.

Iranian law does not stipulate any punishment for those who convert from Islam to other faiths, even if the converts are subject to repression.

A few months ago, the government presented a bill which is currently being discussed in parliament, to include in the penal code the crime of "Ertedad" which is the act of abandoning the Muslim faith.

If the parliament does approve the law, the punishment for abandoning Islam will be the death penalty.

North American Union on the Run

By Tom DeWeese

Take a look at this important article by Jerome Corsi on the effect our efforts are having in the fight to stop the North American Union.

Efforts by thousands around the nation are getting the message out about the North American Union. The perpetrators of this treason did not want the general public to know of their plans. They wanted to operate in secret.

But we have blown the whistle on them. We have alerted Americans. And we are throwing a massive monkey wrench into their well laid plans. And it is having an effect. They started with denials and escalated to calling us names – lunatic fringe; liars; scare mongers. They refuse to debate the issue. They hide behind a curtain of secrecy. But it’s not working. And that fact is having an effect on their plans. There is a feeling of despair growing in the ranks of the SPP.

Back in January, Jerome Corsi reported on an article written by a reporter for the Canadian newspaper, The Globe and Mail. The reporter, John Ibbitson was actually participating in an SPP meeting, presenting a paper. So he was on the inside.

He was basically shocked by the attitudes of the participants. Here are the people who seem to have everything under control. The people you and I fear the most. Yet, he found them exhibiting an overwhelming feeling of despair that their well-laid plans for a North American Union were in trouble. Said Ibbitson, “public exposure has stalled SPP efforts.” He concluded that the Security and Prosperity Partnership is “DEAD.”

Other SPP leaders, while disagreeing with Ibbitson about that, admit that the “public awareness” of the SPP and some of its features will trigger changes. Stuart Trew, a researcher and writer for the Council of Canadians wrote “The opposition in all three countries has exposed the SPP North American Integration agenda.”

Several other attendees to an SPP meeting in Mexico confirmed that public exposure has been a hindrance to the progress of the SPP program.

Ibbitson hinted that Bush and Canadian Prime Minster Harper were reluctant to spend any more political capital in the SPP effort. And that was one reason why the SPP meeting in New Orleans in April was more about public relations than substance. They are trying to regain ground that they’ve lost to us.

Now, I don’t believe for a second that this fight is anywhere near over. But, I tell you this because I want you to understand that your fight is having an effect. Notice how many times they used the word “exposure.”

The fact is this. We do not live in a vacuum. Things don’t just happen. Actions have consequences. Our actions have an effect. Now is the time to keep the pressure on the SPP efforts. Go to the American Policy Center’s website and sign our petitions against the NAU and print out our NAU Fact Sheet to pass around to friends and neighbors so all Americans can know the facts. WE can finally kill this horrible policy and take America back!


For over 31 years Tom DeWeese has been a businessman, grassroots activist, writer and publisher. As such, he has always advocated a firm belief in man’s need to keep moving forward while protecting Constitutionally-guaranteed rights of property and individual freedom.

Tom DeWeese is the publisher/editor of The DeWeese Report. Founder of Freedom21.com and the President of the American Policy Center , a activist think tank headquartered in Warrenton, Virginia.

Deconstructing Obama

From American Thinker

By Kyle-Anne Shiver

Deconstruction, I'm told, is still all the rage on college campuses throughout the Land. Part of the broader movement of postmodernism which has attempted to tear down the old certainties upon which Western Culture is founded.

The academics' pet theory of the past 30 years has touched numerous facets of our society. These thorny deconstructionists have managed to convince many an American college student to sacrifice his God-given common sense and Judeo/Christian values on the altar of presumed white male privilege, from which these students are admonished they now must actively disengage. After all, say the deconstructionists and their postmodernist, post-colonialist allies, every single good in Western civilization has been irrevocably tainted by the despicable, ill-gotten-gain methods of those nasty, imperialist, white, male, chauvinist-pig founders, warriors, inventors, builders, landowners, writers, jurists et al. How dare we, as modern day white Westerners, reap the ill-gotten benefits of such a despicable, greedy, imperialistic lot.

Deconstructionists have attempted to remake society around a new set of power relations. In their philosophical re-do, they imperiously take the advantage away from white males and hand it over, lock, stock and barrel to all non-white males and females of all varieties. And presto-change-o the world is still unfair, but it is unfair in a different direction. A more "fair" form of unfairness, or so say the deconstructionists.

Sadly, we have all seen the results of deconstructionist machinations in our schools, our workplaces, our literature, our legal system and just about every other place one dares to look. Why, the deconstructionists have deconstructed just about everything Western, save the old kitchen sink. In some spheres, the results of this attempt at re-ordering our society is called "affirmative action." In others, it's called a "quota system." Then there is the omnipresent "sensitivity training," what communists blithely refer to as "reeducation camp."

Unfortunately, we now must assume, after 30 years of this theory's preeminence, that those of us who do not ascribe to deconstructionist tenets, must actually deconstruct much of what we used to be able to take for granted.

University degrees are no longer objectively standardized, bona fide credentials; they are subjective instruments that could mean just about anything. Job titles are no longer a guarantee of accomplishment; they could just as easily be token positions. And on and on and on this list could go, but there isn't time here.

Perhaps nowhere outside academia itself have the deconstructionists had more powerful sway than within the once-august body that calls itself the Democratic Party. I have, myself, for years now refused to bestow the adjective, democratic, upon the Democrat Party. It has been so thoroughly infiltrated since the early 70s by leftist deconstructionists that it has become a thoroughly undemocratic institution, giving heaps of advantage to everyone other than white males, and has thusly reduced itself to a committee dictatorially run by a rainbow proletariat.

The dictatorship of the minorities. How democratic is that?

Because the deconstructionists have thoroughly taken over the Democratic Party in America, it is now incumbent upon us, the citizenry, to deconstruct the candidate they are promoting for President, the not-even-through-his-first-term Senator, Barack Obama.

Deconstructing the Democratic Party Brand

Sadly, we can no longer assume that anyone promoted by the Democratic Party has been properly vetted for disqualifying scandalous behavior, or even on the most fundamental level of actually possessing barely minimal qualifications for public office.

As many have noted during this protracted Democrat primary race, the rules for nominating a Presidential candidate under this Party's label are mystifying in their complexity. Prior to 1968, the Democrats used, by and large, the same winner-take-all formula for primaries that the Republican Party still uses.

This formula is not unlike the wisdom of our Electoral College, which ingeniously allows for majority votes to count by localities and states. It's simple, uncomplicated, clean-cut. Under this old, tried-and-true system the majority rules and life goes on without a whole heap of fuss, which has allowed this Republic of ours to transfer power without bloodshed, uninterrupted for going on three centuries.

Of course, as anyone with a lick of political, historical knowledge already knows, the Democratic Party's system had for the last few decades taken a low-road, backroom approach to party politics that favored insiders and machine bosses over the will of ordinary voters. Their system was already primed for the comeuppance it got in 1968.

The Democratic National Convention of 1968 was a quite raucous and bloody affair, with mobs of young leftist agitators rioting in the streets of Chicago, demanding their way. These home-grown Marxist revolutionaries, many of whom went on to become domestic terrorists and bombers and universal nihilists of all variety, didn't get their way that year. But they did make enough of a dent in the bastions of Democratic Party authority to rewrite the nominating rules around what they considered more egalitarian principles. What resulted from the radical changes to the nominating process is the convoluted mess that formed the basis for this year's slugfest between two affirmative-action candidates.

To be sure, a great many journalists have already tiptoed through this affirmative-action mine field upon which I am about to brazenly march, but so far their dainty ruminations have had scanty effect upon polling numbers.

Actually, that may be a bit understated, since it seems nearly miraculous that the Republican candidate, John McCain, is within shouting distance of the Democrat after a full eight years of leftist press bombardment aimed at the Republican brand, effectively polarizing a sitting Republican President. I personally believe McCain's strong showing so far is owed not to racism, as has been suggested, but due to the obvious affirmative-action nature of the Democrats' candidate, Barack Obama.

The truth is that neither of the Democrat front-runners for the nomination this year would have ever been considered for the highest office in the Land had they not received the benefit of 30 years' worth of postmodernist/deconstructionist machinations that gave them undue advantage owing to their presumed mantle of past grievances on account of race and gender.

One woman who unabashedly leapfrogged her way into the Senate on the back of a still-sitting President, her husband. And the other frontrunner, Obama, has absolutely nothing on his resume but stints in academia, political organizing, a do-nothing state senate gig, and the office of a Senator, which he has shamefully used as nothing more than a launch pad for his audacious attempted catapult into the White House.

By offering us two nominees and a presumed candidate whose demographic background outweighs considerations of experience and merit, the Democratic Party is undermining, deconstructing really, its own brand, traditionally built on the pose of championing the little guy.

Deconstructing Obama

We, the citizenry, are being asked at this juncture to literally turn our time-tested demand for a presidential resume check completely on its ear. We are asked to give advantages to Barack Obama on account of his racial mix that we would never give to a white male, and as some have surmised even to a white female, in the same position.

We are being asked to deconstruct the most powerful political position in the world.

One of the pet "methods" of deconstruction, I'm told, is the critique of binary oppositions. It's proposed by deconstructionists that there are classic dualities in Western thought, which give privileged position to one term over the other, the favored position always going to the meaning most associated with the phallus. Puh-lease.

But, okay, let's play along. A few of the most oft noted binary oppositions in Western thought are: fullness over emptiness, meaning over meaninglessness, identity over difference and life over death.

And, yes, as a mere product of my wholly Western thought, I do tend quite naturally to give a positive weight to fullness over emptiness, meaning over meaninglessness, identity over difference and life over death. Mere common sense would seem to dictate these positive connotations, in my own mind, whether one is Western, Eastern or anything else.

But according to the deconstructionists, if I want to throw my full support to candidate Obama, then I must literally force myself to go completely athwart these Western tendencies, and opt to reverse them.

I must accept that Obama's nearly empty resume for the Presidency is actually better than McCain's full resume.

I must accept that Obama's meaningless, non-defined rhetoric is actually better than McCain's meaningful, painstakingly defined rhetoric and plans.

I must accept that Obama's difference, in terms of his racial makeup is actually better than McCain's common identity with my own. Whatever happened to Martin Luther King's insistence on a colorblind society?

So far, Obama's only plans worth noting are to disarm America and turn over vast amounts of our wealth to refortify failing dictatorships in third-world countries. If accomplished, this will amount to nothing less than handing over our sovereignty and liberty in favor of bondage to international consensus.

I must accept that Obama's death plan for America, the Land that I love, is actually better than McCain's life plan to preserve and protect our liberty.

I might as well go a bit further with the deconstructionists and throw in another purely Western assumption. Liberty over bondage. Yes, it's true. Color me prejudiced to the core of my being.

I actually will prefer to my dying day, with the last breath I draw, as God is my witness, liberty over bondage.

I'm hopelessly, irretrievably, to the marrow of my bones, an American. And I will not give my one vote, earned by the precious sacrifice of millions before me, to a deconstructionist, affirmative-action candidate. The Presidency of the United States of America is not now, nor should it ever be, an entitlement.

Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other's gaze that wins out and decides.

- Jacques Derrida, Father of Deconstructionist Theory

Millions of dollars, lots of great minds, many slick branding tricks, slogans and sales pitches have gone into creating the "photograph" of Barack Obama's public persona. But in the end, on election day, it will be we "gazers," the voters, who will decide whether the image truly fits the man.

If this were American Idol, Barack would be a shoe-in. But for the most powerful political position in the world?

Kyle-Anne Shiver is an independent journalist and a frequent contributor to American Thinker. She welcomes your comments at kyleanneshiver.com.

Al-Qaeda Video Urges Saudi Monarch's Killing for Dialogue with Pope

From Adnkronos International

Al-Qaeda Number 3, Abu Yahya al-Libi has issued a new video urging the killing of Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah for his moves towards inter-faith dialogue with Pope Benedict XVI.

"They want to spawn a new religion on the Arabian Peninsula and that is bringing religions closer together," al-Libi warns in the video message posted to Islamist websites on Monday.

The video strongly criticises the inter-faith dialogue conference held earlier this month in the Spanish capital, Madrid, under King Abdullah's patronage and organised by the Muslim World League.

The three-day conference closed with a declaration that cited terrorism as a major obstacle to mutual understanding.

The conference brought together representatives from the three main monotheistic faiths, Islam, Christianity and Judaism, as well as Buddhism.

A photo of King Abdullah and Benedict XVI taken during Abdullah's historic visit to the Vatican last November has been posted with the video to publicise it on Islamist websites.

A caption beneath the photo repeats part of al-Libi's video message. It reads: "He (Abdullah) has made religion a joke and has done so in public with Jews, Christians and Muslims.

"He has thrown those fighting for Islamism into jail...and has fraternised with those who have offended the Prophet, notably the adulator of the Cross, the Vatican's Pope."

Al-Libi also attacks Muslim religious leaders, claiming they have colluded in inter-religious dialogue by sitting alongside exponents of other faiths.

"The Prophet ordered us to drive unbelievers from the Arabian Peninsula. Today, the Saudi royal family is destroying our Islamic tenets by showing Muslims it is possible to spread Christian principles."

"By sitting side by side in public, they are taking part in the Crusader campaign. They are helping them, giving information to their secret services, all in order to spread their culture and religion."

Al-Libi concludes the message with a call to kill King Abdullah for having betrayed Islam.

The Libyan-born militant is believed to have fought alongside al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan.

Barack Obama: The Child - The Messiah - The Obamessiah

The President Sets A Record

The White House presented its Mid-Session Review of the Fiscal Year 2009 budget today, and with it announced a new record -- a budget deficit of $490 billion. That is quite a record indeed, considering that during the President's first year in office the nation enjoyed a budget surplus of $236 billion.

Much was made of record deficits during the Reagan Administration, but the worst of those, in 1983, was $208 billion. That was a time when defense spending was high in what was ultimately a triumphant showdown with the Soviet Union.

President Bush, on the other hand, has presided over a 60% growth in the size of the federal government.

While the budget figures were being presented to the media, the President enjoyed an expensive lunch with the Prime Minister of Pakistan -- $115 million plus tip in promised aid to the country harboring Osama Bin Laden.

Melanie Phillips on "Swooning Over Princess Obama"

Melanie Phillips, the author of Londonistan and other best-selling books, is also one of Britain's finest columnists. In her most recent column, Swooning Over Princess Obama, she applies a much needed pinprick to the hyperinflated rhetoric and media hype surrounding the one who has promised to "rebuild the world" and "declared his presidency would be seen as ‘the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.'"

Music of Paradise - Music for the Soul - Cistercian Abbey Stift Heiligenkreuz

Best Thing On His Resume

Paul Weyrich on the Best Bushie

Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao

By Stephen Dinan

With so many thinking so much has gone wrong in the Bush administration, conservative icon Paul Weyrich has asked an interesting question: Who in the administration has done the best at living up to the Bush promises of 2000?

His answer is Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, the only cabinet official to go from start to finish (so far) with the president.

"[She] has promulgated regulations which have made the transparency of union expenditures a cornerstone of her efforts. Although she is known for fairness, labor unions despise her. Yet she has handled herself in such a way that she has avoided most direct confrontation. In 1959 one-third of all American workers belonged to a labor union. By 1980 under a quarter of the workforce held a union card. Today that number stands at only 12.1%. If government workers are taken out of the equation the number stands at just 7.5%. Accordingly, Mrs. Chao considers herself Secretary of all workers and not just of those who belong to unions.

The unions are spending a record amount of their employees’ money this year to help elect Senator Barack H. Obama to the Presidency and to elect what they hope will be a veto-proof House of Representatives and Senate. If they achieve their objectives they have pledged to undo all of the reforms Mrs. Chao has been successful in enacting through legislation and regulation. That would be unfortunate because for the first time ever a union member can go to a website and see exactly how his dues money is spent."

Who else can you offer up?

A lot of folks in the attorney general's office and the Defense and State departments are disqualified because of uncertainty surrounding the war and terrorist detention. The Department of Homeland Security, which didn't even exist when President Bush took office, has struggled with immigration and became the symbol of mismanagement for Hurricane Katrina. The Education Department has tried to press forward with No Child Left Behind, but those on both sides of the aisle balk at the way it's been carried out. There have been scandals at Veterans and HUD, as well as Education.

It's clear President Bush is out of the running because he failed to meet many of his promises, both those he made in 2000 (remember no nation-building?) and along the way (remember his pledge not to sign a campaign finance bill that he disagreed with, then his signing one even as he said it had constitutional questions?).

Does Ms. Chao win by dint of being the longest-serving major official?

Stephen Dinan is the national political correspondent for The Washington Times

Calling Evil By Its Proper Name

From National Review Online
By Andy McCarthy

Bravo Pete Hoekstra for Defunding the Government's Jihad on "Jihad"

I've had a number of things to say about the intelligence community's attempted language purge, the effort to inculcate an aversion to calling jihadists jihadists, to bleach the Islam out of Islamic terror, and so on. (See, e.g., here, here and here if interested.) Well, I'm happy to report that Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI and ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee), whose been fighting the effort for some time (see Robert Spencer's post here), has seen his efforts bear fruit.

Rep. Hoekstra added an amendment to the Intelligence Bill that denies funding to this ill-conceived propaganda campaign (aptly referred to as "McCarthyism in reverse"). Despite the predictable opposition of Speaker Pelosi and the Democrat leadership, 55 Democrats joined Republicans to pass it by a whopping 249-180 margin.

CAIR, natch, is up in arms — you always know you're doing the right thing if all the right people are in a snit. [H/T, again, to Mr. Spencer & the invaluable Jihad Watch.]

Bob Barr on the Mortgage Bailout

Dear Friend,

You may have heard or read media reports about actions yesterday in Congress to deal with the housing debt crisis and to bail out two private lenders known as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

The bill passed the House of Representatives and will be taken up in the Senate and once through that pork factory, President Bush has said he will sign it. If I were your President I would veto it so fast, heads would spin.

The bill - and that's exactly what it is - is a bill you are going to be expected to pay! It's for an estimated $400,000,000,000. That is, of course, $400 Billion that we don't have, so more borrowing is ahead. Your share of this expense? About $1,300.

And that's on top of the more than $31,000 you already owe!

In 2001, the national debt crossed $6 Trillion. Today, it is closing in on $10 Trillion. Our debt is growing faster than at any time in our nation's history and there is no end in sight. Yesterday I issued a statement to the media blasting their actions. Today I ask your help in getting out the message that President Bush and Senators Obama and McCain are wrong for bankrupting our future with more and more debt.

First I ask that you forward this email to as many of your friends as possible. The average American doesn't understand what's going on. They have a sincere, but misguided, desire to help people less fortunate than themselves at this time of economic crisis. But this bailout only rewards people who made bad decisions and bails out those who profited from them.

Second, please consider a campaign contribution to help fund our daily operations. Your gift of $5 or as much as the legal limit of $2,300 will make a difference.

I thank you for your consideration.

Bob Barr


P.S. - You may also want to call your U.S. Senators to tell them to vote no on the big-bank bail out. And remember, if I were your President, this bill would be dead on arrival at the White House. Please help me change government. Thanks again.

Only Huckabee Can Save McCain

From what I have observed, John McCain only consults conservative voices in the Republican Party to ensure he is working against their interests. It may be the result of the drugs and brain washing that Soviet doctors applied during his imprisonment in Vietnam. Nevertheless, some conservative leaders are making one last attempt to salvage the 2008 presidential election. The following was reported by Right Wing Watch, published by People for the American Way.

A few weeks ago, we wrote several posts about the meeting in Colorado where a large group of right-wing leaders finally decided to support John McCain. At the time, all we had were second-hand accounts that those in attendance had decided that Barack Obama would “decimate [the] moral values” they hold dear and, as such, collectively decided to support McCain as the lesser of two evils.

Glossed over in the press coverage was the fact that their support for McCain seemed to rest heavily on his choice of candidate for Vice President, with those in attendance making their preference known that they really want him to pick Mike Huckabee:

Those in attendance also reached a consensus that they would send a letter to McCain, R-Ariz., encouraging him to consider former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee as his choice for vice president.

"It's not a demand; it's a request," said [Mat] Staver, who couldn't say when McCain would be contacted about Huckabee, a former Southern Baptist pastor who resonated with some evangelical voters during the Republican primaries.

Until now, the content and signatories of that letter remained unknown. But recently Clark Vandeventer, founder and CEO of World Changers, Inc, who reportedly attended the meeting and signed the letter, posted it on a blog called Veritas Rex and it seems clear that they were not so much “requesting” that McCain pick Huckabee as his Vice President as outright warning him that doing so is “necessary for [his] success”:

We believe that a pro-life, pro-family Vice Presidential running mate is critical to confirm to our constituents that you will take affirmative steps to protect these values. Your selection of a pro-life, pro-family running mate will be one of the first and most important opportunities to communicate your commitment to such values, since we believe that personnel is policy.

As citizens who love this country and as leaders who communicate collectively with millions of values voters, we met this week in Denver to discuss our shared moral values and the need to support your campaign. As a sincere expression of what we believe is necessary for your success, we strongly agreed to respectfully urge you to select former Governor Mike Huckabee as your running mate.

We believe putting Gov. Huckabee on your ticket will immediately excite, mobilize, and activate a key grassroots constituency that is essential to your success and the advancement and defense of the values we share. We have heard this message so clearly and consistently from our constituencies that we believe it is our duty to respectfully share it with you -- not as a demand or condition of our support -- but as an honest communication of what we believe to be the surest way to immediately activate millions of social conservative voters and activists nationwide in support of your candidacy.

Thank you for your consideration.
Respectfully,

Phil Burress, President, Citizens for Community Values
Mathew Staver,Founder and Chairman, Liberty Counsel
Gary Glenn, President, American Family Association of Michigan
David Barton, Wall Builders
Bill and Deborah Owens
Clark Vandeventer, Chief Executive Officer, World Changers Inc.
Kelly Shackelford, Esq., President, Liberty Legal institute
John Stemberger, Florida Attorney and Pro Family Advocate
Dr. Beverly LaHaye, Concerned Women for America
Dr. Tim F. LaHaye, Tim LaHaye Ministries
Paul E. Rondeau
Rick Scarborough, President of Vision America Action
Johnnie Moore,
 Campus Pastor, Liberty University
Jim Garlow, California Pastors Rapid Response Team
Steve Strang, publisher, Charisma magazine
Kenneth L. Connor, Wilkes & McHugh, P.A.
Clint Cline
Donald E. Wildmon, Founder and Chairman, American Family Association
Randy Thomasson, President
Campaign for Children and Families
Rebecca Kiessling
Joshua Straub, American Association of Christian Counselors
Sandy Rios, President of Culture Campaign
Deryl Edwards, President, Liberty Alliance
Linda Harvey, Mission America
Diane Gramley, President, American Family Association of Pennsylvania
David N. Cutchen
Micah Clark, Executive Director, American Family Association of Indiana
Don McClure
Alex Harris, Founder and Chairman, Huck's Army and Director, The Rebelution
Brett Harris, Founder and Chairman, Huck's Army and Director, The Rebelution

The Time for Liberty

World Youth Day: Beauty Personified On Our Streets

From The Sydney Morning Herald
By Miranda Devine

For those who had been to previous World Youth Days in Rome, Manila, Toronto and Cologne, the unqualified success of Sydney's turn was no surprise. The joy and sweetness of thousands of young Catholic pilgrims who flooded into the city, in the words of Cardinal George Pell, simply "overwhelmed" the rancid negativity of sections of our sex-fixated media, and those aggressive secularists who regard religion as an irrational threat to their way of living.

In the end, pilgrims from across the globe melted a cynical city's heart, from the bus drivers who finished their shifts and then took it on themselves to ferry home nuns and others they spotted stranded near Central station one cold night, to the suburban families who spontaneously offered their showers to visitors camping in local schools.

Catholic or not, most people want love and goodness in their lives and the contrast between the radiant faces of the pilgrims and the strained masks of their most strident condom-waving detractors was striking. Beauty was not just in the eye of the beholder.

For many Sydneysiders, even jaded priests, it showcased a new generation of young people who shocked them with their social conservatism. This wasn't the fabled youth of binge drinking, drug abuse and rampant sexually transmitted diseases, but a group of gregarious, sophisticated people unashamedly embracing the 21st-century revival in orthodox religious faith.

The genius of a World Youth Day is to tap into the desire of a technologically connected global generation for mass human interaction.

"Youth in every corner of Australia are working and trying to build up their faith," said Annaliese Wursthorn, 25, a speech pathologist from Melbourne who spent the last six months travelling around the country with the World Youth Day cross. "But when you begin to realise you're not the only one [searching for answers] it fills you with such excitement and such reassurance you can come out and be a bit more open about your faith."

Of her first World Youth Day, in Rome, when she was 17, Wursthorn recalls: "I was so surprised by how many other Catholics from my own city were there. I had been worried the church was dying because so many people tell you it is, but it isn't."

For anyone despairing that the nihilism of Big Brother and Dolly magazine represents Australian youth, World Youth Day was the antidote. "It was so wonderful as a young person to show people we're not all like that. We're just working hard to be good people and trying to be the best we can be," Wursthorn said.

Cath Smibert, 28, who worked for Vatican media in Rome for seven years before returning this year to hometown Sydney, says World Youth Day is proof that "young people are rebelling against relativity and nothingness, and are excited about a voice that is consistent and proven over generations, and which cares enough about them to be consistent".

The World Youth Day generation, as the national German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has described it, "is united by a consciousness fundamentally different from that of the 1968 generation and their children". It is rebelling against the do-whatever-you-want culture spawned by the 1960s social revolution. It has experienced first hand the consequences of the four-decade-long experimentation with false freedom, the broken marriages and damaged children, and a sense that there are many truths and no immutable moral rules.

In a world of moral relativism, the World Youth Day generation hungers for certainty and absolute truths, the stock in trade of Pope Benedict XVI.

"Life … is a search for the true, the good and the beautiful," he told the pilgrims at the Hungry Mile last week. "It is to this end that we make our choices; it is for this that we exercise our freedom."

While pantheistic followers of Al Gore were heartened by what they saw as the Pope's nod to environmentalism, and played up a pretend rift between him and Cardinal George Pell on climate change, the Pope's message was more crafty. If we are concerned about the poisoning of the natural environment, so we should be "equally alert" to the poisoning of the social environment, he said; to "the signs of turning our back on the moral structure with which God has endowed humanity".

We should be alert to "a poison which threatens to corrode what is good, reshape who we are, and distort the purpose for which we have been created".

He cited alcohol and drug abuse, violence and sexual degradation, "often presented through television and the internet as entertainment", and finally, abortion: "How can it be that the most wondrous and sacred human space - the womb - has become a place of unutterable violence?"

More popular concerns with which the secular and religious worlds find agreement, the Pope said - such as non-violence, sustainable development, justice and peace, and care for our environment - "are of vital importance for humanity. They cannot, however, be understood apart from a profound reflection upon the innate dignity of every human life from conception to natural death."

These more difficult and controversial battles are those which the new World Youth Day generation is showing itself willing to take on.

I watched a lot of the festivities from Rome, revelling in the cultural treasures and iconography that make the modern irreligious city a mecca for pilgrims of the tourist kind. In the Pope's home, admiring Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling, I was reminded by our young tour guide, Paul Encinias, an American doctoral student with degrees in archeology, art history and philosophy, of the Renaissance attitude to beauty as an absolute concept, able to be defined mathematically as expressly as it is in nature, where the "golden ratio" is present in the spacing of flower petals as much as it is in the symmetry of a marble statue or da Vinci's Vitruvian Man.

Living in an era when faith and reason, art and mathematics, were inextricably linked, Renaissance artists would regard modern relativistic notions of beauty as ludicrous.

The idea there is no absolute beauty or absolute truth was as alien to the devout 23-year-old genius who carved the Pieta and later painted the roof of the Sistine Chapel, as we hope it is to the new World Youth Day generation.

Guns, Foreign Courts, and the Moral Consensus of the International Community

From The Acton Institute
By Jordan Ballor

In a landmark decision that will impact the future of gun regulation in the United States, late last month the Supreme Court struck down a handgun ban in Washington, D.C. In District of Columbia etal. v. Heller (No. 07–290) a slim 5-4 majority found the D.C. ban to violate the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which reads, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Over the last few years observers of the Supreme Court have noticed a trend among some of the justices to cite the decisions of foreign courts as part of the relevant precedent in deciding the cases before them. In 2005, justices Scalia and Breyer engaged in a rare public conversation on this very topic, “Constitutional Relevance of Foreign Court Decisions.” In the recently-decided D.C. v. Heller neither of the two dissenting opinions, written by justices Stevens and Breyer respectively, make substantial reference to foreign court decisions. But the growing phenomena of reference to foreign judgments as precedents raises the question of what the justices might have found if they had consulted such materials.

This tendency to invoke foreign jurisprudence is becoming more troubling as it becomes clearer that the moral consensus that once united Western nations has almost entirely broken down. A few years ago a pastor I know, as part of his duties as a representative of the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC), took part in an inter-church dialogue with a member of the Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland (GKN), a grouping of Reformed congregations in the Netherlands. The GKN sent what they considered to be a moderate pastor to participate in this conversation about moral issues. In the course of the discussion, the GKN moderate asserted that it was more evil to own a gun than to have an abortion.

At this, the CRC representative was only able to respond that their discussion was effectively over. The CRC’s official position on abortion is that the church “condemns the wanton or arbitrary destruction of any human being at any stage of its development from the point of conception to the point of death.” As any rhetorician knows, argument can only proceed where there is some basic level of agreement, and the ethical opinion expressed by the GKN pastor was so far removed from the sensibilities of the CRC that there was effectively no point of contact for continuing dialogue. The GKN has since joined a number of other Protestant denominations in the Netherlands, including other Lutheran and Reformed denominations, to form the Protestantse Kerk in Nederland (PKN).

While this is a relatively minor anecdote, it serves well to illustrate the conflicting moral values placed on issues of life by the mainstream culture in Europe and the United States. No doubt there are those on either side of the Atlantic who would take issue with the dominant cultural judgment, but the national and international legal documents underscore the real differences. Where the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights singles out the right of the people to keep and bear arms, proposed European Union constitutional documents make no such mention. And as a recent Washington Times article relates, “many in Western Europe and Japan see U.S. gun ownership rates and gun violence as a clear mark of difference with other industrial countries.”

But the difference has not always been so stark. Indeed, the preamble to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, written in 1948, recognized the possibility of “rebellion against tyranny and oppression” as “a last resort,” an option that ideally could be avoided by protections according to the rule of law.

On the question of abortion, part of what derailed adoption of the EU Constitution in 2004 was concern by nations like Poland and Ireland that the vague constitutional provisions about “dignity” and “integrity” of the human person would require the repeal of national anti-abortion laws. The Treaty of Lisbon, successor to the failed EU Constitution, was rejected by Ireland last month, in part over similar concerns by pro-life advocates that adoption of the treaty “would threaten the Irish constitutional protection for the unborn, given the almost universal acceptance and promotion of abortion at the EU level.”

Upon reflection, then, the ethical judgment expressed by the GKN pastor seems to represent fairly well the mainstream EU attitude toward moral issues like guns and abortion. If part of what characterizes a civilization is a consensus on moral issues, then the idea of a unified Western civilization encompassing Europe and the United States is an illusion. A consensus that diverges on such fundamental questions of the right to life and responsibilities of self-defense is simply no consensus at all.

Jordan J. Ballor is associate editor at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty in Grand Rapids, Mich., and a contributor to the Acton Institute PowerBlog.

Elvis Llives: in 2,000-Year-Old Carving

From the towering quiff, to the come-to-bed eyes and seductive pout, the resemblance of this carving to Elvis Presley is striking.

From The Telegraph
By Laura Clout

But the sculpture was created around 1,800 years before 'The King' ever crooned his first song.

The Roman ornament, called an acroterion, is carved in marble on the corner of a sarcophagus dating from the second century AD.

It is among a collection of ancient art owned by the Melbourne-based dealer Graham Geddes, which is estimated to sell for more than £1m.

Mr Geddes' collection, which includes more than 50 classical Greek vases and 30 pieces of marble sculpture, will be auctioned by Bonhams in October.

Many of these items will sell for up to £90,000 each, and the bust, which even the collector has nicknamed 'Elvis', is estimated to make between £25,000 and £30,000.

A spokesman for Bonhams said: "Fans of the King of Rock 'n Roll, seeing this face from the distant past will be forgiven for thinking that their idol may well have lived a previous life in Rome.

"Looking at this face with its Elvis-like quiff, strong jaw and nose, one is inevitably led to the thought that the human face for all is diversity and subtlety has after all an ability to repeat itself."

The Power of Choice

New data from Milwaukee's Parental Choice Program

show even 'charity vouchers' can help public schools improve

As some educators and school choice advocates begin to question whether school vouchers can reform public education, a new study of Milwaukee's pioneering voucher program -- the nation's oldest and largest city-specific program -- concludes it has had a positive effect on the city's public schools and will become even more influential in the near future.

The study, "Can Vouchers Reform Public Schools? Lessons from the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program," was released today by The Heartland Institute, a national nonprofit research organization. It finds that most voucher programs are not universal programs but simply "rescue" efforts that offer a life-line to poor parents with children in struggling school systems, what Nobel Prize laureate Milton Friedman characterized as "charity" vouchers.

"Since existing voucher programs are limited largely to charity vouchers, or rescue efforts, it is not surprising that they have produced no dramatic improvement in the public schools," writes author George A. Clowes, Ph.D., a senior fellow for education studies for The Heartland Institute. "Before writing off universal vouchers, it would seem prudent first to actually try them."

Clowes shows how competition from voucher schools in Milwaukee, despite being hobbled by legal challenges, a voucher amount that is less than half the public school's per-pupil spending, and enrollment caps, has prompted the Milwaukee Public Schools to implement a long list of reforms, including before- and after-school programs, more Montessori schools, improved teacher selection procedures, decentralization of budgeting authority to local schools, and greater influence of parents in local school councils.

According to Clowes, the voucher program gave school reformers including public school officials considerable clout in their negotiations with public school system interest groups. The results include a high school graduation rate that improved from 49 percent in 2002-03 to 58 percent in 2006-07. Black and Hispanic graduation rates during this period increased more than the white graduation rate. This was accomplished despite rising minority and low-income enrollments as a share of total MPS enrollment.

Critics of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, says Clowes, overlook the fact that steadily increasing voucher school enrollment had little apparent effect on MPS because of growing K-12 enrollment during most of the program's history. Since 2003-04, however, MPS enrollment has been falling while voucher school enrollment has continued to rise by an average of 1,500 students a year. Public schools are finally being exposed to serious competition for students.

"The next few years are likely to reveal the reforming power of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program on the Milwaukee Public Schools, since only now is the success of voucher schools posing a genuine competitive threat to existing public schools. The city's public schools may begin to improve more rapidly in response to this enhanced competitive environment," Clowes concludes.

"Can Vouchers Reform Public Schools? Lessons from the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program" is available for free online at http://www.heartland.org/article.cfm?artId=23540. The printed report is available for $19.95 by calling The Heartland Institute at 312/377-4000.

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Editors: Report author George A. Clowes, Ph.D., a senior fellow with The Heartland Institute and founding managing editor of School Reform News between November 1996 and January 2005, is available for comment on this study. To communicate with him, please contact Dan Miller, Heartland's executive vice president, at 312/377-4000 or by email at dmiller@heartland.org.

The Heartland Institute is a 24-year-old national nonprofit organization based in Chicago, Illinois.