Why Pro-Lifers (and Everybody Else) Should Read G.K. Chesterton

From LifeSiteNews.com
By John Jalsevac

A few days ago a good friend of mine reminded me of a mildly amusing incident of some middling illustrative power. It happened late one night in Rome. The two of us (for he was my roommate at the time) were drinking cheap brandy in our room at the Christian Brothers monastery on the outskirts of the city, and writing.

During our three month stay in the Eternal City we had agreed to each write a biweekly column for our college newspaper about our experiences. Usually we procrastinated until the last minute, and leant heavily on the truth that cheap brandy can give one wings. Tuesday evenings (the eve of our deadline) were long, exhausting, intoxicating, and richly creative: for when one is in Rome, it is easy to write.

On this particular night I was pleased as punch, for I had struck upon what I thought an extraordinarily clever idea, and in a furious burst of creative energy, I wrote it down. And then, after that short but exhausting stint of concentrated composition, I paused and picked up a nearby book, which happened to be by G.K. Chesterton. I opened it at random in the hope of some mental refreshment before putting the finishing touches on my piece for the week.

And then I cursed, rather emphatically. For, there, on the page, was precisely the same clever idea that I had so proudly hit upon, but there it was expressed with infinitely greater wit, clarity, and weight. I felt like the bold adventurer who, after countless months at sea, thought that at long last he’d discovered the new continent he had set out in search of, only to find a fellow countryman lounging serenely on the beach. I was deflated.

But in time I got used to the feeling. Truth be told, I cannot recall ever having come up with a good idea that I have not later found in a much improved form in the writings of Chesterton, or realized was actually subconsciously stolen from him in the first place. Even the metaphor I just used, about the adventurer, is one of his. It is as if Chesterton exists in large part to take the wind out of the sails of self-important young writers who think they’ve set upon clever and original ideas. They may be clever, but they aren’t original. Chesterton has already planted his flag.

But why all this talk about Chesterton? Because, quite simply, his writings remain one of the most potent cures for the madnesses that plague our age – and this encompasses all the various madnesses that we at LifeSiteNews specialize in. Indeed, if everybody had kept on reading Chesterton, perhaps we’d never have found ourselves in the mess we’re in now, and LifeSiteNews wouldn’t have to exist. Instead of writing articles about how very progressive scientists are proposing that we kill our grandmothers, I’d be a travel writer, or a wine connoisseur. Life would be grand.

Sadly, Chesterton is no longer particularly well known. But in his day he was a giant, in both a metaphorical and a literal sense (he quite famously weighed some 300 pounds, and walked about with a cape and a sword-cane). But fortunately he is making a comeback, which may well be the best news you’ve heard this year. Ignatius Press is already well into producing the Collected Works of Chesterton (a monolithic project), and his books are selling.

It is impossible to write a brief introduction to the work of “the jolly journalist,” as Chesterton called himself, though obviously an introduction, and a brief one, is what is called for. It is also nearly impossible to justify precisely why, amongst all the thousands of exceptional writers in the last century, I have chosen to highlight Chesterton in particular, without simply putting on the table in front of you his collected works and telling you to read. The only problem, of course, is that if the collected works of Chesterton were put on the table in front of you, the table would collapse under the weight, and possibly even crash through to the floor below. For he wrote close to 100 books, several hundred poems, some 200 short stories, 4000 essays, and several plays. And he died when he was only 62.

Dale Ahlquist, the president of the American Chesterton Society and a good friend of mine (indeed, his son Julian is the friend I alluded to at the beginning of this column), is fond of saying that “G.K. Chesterton was the best writer of the 20th century,” and that Chesterton “said something about everything and he said it better than anybody else.” And that’s perfectly true. But if you are of the skeptical temperament and think that’s mere hyperbole, go ask Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis (who was converted to Christianity in part by Chesterton’s writing), William F. Buckley or Etienne Gilson, amongst others. They all agree. Gilson, the famous Thomist philosopher, said, "Chesterton was one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed. He was deep because he was right." Philosophers, as you may imagine, are not particularly fond of heaping praise on the intellectual capacities of journalists (as Chesterton was), and so you see how extraordinary a compliment this is.

Chesterton was prophetic in his insights, and devastating in his critiques of the errors of modernism. “The next great heresy,” he wrote, in the 1920s, “is going to be simply an attack on morality, and especially on sexual morality. … The madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow, but much more in Manhattan.”

He wrote books and essays on eugenics, birth control, marriage, education, family, faith, and just about everything else that is important: and they are all still just as pertinent today as they were when he first penned them. Chesterton’s two great principles were faith and the family, and he defended them from the attacks of modernism with more passion, wit, wisdom and good sense than anyone else.

Of the family, he famously wrote, “When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale.” And of the faith, he even more famously said, "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."

His was a curious and contradictory voice in the midst of the age of pessimism, proclaiming the unutterable goodness of life, of the mere act of existing. One of my absolute favorite quotations by him also bears some of the responsibility for my gathering the courage to propose to my wife, and it is this: "We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one's life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being."

But, before I conclude and set my dear reader loose upon Chesterton, it would do some good to issue a warning: Many people have a tough time with Chesterton at first. He can be difficult, not in the way that modern, scientific writers are difficult (i.e. by using a multiplicity of impressive sounding but empty and often misleading words), but because he manages to pack so much truth and insight into such tiny spaces, and he expects his readers to have some basic acquaintance with Western history and ideas. His writing is heavy, but only because it bears the weight of much truth. So, if you get frustrated at first, do not worry. There is frequently an acclimatization period, and many current devoted fans of Chesterton will admit to having gone through it. That middle period is merely the uncomfortable feeling of the depressurization chamber, as we leave the vacuums of our own petty minds, and enter the rich atmosphere of Chesterton’s. But once you come through the other side, you have entered a living, teeming world of almost endless intellectual and spiritual refreshment.

(John can be reached at jjalsevac@lifesite.net)

Some recommended introductory reading:

Dale Ahlquist has written two excellent books for those who have never before encountered Chesterton or who wish to learn more about him. In large part Dale merely weaves together the best quotations by Chesterton and guides the reader through his worldview. The two books are: Common Sense 101 - Lessons from Chesterton and G.K. Chesterton - The Apostle of Common Sense. They can be purchased at: http://chesterton.org/acs/aboutchesterton.htm


Introductory essays about Chesterton:

G.K. Chesterton Common Sense Apostle & Cigar Smoking Mystic
http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features/ahlquist_gk1.asp

"Who is this guy and why haven’t I heard of him?"
http://chesterton.org/discover/who.html

Recommended writings by Chesterton (Warning: Don’t attempt to read them on the computer screen. Print them out, kick back, and enjoy):

A Piece of Chalk
http://chesterton.org/gkc/essayist/chalk.htm

A Defence of Rash Vows
http://chesterton.org/gkc/essayist/v1n3.gkcessay.htm

The Extraordinary Cabman
http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/cabman.html

Quotations of G. K. Chesterton
http://chesterton.org/discover/quotations.html

Obama Picks Religious Adviser DuBois for Faith-Based Post

From Associated Baptist Press
By Robert Marus


President Obama has selected a 26-year-old Pentecostal minister who served as his top religion adviser during the presidential campaign to head a revamped White House office on faith-based social services.

Critics of President Bush’s attempt to expand the government’s ability to fund the charitable work of churches expressed guarded optimism at the pick of Joshua DuBois to head the renamed White House Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

The New York Times first reported Jan. 29 that DuBois, who joined the Obama campaign last year and served as its chief liaison with the evangelical Christian community, would head the new council. Other news outlets confirmed the news.

Burns Strider, who served as a religious strategist with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, said Obama's choice of DuBois “is no surprise, but even more it’s an indicator of the importance placed on the goals and work of the faith office.” Strider, a Mississippi native who was raised Southern Baptist, now does consulting with the Eleison Group, which focuses on faith and politics.

Advocates of strict church-state separation who have criticized direct government funding for explicitly religious charities and the way Bush used the faith-based issue were largely supportive of the expected appointment. But they said thorny questions remain for how Obama will handle the faith-based effort.

Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, described DuBois as “an impressive, compassionate advocate with whom I have had several opportunities to meet throughout the electoral campaign and the work of President Obama's transition team."

Gaddy said he would have preferred Obama close the office altogether, but since the president has chosen simply to re-tool it, “the question remains whether or not a change in the name of the office as organized by the Bush administration will reflect substantive change in the policies of the Obama administration that advocates for religious liberty find acceptable.”

Gaddy, who also serves as pastor for preaching and worship at Northminster Baptist Church in Monroe, La., said he was “cautiously optimistic” that Obama’s faith-based office would avoid the mistakes he thought Bush’s made.

“In recent conversations, senior transition officials assured me of President Obama's interest in establishing a council that protects religious freedom and assures constitutional separation between the institutions of religion and government,” he added.

Gaddy and other church-state separationists opposed many aspects of the initiative, which Bush used to expand the numbers of government social-service programs that provided grants directly to churches and other overtly religious charities. While Bush and his supporters contended that churches were unnecessarily being left out of the programs, opponents said religious charities were already eligible for such grants as long as they clearly separated their clearly religious work from their other charitable work.

Bush officials argued that religious organizations should be eligible for funds on the same basis as secular providers, while retaining their special rights to discriminate in hiring on the basis of religion.

That aspect of the program proved the most contentious in Congress, and Gaddy and others have expressed hope that Obama would reverse Bush actions allowing religious organizations receiving federal funds to take religion into account when hiring for jobs wholly or partially subsidized with government dollars.

Obama promised not to allow discrimination under the program in a July campaign speech, but he and his surrogates have said little about the issue since.

Given the new president’s background in constitutional law and assurances they have received from DuBois and other Obama officials, opponents of Bush’s faith-based efforts expressed hope that the new administration in general -- and DuBois in particular -- would handle the initiative in ways more sensitive to their concerns.

“Josh clearly has the background and interest in bringing diverse groups together for a common purpose,” Holly Hollman, general counsel for the Baptist Joint Committee, said Jan. 30. “He recognized the need to carefully consider various approaches to the more difficult aspects of the policy. We were pleased that he listened to our suggestions for correcting some of the problems in the Bush administration’s approach and that he expressed a real desire to get things right.”

Another criticism of the faith-based push under Bush was that his White House politicized the effort. That included accusations of grants to conservative religious groups as payoffs for their support of Bush in the 2000 and 2004 elections.

Strider said efforts to increase funding for faith-based groups under President Clinton’s administration did not prove the political football they did under Bush, and that he expected DuBois and Obama to handle the effort in a similar fashion to Clinton.

“Politics doesn’t belong in the faith-based office, and we are fortunate President Obama chose a trusted adviser in Rev. DuBois who is committed to dialogue with the whole faith community and will focus on programs and services that work for all,” he said.

Dissident Anglicans Poised to Join Catholics

Disaffected Anglican priest Graeme Mitchell hopes and prays he will become a full member of the Catholic Church. Photo: Michael Clayton-Jones

From The Age (Australia)
By Barney Zwartz

NEARLY half a million dissident Anglicans are on the verge of rejoining the Catholic Church in a move their leader suggests may be the beginning of a flood to Rome of millions of Anglicans worldwide who oppose gay and female clergy.

Vatican officials are believed to have recommended to Pope Benedict XVI that he accept the Traditional Anglican Communion under a special category, and an announcement is expected in April.

West Australian Catholic newspaper The Record yesterday reported the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has decided to recommend to the Pope that he create a "personal prelature" for the TAC, which leading Anglicans confirmed.

Reunion would be the most important advance in Catholic/Anglican relations since 1553, when "Bloody" Queen Mary briefly returned England to Catholicism. The mainstream Anglican Church is also holding discussions with the Vatican, but they are not close to union.

If the Pope agrees, the TAC, which has a large number of married bishops and priests, would answer to the Pope but keep their existing structure, clergy and some elements of Anglican identity. At present, the Catholic Church has only one personal prelature, the ultra-conservative Opus Dei.

The TAC's primate (global leader), Adelaide-based Archbishop John Hepworth, said yesterday: "We are quietly and optimistically waiting for an answer. All 60 bishops accept the role of the Pope, the Catholic catechism and the traditional claims of the church, and want to be part of it."

The TAC has more than 400,000 members in 41 countries, and is not in relationship with the mainstream Anglican Church. In Australia, it has about 1600 members.

Archbishop Hepworth said if the Pope approved, the TAC would be a beacon for Anglicans around the world dreaming of doctrinal stability and unity.

Representative of the disaffected Anglicans is Father Graeme Mitchell, who is hoping to join his fourth church, but says this time "I feel like I'm coming home".

Married with two children, Father Graeme began life as a Presbyterian, followed his mother to the Anglican Church, and in 1987 was one of the founders of the breakaway Anglo-Catholic Church of Australia.

This year, Father Graeme — parish priest at St Mary the Virgin in Caulfield South and registrar of the TAC diocese of Australia — hopes and prays he will join the half-million other former Anglicans as a full member of the Catholic Church.

His disillusionment with the Anglican Church began mounting in 1987, when the Melbourne synod made the Catholic sacrament of confirmation optional. "It seemed to me a betrayal of what I'd been brought up to in the Catholic faith," he says.

NBC Rejects Super Bowl Pro-Life Ad Featuring Unborn Baby Obama

From LifeSiteNews.com

NBC has rejected an uplifting and positive pro-life ad submitted for its Super Bowl broadcast this Sunday. After several days of negotiations, an NBC representative in Chicago told CatholicVote.org late yesterday that NBC and the NFL are not interested in advertisements involving ‘political advocacy or issues.’

Brian Burch, President of CatholicVote.org said, “There is nothing objectionable in this positive, life-affirming advertisement. We show a beautiful ultrasound, something NBC’s parent company GE has done for years. We congratulate Barack Obama on becoming the first African-American President. And we simply ask people to imagine the potential of every human life.”

“NBC told CatholicVote.org that they do not allow political or issue advocacy advertisements. But that’s not what they told PETA,” said Burch. “There’s no doubt that PETA is an advocacy group. NBC rejected PETA’s ad for another reason altogether.”

According to an email posted on PETA.org, Victoria Morgan, Vice President of Advertising Standards for Universal, said: “The PETA spot submitted to Advertising Standards depicts a level of sexuality exceeding our standards.” Morgan even detailed “edits that need to be made” in order for the spot to run during the Super Bowl. The PETA ad depicts lingerie clad women in highly sexually suggestive poses.

“NBC claims it doesn’t allow advocacy ads, but that’s not true. They were willing to air an ad by PETA if they would simply tone down the sexual suggestiveness. Our ad is far less provocative, and hardly controversial by comparison,” said Burch.

“The purpose of our new ad is to spread a message of hope about the potential of every human life, including the life of Barack Obama,” said Burch. “We are now looking at alternative venues to run the ad over the next several weeks.”

The ad aired on BET in Chicago on Inauguration Day. It has become an Internet hit with over 700,000 views in seven days. The ad was in the top 10 ‘most viewed’ category on YouTube on Inauguration Day last week.

The ad shows an ultrasound of an unborn baby and reads: “This child’s future is a broken home. He will be abandoned by his father. His single mother will struggle to raise him. Despite the hardships he will endure … this child … will become … the 1st African-American President.” The ad concludes with the tagline, “Life: Imagine the Potential.” The ad is the first of several ads in new campaign launched by CatholicVote.org.

To express your concerns to NBC, write:

Email to: victoria.morgan@nbc.com

Senate Defeats Pro-Life Amendment to Restore Mexico City Policy on Abortion

Barack Hussein Obama has criticized the past arrogance of US foreign policy, but what could be more arrogant than sending US taxpayers' dollars by the billions to fund family planning and abortion in nations around the world? It is a policy aimed at destroying lives like his own -- poor, dark-skinned babies who would grow up in third-world countries.

The Senate has just voted on an amendment offered by Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL) to restore the Mexico City policy that was rescinded by President Obama last week. The House of Representatives will soon take up a similar measure to restore the Mexico City Policy. There are few Congressional roll call votes that offer a clearer view of where our representatives stand on this, the greatest moral issue of our day.

Pro-life organizations are urging all pro-life Americans to contact members of the Senate by going to http://www.Senate.gov and letting your Senators know what you think of your money being used to fund pro-abortion groups promoting and performing abortions overseas. See below for the Senate roll call. You are also urged to contact members of the House by going to http://www.House.gov and urging strong support for HR 708 to restore the Mexico City Policy.

Senate Vote on Pro-Life Martinez Amendment on Mexico City Policy
(Yea is a pro-life vote and Nay is a pro-abortion vote)

Alabama:	Sessions (R-AL), Yea	Shelby (R-AL), Yea
Alaska:	Begich (D-AK), Nay	Murkowski (R-AK), Nay
Arizona:	Kyl (R-AZ), Yea	McCain (R-AZ), Yea
Arkansas:	Lincoln (D-AR), Nay	Pryor (D-AR), Nay
California:	Boxer (D-CA), Nay	Feinstein (D-CA), Nay
Colorado:	Bennet (D-CO), Nay	Udall (D-CO), Nay
Connecticut:	Dodd (D-CT), Nay	Lieberman (ID-CT), Nay
Delaware:	Carper (D-DE), Nay	Kaufman (D-DE), Nay
Florida:	Martinez (R-FL), Yea	Nelson (D-FL), Nay
Georgia:	Chambliss (R-GA), Not Voting	Isakson (R-GA), Yea
Hawaii:	Akaka (D-HI), Nay	Inouye (D-HI), Nay
Idaho:	Crapo (R-ID), Yea	Risch (R-ID), Yea
Illinois:	Burris (D-IL), Nay	Durbin (D-IL), Nay
Indiana:	Bayh (D-IN), Nay	Lugar (R-IN), Yea
Iowa:	Grassley (R-IA), Yea	Harkin (D-IA), Nay
Kansas:	Brownback (R-KS), Yea	Roberts (R-KS), Yea
Kentucky:	Bunning (R-KY), Yea	McConnell (R-KY), Yea
Louisiana:	Landrieu (D-LA), Nay	Vitter (R-LA), Yea
Maine:	Collins (R-ME), Nay	Snowe (R-ME), Nay
Maryland:	Cardin (D-MD), Nay	Mikulski (D-MD), Nay
Massachusetts:	Kennedy (D-MA), Not Voting	Kerry (D-MA), Nay
Michigan:	Levin (D-MI), Nay	Stabenow (D-MI), Nay
Minnesota:	Klobuchar (D-MN), Nay
Mississippi:	Cochran (R-MS), Yea	Wicker (R-MS), Yea
Missouri:	Bond (R-MO), Yea	McCaskill (D-MO), Nay
Montana:	Baucus (D-MT), Nay	Tester (D-MT), Nay
Nebraska:	Johanns (R-NE), Yea	Nelson (D-NE), Yea
Nevada:	Ensign (R-NV), Yea	Reid (D-NV), Nay
New Hampshire:	Gregg (R-NH), Yea	Shaheen (D-NH), Nay
New Jersey:	Lautenberg (D-NJ), Nay	Menendez (D-NJ), Nay
New Mexico:	Bingaman (D-NM), Nay	Udall (D-NM), Nay
New York:	Gillibrand (D-NY), Nay	Schumer (D-NY), Nay
North Carolina:	Burr (R-NC), Yea	Hagan (D-NC), Nay
North Dakota:	Conrad (D-ND), Nay	Dorgan (D-ND), Nay
Ohio:	Brown (D-OH), Nay	Voinovich (R-OH), Yea
Oklahoma:	Coburn (R-OK), Yea	Inhofe (R-OK), Yea
Oregon:	Merkley (D-OR), Nay	Wyden (D-OR), Nay
Pennsylvania:	Casey (D-PA), Nay	Specter (R-PA), Nay
Rhode Island:	Reed (D-RI), Nay	Whitehouse (D-RI), Nay
South Carolina:	DeMint (R-SC), Yea	Graham (R-SC), Yea
South Dakota:	Johnson (D-SD), Nay	Thune (R-SD), Yea
Tennessee:	Alexander (R-TN), Yea	Corker (R-TN), Yea
Texas:	Cornyn (R-TX), Yea	Hutchison (R-TX), Yea
Utah:	Bennett (R-UT), Yea	Hatch (R-UT), Yea
Vermont:	Leahy (D-VT), Nay	Sanders (I-VT), Nay
Virginia:	Warner (D-VA), Nay	Webb (D-VA), Nay
Washington:	Cantwell (D-WA), Nay	Murray (D-WA), Nay
West Virginia:	Byrd (D-WV), Nay	Rockefeller (D-WV), Nay
Wisconsin:	Feingold (D-WI), Nay	Kohl (D-WI), Nay
Wyoming:	Barrasso (R-WY), Yea	Enzi (R-WY), Yea

Lindsey to the Rescue Again, Supports Holder Nomination

From The Hill
By Alexander Bolton

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted Wednesday to advance the nomination of Eric Holder to become President Obama’s attorney general.

Six Republicans voted with Democrats in favor of Holder, assuring him of confirmation by the full Senate. Holder would become the first African-American to serve as attorney general.

Holder made headlines and won applause from Democrats when he declared the practice of waterboarding akin to torture and illegal. The stance drew Republican opposition, however, notably from National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman John Cornyn (Texas).

Cornyn and Sen. Tom Coburn (Okla.) were the only two Republicans to vote against Holder.

Holder also became embroiled in controversy because of his role in former President Clinton’s decision to pardon fugitive financier Marc Rich and members of a militant Puerto Rican separatist group. The nominee was deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration at the time.

Holder said he regretted his role in approving the Rich pardon but defended the decision on the Puerto Rican nationalists, which he called “reasonable” despite strong GOP criticism highlighting their links to domestic terrorist attacks in the '70s.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (Utah), the second-ranking Republican on Judiciary and a former chairman of the panel, was the first Republican to voice support for Holder, giving him a major boost.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) was the next Republican on Judiciary to line up behind Holder, telling reporters on the day of Holder’s confirmation hearing that he would support the nominee.

Graham said he appreciated Holder’s recognition that the nation is at war and that suspected terrorists should be treated as enemy combatants.

On Tuesday, Holder received the support of Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.), the ranking Republican on Judiciary, who clashed with Holder at his confirmation hearing. Specter questioned Holder’s ability to maintain his independence in the Obama administration.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), who had expressed serious reservations about Holder before his hearing, also voted for Holder.

“I think he’s indicated that he understands that error,” Sessions said of the Rich pardon.

Cornyn, one of the few Republicans to vote against Holder, said he was “left with doubts about his judgment and independence,” citing the Rich pardon. Cornyn said he suspected Holder approved the pardon to give Clinton “the answer he wanted.”

Cornyn also questioned Holder’s ability to lead the Justice Department while national security officials are pursuing international terrorists. Bush administration officials argued that waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques were necessary to obtain intelligence.

Leahy said Holder could receive a vote before the full Senate as early as Thursday.

Blessings Of A Catholic Education

The Lyceum, providing excellent Catholic classical education in Cleveland, Ohio.

From The Bulletin
By Andrew T. Seeley, Ph.D.

Next week Catholics around the country will be taking time to celebrate the blessings their schools have been, not only for the Catholic Church, but for our nation. Catholic schools have served millions students of many faiths. From the earliest schools established in Florida and California by Spanish missionaries, to the diocesan system begun by Bishop St. John Neumann in Philadelphia, to the schools founded by the Jesuits and other religious orders, Catholic schools have provided students of diverse backgrounds a strong education in a religious environment marked by charity, joy and commitment to the truth. And thanks to the great personal sacrifices of educators and church members, Catholic schools have served the poor and immigrants in a particularly admirable way throughout the years.

Jesus told his followers that they should be like “the head of a household who can bring from his store both the new and the old.” Over the last quarter of a century, schools like Regina Coeli Academy in Wyndmoor and Regina Angelorum in Wynnewood have done just this by embracing what has become known as “classical education.”

Classical schools take for their model the kind of education that formed great men such as Benjamin Franklin and William Shakespeare. Schools at that time had one great goal: to pass on to their students the wisdom and glory of the past so that they could do great things themselves.

As young men, they learned to understand and appreciate the works of Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, and Cicero. Anyone who has read the correspondence of men like Adams or public letters such as the Federalist Papers are frequently struck by how much our Founding Fathers drew on the wisdom of the past in bringing forth a “new nation conceived in liberty.”

This view of the past is out of step with modern assumptions, but all the more necessary because of that. Classical education begins from an admiration of the wisdom and achievements of the past 3,000 years. Our future will be brighter if our young learn about anger and pity from Achilles and Hector, sin and purgation from Dante, the strength of virtue and the weakness of corruption from the Roman Republic, the suffering of old age from King Lear, fidelity and leadership from George Washington.

By contrast, today’s young people are not far removed from thinking that people lived in a black-and-white world until the advent of color television! Encouraged by progressive theories of education, they finish with just enough knowledge of the past to wonder at its ignorance, intolerance and prejudice. Bach might be a name to them, but his fame in the musical world utterly incomprehensible.

Classical education gives students a great deal of confidence, the confidence that, though evil has always existed, so much that is good and true and beautiful has flourished and endured. This is a firm foundation on which to base the work that needs to be done in bettering the world as it is now.

The classical form of education never leaves students in the past; rather, it gives students the tools they need to make today’s world better. “The Well-Trained Mind” is one way to express the classical devotion to improving the most important strengths of young people. Classical schools work to develop retentive memories, clear thinking, fertile imaginations. Students are trained in the Trivium — the arts of grammar, logic and rhetoric — that gives them the power to express their ideas forcefully, beautifully, persuasively.

Catholic classical schools add to this by additionally infusing and handing down to its students Catholic culture. Catholics have a lot to be proud of in their cultural heritage: works of art, thought and imagination, and true, heroic stories of saints from throughout history. Students in Catholic classical schools come to know St. Augustine and St. Monica, his mother; the role the Benedictines played in forming Christian Europe from the remnants of great Rome and the barbarian hordes that destroyed it; St. Thomas Aquinas and his great labor to explain and defend the truths of the Catholic Faith; St. Philip Neri, the Apostle of Joy, who renewed sanctity in the Church during the Catholic Counter-Reformation; St. Junipero Serra and the great work of bringing the Gospel to the Americas.

They become familiar with the great works of Catholic art, music and literature: Gothic cathedrals, Gregorian chant, medieval icons, Palestrina’s motets, Mozart’s symphonies and operas; and so much else. They become proud of the Church that has always encouraged the life of the mind, brought forth the works of Copernicus and Galileo, and that founded the great universities of Europe and elementary and high schools throughout North America.

Not only is it fitting this week to celebrate the past and current educational achievements of Catholic schools, but also to celebrate the emerging of Catholic classical schools and their contribution to our communities and nation.


Andrew T. Seeley, Ph.D. is executive director of The Institute for Catholic Liberal Education and a tutor at Thomas Aquinas College in California. For more information, visit, CatholicLiberalEducation.com.

The Post-Neuhaus Future of Evangelicals and Catholics Together

Charles Colson says the convert to Catholicism helped break down the most important barrier.


From Christianity Today
Interview By Susan Wunderink


When Richard John Neuhaus died January 8, Prison Fellowship's Charles Colson didn't just lose a friend of 25 years. He also lost his partner in convening Evangelicals and Catholics Together. Since its first publication in 1994, "The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium," the group has issued other consensus statements on salvation, the relationship between Scripture and tradition, the communion of saints, and other issues. It is next set to issue a document on Mary, the Mother of Jesus. But can the movement continue without its chief Roman Catholic architect? Christianity Today international editor Susan Wunderink asked Colson, a Christianity Today columnist, what lies ahead.

How will Neuhaus' death affect Evangelicals and Catholics together?

It's a terrible setback because Cardinal Avery Dulles died a month before Neuhaus died. It was like a double-barreled blow. They were the principal leaders on the Catholic side of the dialogue. In some respects, those are two giants of the faith that you can't replace. But God in his sovereignty, his providence, knows exactly what he's doing.

The timing of Neuhaus's and Dulles's deaths is really significant when you realize that Pope Benedict on November 19 in what was otherwise a routine audience in St. Peter's square, gave a homily on justification and fully embraced the position that Evangelicals and Catholics Together had taken [in the 1997 document, "Gift of Salvation"]. He didn't identify it as such, but that's what he did.

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School Can Expel Lesbian Students, Court Rules

An appeals panel finds California Lutheran High School in Riverside County is not a business and therefore doesn't have to comply with a state law barring discrimination based on sexual orientation.

From The Los Angeles Times
By Maura Dolan

Reporting from San Francisco -- After a Lutheran school expelled two 16-year-old girls for having "a bond of intimacy" that was "characteristic of a lesbian relationship," the girls sued, contending the school had violated a state anti-discrimination law.

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Fifty Years On: Time to Revisit and Reform the Second Vatican Catastrophe

Perhaps never in world history have so many denied a catastrophe so terrible and painfully obvious -- that the so called "reforms" of the Second Vatican Council wreaked havoc, division and destruction on the Church at the very time in history when assurance, unity and evangelism have been most needed. As has been true throughout its history, it was not the faith that needed reforming, but personal behavior, and that personal, interior renewal, within all her members, is an enduring need. To our view, Gerald Warner states the obvious. More importantly, it also appears to be the view of this great Pope.

From The Telegraph
By Gerald Warner

Benedict XVI grows in stature as his reign progresses. To the momentous achievement of the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, freeing the Tridentine Mass, he has now added the sagacious and just lifting of the excommunications imposed on the four bishops of the Society of St Pius X.

Although there was widespread scepticism about the validity of those censures, their lifting removes a roadblock to the restoration of the Church after the damage wrought by the Second Vatican Catastrophe. Not everyone is happy about the pardoning of the bishops. The staff of The Tablet are rumoured to be on suicide watch, while the malign spirit of those who, without any conscious irony, denominate themselves "liberals" was well illustrated by Gianni Gennari, an Italian journalist.

Gennari is a laicized priest, now married. Fighting back tears, he responded to news of the lifting of the excommunications: "It is a tragedy, the complete debacle of the Church!... I am disappointed, stunned, scandalised... In this case there is no place for the mercy of Christ"... Of course not. The Modernists have always excluded from any kind of mercy those faithful Catholics who adhere unreservedly to the Deposit of Faith. Anything that reduces the likes of Gennari to tears has to be good news.

Over the past few days, some blinkeredly optimistic souls have been trying - without much real hope - to persuade Catholics to "celebrate" the 50^th anniversary of the announcement of the Second Vatican Council. This was the great "renewal", when the Holy Ghost inspired the Church to aggiornamento, or modernisation. What form has that Renewal taken?

In England and Wales in 1964, at the end of the Council, there were 137,673 Catholic baptisms; in 2003 the figure was 56,180. In 1964 there were 45,592 Catholic marriages, in 2003 there were 11,013. Mass attendance has fallen by 40 per cent. In "Holy" Ireland, only 48 per cent of so-called Catholics go to Mass. In France, there were 35,000 priests in 1980; today there are fewer than 19,000. Renewal?

In the United States, in 1965, there were 1,575 priestly ordinations; in 2002 there were 450 - a 350 per cent decline. In 1965 there were 49,000 seminarians, in 2002 just 4,700. Today 15 per cent of US parishes are without priests. Only 25 per cent of America's nominal Catholics attend Mass. Worse still is the erosion of faith among those who ludicrously describe themselves as Catholics. Among US Catholics aged 18-44 (the children of Vatican II) as many as 70 per cent say they believe the Eucharist is merely a "symbolic reminder" of Christ.

To describe this unprecedented collapse of the Church as "renewal" is insane; to attribute it to the operation of the Holy Ghost is blasphemous. The Catholic Church is in the same position as an alcoholic: until it admits to the problem, no cure is possible. The problem is Vatican II.

Pope Benedict himself has expressed reservations about at least one Council document. The only remotely celebratory response to the Council's 50^th anniversary would be to appoint a commission of orthodox theologians to scrutinise all of Vatican II's documents and correct their errors. It is time to revisit and reform this council that has brought forth such poisonous fruits.

Orthodox Church Elects Modernizer as Patriarch

Reconciliation sought with Roman Catholics

From The Washington Times
By Mansur Mirovalev ASSOCIATED PRESS

The interim leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, seen as a modernizer who could seek a historic reconciliation with the Vatican and more autonomy from the state, was overwhelmingly elected patriarch Tuesday.

Metropolitan Kirill received 508 of the 700 votes cast during an all-day church congress in Moscow's ornate Christ the Savior Cathedral, the head of the commission responsible for the election, Metropolitan Isidor, said hours after the secret ballot was over.

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Arab TV Gets First Obama Interview

Lindsey Graham Supports Tax Cheat for Treasury Secretary

Get used to it South Carolina; Lindsey Graham (RINO-Seneca) just can't say no to big black men.

He just voted to confirm an admitted tax cheat to serve as the nation's chief financial officer and oversee the printing of money and the collection of taxes. On the big issues where Senator DeMint will be voting as a principled, South Carolina conservative, Lindsey Graham will be canceling out that vote and voting with the Senators from Massachusetts. Even liberals like Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) voted against Timothy Geithner. Not Graham! He was with Obama and the socialist agenda.

Here at Sunlit Uplands we urged you to dump the quisling and nominate Buddy Whitherspoon. We then had the chance to elect a Democrat, Bob Conley, who is as conservative as Senator DeMint and would be voting with him in representing South Carolina views. Instead, you sent this not-so-closeted liberal back to be a critical vote as Barack Obama imposes the most destructive agenda America has ever seen.

At what point will you demand that he stop? Will there be any issue on which he will go too far? What will it take for you to support a recall? We were criticized for referring to this embarrassment as Massachusetts' third Senator. How many times will he vote with Ted Kennedy before you feel betrayed and realize he does not represent you?

Signs and Wonders in Week One of the Obama Era

From American Thinker
By J. R. Dunn

Last week I enjoyed the honor of having my essay on "Bush and the Bush Haters" featured on both Democratic Underground and Daily Kos. Glancing over the comments (along with those in a similar vein on RealClearPolitics) I saw that with few exceptions, they were the standard run of viciousness, nastiness, and obscenity that we've grown used to from the left in recent years. But there was another quality too, one that took me a little while to identify. What struck me at last was this: the left are not acting like winners.

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What I Learned from Dad

The following is a poignant reminder that parents are one's first and most important teachers, and the dinner table is the most effective place to change the world.

From The Globe and Mail (Canada)
By Daniel Goodwin

No matter how much he tries, no matter how gifted with empathy he is, no matter how naturally sensitive, a man can never fully understand or appreciate his father until he has become one himself.

Every son must have some regret about his father — at least it's a rare son that doesn't. The litany is well known: He wasn't around enough or wasn't affectionate enough. He was there but was a domineering tyrant. He didn't support your career choice. He was too focused on his own career. He left his wife (and more importantly, your mother). He didn't leave but should have.

When it comes to my father, my biggest regret, the only regret that I remember, is that he died too soon. He lived a good, long life, dying almost nine years ago at 83 of prostate cancer. But he was 54 when I was born, and he never got to meet my son and daughter.

My father, like all fathers (it must be in the paternal DNA), worked hard to pass down his wisdom to his progeny. At the time, I didn't appreciate it much. The fathers of my friends all seemed to have good, solid, practical talents, whether it was teaching their sons how to play hockey, fix cars or repair their homes.

I must admit that my father did teach me how to swim and ride a bike. We even threw the ball around a bit when I was a kid, but he didn't teach me many practical things.

I still remember turning 12 and hoping for something fun and useful for my birthday. Instead, my dad came home from work and proudly handed me a collection of Hemingway short stories, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye.

My father loved books. The walls of many rooms in our home were lined with bookshelves. History. Philosophy. Poetry. Politics. Novels. Biographies. Short Stories. Essays. Plays.

I still remember my 12-year-old sense of disappointment when my father handed me those books, but now, more than 25 years later, they're one of my favourite birthday presents.

My father was well read and had an immense vocabulary, but his daunting grasp of the English language came with a light touch. He'd use polysyllabic and obscure words in almost every conversation, but so gently that you could almost always figure out what he meant.

His erudition had, at least as far as his sons were concerned, a supremely annoying side. When my younger brother and I were growing up and would go to my father with a problem, there was never any simple commiseration, no fatherly "You'll do better next time."

Instead, every mundane childhood problem was addressed through recourse to a plot situation or character in something or other by Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, Hemingway or others from the Western canon: "Well, you're not alone in feeling that way. That's exactly how Odysseus felt when he couldn't get home for 10 years."

As I grew older, I came to realize that despite this annoying habit of relating almost every personal challenge to some plotline in a book, my father did offer some practical advice, advice that I remember every time I look at my son and daughter.

My dad excelled at enjoying himself, no matter where he was or what he was doing, or what was happening to him. One of his favourite phrases, the closest thing he had to a motto, was: "Enjoy yourself."

True to form, it operated for him on more than one level. Enjoy who you are, your talents, your thoughts, your foibles, your strengths, your challenges, your character.

In my more reductive moments, I sometimes think there are only two lessons in life: First you learn how to live and then you learn how to die.

If this is true, my father put his learning to the test. As he lay dying in a lot of pain, he relished the novelty of the experience. He had never died before and he was darn well going to enjoy every last minute of it.

As for living, my father taught me many lessons. Work at what you like and then it won't be work. Books and words are important. Do what's right, not what gives social or economic status or what others expect or what might be in fashion.

Tell the truth, not what you think others want to hear. Be curious, like a child. Take care of your family. Be there for your friends. Whatever you decide to do, do it as well as you can. Teaching is an honourable calling, whether it's your profession or not.

Don't complain. Be grateful. Accept praise and criticism with the same grace. And, most importantly, enjoy yourself.

When I see my young son and daughter laughing, telling jokes, rhyming off words and making puns, I think of you, Dad. Wherever you are, enjoy yourself.

Daniel Goodwin lives in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada.

US Economy Predicted to Collapse Under Socialism

From OneNewsNow
By Pete Chagnon

A U.K. official says his predictions of economic collapse are coming to pass.

The Telegraph is reporting that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has brought the country to the brink of bankruptcy. Christopher Monckton, the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, agrees. He says the Labor Party's continual borrowing for social programs is to blame.

"Every Labor government there has ever been from 1926 to the present day has always ended in exactly the same way because they essentially try to run a communist financial system," he contends, "and it doesn't work any better here than it worked in the Soviet Union."

He adds that hope does not trump experience. "We have politicians who simply haven't had enough experience in the real world before going into politics to know how things run, to know how many beans make five," Monckton notes.

Monckton says U.K. markets are starting to realize that tax revenue is collapsing, which in turn makes investment in debt undesirable.

"So you've got government revenues collapsing and government expenditures rocketing because not only do they have to pay the cost of unemployment and other very lavish benefits for people who are no longer employed," he points out, "they're also having to pay eye-wateringly large sums to bail out the banks whom overspending and over-regulation drove under."

He believes the U.S. is poised for the same collapse should they hold fast to a doctrine of socialism.

"She is a large, and for the time being, a relatively prosperous nation, and I think that the likelihood I'm afraid is that Obama is going to change that for the worse. He has all the kindliness intentions I have no doubt; the left usually do," he adds. "They would love to have motherhood and apple pie, as would we all. But they are so busy working out how to distribute the apple pie, that they never think about the people who are going to have to roll up their sleeves and bake it. And that's the difficulty with socialism. It is all about redistribution and not about generation of wealth."

Monckton says both the U.K. and the U.S. need to return to Margaret Thatcher's "handbag economics," or living within a person's means.

"What it meant was that you always knew you had enough to buy your baked beans because you were careful with your money," he concludes. "And if the government is careful with the people's money, then the people can prosper."

9-11 Families Upset Over Obama Guantanamo Decision

Urge President to reverse his decision to suspend the trial of five detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

From Associated Press

Three families of firefighters killed at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 want to meet with President Barack Obama to urge him to reverse his decision to suspend the trial of five detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who admit roles in the terror attacks.

In a meeting with reporters at their attorney's office on Sunday, the families deplored what they called "delays and confusion" in the former Bush administration's effort to prosecute suspects in the 2001 attacks, which killed about 3,000 people, saying they want "a firm commitment" that the same process won't continue under Obama.

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Catholic Schools Week: An Opportunity and a Suggestion

This week is the thirty-sixth annual "Catholic Schools Week" throughout the United States.

I have written previously about the history, mission and importance of these schools. This week offers an opportunity for anyone who is curious, whether you are Catholic or not, and whether you have school-aged children or not, to visit these schools, observe classes, and talk to the teachers and principal. You would be warmly welcomed.

Every Catholic school is a unique community with its own charism, history and traditions, but what they share has made them a vital safety valve in America's inner-cities, where more than half of all students entering public high schools drop out. They are also chosen by many hundreds of thousands of suburban and rural parents who believe that moral, spiritual and character formation are at least as important as one's academic development, and are an essential part of a complete education.

For those who have the time, I would suggest that along with a visit to your local Catholic school, you consider asking the local public school authorities for the opportunity to visit at least one of the local public schools for which you pay. We would be pleased to publish your findings.

The Australian Military Tattoo - Massed Bands Finale - "Highland Cathedral"

"Land of my fathers, we will always be
Faithful and loyal to our own country.
In times of danger we will set you free,
Lead you to glory and to victory."

Cristina Piccardi - "Laudate Dominum" by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

(After video begins, click arrow at lower right, above, and select "HQ" for high quality video)

English Translation:

Praise the Lord, all you nations;

Praise Him, all peoples.

For He has bestowed His mercy upon us,

And the truth of the Lord endures forever.

Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.

As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be,

World without end.

Amen.

Who Stole Our Culture?

The following column is an excerpt from Dr. Ted Baehr and Pat Boone's book "The Culture-wise Family: Upholding Christian Values in a Mass Media World." It provides an excellent overview of how, over the course of a century, Marxists subverted a Christian culture and laid the foundation for the election of a Marxist President of the United States. The following is Chapter 10 of that book, written by historian William S. Lind.

Sometime during the last half-century, someone stole our culture. Just 50 years ago, in the 1950s, America was a great place. It was safe. It was decent. Children got good educations in the public schools. Even blue-collar fathers brought home middle-class incomes, so moms could stay home with the kids. Television shows reflected sound, traditional values.

Where did it all go? How did that America become the sleazy, decadent place we live in today – so different that those who grew up prior to the '60s feel like it's a foreign country? Did it just "happen"?

It didn't just "happen." In fact, a deliberate agenda was followed to steal our culture and leave a new and very different one in its place. The story of how and why is one of the most important parts of our nation's history – and it is a story almost no one knows. The people behind it wanted it that way.

What happened, in short, is that America's traditional culture, which had grown up over generations from our Western, Judeo-Christian roots, was swept aside by an ideology. We know that ideology best as "political correctness" or "multi-culturalism." It really is cultural Marxism, Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms in an effort that goes back not to the 1960s, but to World War I. Incredible as it may seem, just as the old economic Marxism of the Soviet Union has faded away, a new cultural Marxism has become the ruling ideology of America's elites. The No. 1 goal of that cultural Marxism, since its creation, has been the destruction of Western culture and the Christian religion.

To understand anything, we have to know its history. To understand who stole our culture, we need to take a look at the history of "political correctness."

Early Marxist theory

Before World War I, Marxist theory said that if Europe ever erupted in war, the working classes in every European country would rise in revolt, overthrow their governments and create a new Communist Europe. But when war broke out in the summer of 1914, that didn't happen. Instead, the workers in every European country lined up by the millions to fight their country's enemies. Finally, in 1917, a Communist revolution did occur, in Russia. But attempts to spread that revolution to other countries failed because the workers did not support it.

After World War I ended in 1918, Marxist theorists had to ask themselves the question: What went wrong? As good Marxists, they could not admit Marxist theory had been incorrect. Instead, two leading Marxist intellectuals, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary (Lukacs was considered the most brilliant Marxist thinker since Marx himself) independently came up with the same answer. They said that Western culture and the Christian religion had so blinded the working class to its true, Marxist class interests, that a Communist revolution was impossible in the West, until both could be destroyed. That objective, established as cultural Marxism's goal right at the beginning, has never changed.

A new strategy

Gramsci famously laid out a strategy for destroying Christianity and Western culture, one that has proven all too successful. Instead of calling for a Communist revolution up front, as in Russia, he said Marxists in the West should take political power last, after a "long march through the institutions" – the schools, the media, even the churches, every institution that could influence the culture. That "long march through the institutions" is what America has experienced, especially since the 1960s. Fortunately, Mussolini recognized the danger Gramsci posed and jailed him. His influence remained small until the 1960s, when his works, especially the "Prison Notebooks," were rediscovered.

Georg Lukacs proved more influential. In 1918, he became deputy commissar for culture in the short-lived Bela Kun Bolshevik regime in Hungary. There, asking, "Who will save us from Western civilization?" he instituted what he called "cultural terrorism." One of its main components was introducing sex education into Hungarian schools. Lukacs realized that if he could destroy the country's traditional sexual morals, he would have taken a giant step toward destroying its traditional culture and Christian faith.

Far from rallying to Lukacs' "cultural terrorism," the Hungarian working class was so outraged by it that when Romania invaded Hungary, the workers would not fight for the Bela Kun government, and it fell. Lukacs disappeared, but not for long. In 1923, he turned up at a "Marxist Study Week" in Germany, a program sponsored by a young Marxist named Felix Weil who had inherited millions. Weil and the others who attended that study week were fascinated by Lukacs' cultural perspective on Marxism.

The Frankfurt School

Weil responded by using some of his money to set up a new think tank at Frankfurt University in Frankfurt, Germany. Originally it was to be called the "Institute for Marxism." But the cultural Marxists realized they could be far more effective if they concealed their real nature and objectives. They convinced Weil to give the new institute a neutral-sounding name, the "Institute for Social Research." Soon known simply as the "Frankfurt School," the Institute for Social Research would become the place where political correctness, as we now know it, was developed. The basic answer to the question "Who stole our culture?" is the cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School.

At first, the Institute worked mainly on conventional Marxist issues such as the labor movement. But in 1930, that changed dramatically. That year, the Institute was taken over by a new director, a brilliant young Marxist intellectual named Max Horkheimer. Horkheimer had been strongly influenced by Georg Lukacs. He immediately set to work to turn the Frankfurt School into the place where Lukacs' pioneering work on cultural Marxism could be developed further into a full-blown ideology.

To that end, he brought some new members into the Frankfurt School. Perhaps the most important was Theodor Adorno, who would become Horkheimer's most creative collaborator. Other new members included two psychologists, Eric Fromm and Wilhelm Reich, who were noted promoters of feminism and matriarchy, and a young graduate student named Herbert Marcuse.

Advances in cultural Marxism

With the help of this new blood, Horkheimer made three major advances in the development of cultural Marxism. First, he broke with Marx's view that culture was merely part of society's "superstructure," which was determined by economic factors. He said that on the contrary, culture was an independent and very important factor in shaping a society.

Second, again contrary to Marx, he announced that in the future, the working class would not be the agent of revolution. He left open the question of who would play that role – a question Marcuse answered in the 1950s.

Third, Horkheimer and the other Frankfurt School members decided that the key to destroying Western culture was to cross Marx with Freud. They argued that just as workers were oppressed under capitalism, so under Western culture, everyone lived in a constant state of psychological repression. "Liberating" everyone from that repression became one of cultural Marxism's main goals. Even more important, they realized that psychology offered them a far more powerful tool than philosophy for destroying Western culture: psychological conditioning.

Today, when Hollywood's cultural Marxists want to "normalize" something like homosexuality (thus "liberating" us from "repression"), they put on television show after television show where the only normal-seeming white male is a homosexual. That is how psychological conditioning works; people absorb the lessons the cultural Marxists want them to learn without even knowing they are being taught.

The Frankfurt School was well on the way to creating political correctness. Then suddenly, fate intervened. In 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, where the Frankfurt School was located. Since the Frankfurt School was Marxist, and the Nazis hated Marxism, and since almost all its members were Jewish, it decided to leave Germany. In 1934, the Frankfurt School, including its leading members from Germany, was re-established in New York City with help from Columbia University. Soon, its focus shifted from destroying traditional Western culture in Germany to doing so in the United States. It would prove all too successful.

New developments

Taking advantage of American hospitality, the Frankfurt School soon resumed its intellectual work to create cultural Marxism. To its earlier achievements in Germany, it added these new developments.

Critical Theory

To serve its purpose of "negating" Western culture, the Frankfurt School developed a powerful tool it called "Critical Theory." What was the theory? The theory was to criticize. By subjecting every traditional institution, starting with family, to endless, unremitting criticism (the Frankfurt School was careful never to define what it was for, only what it was against), it hoped to bring them down. Critical Theory is the basis for the "studies" departments that now inhabit American colleges and universities. Not surprisingly, those departments are the home turf of academic political correctness.

Studies in prejudice

The Frankfurt School sought to define traditional attitudes on every issue as "prejudice" in a series of academic studies that culminated in Adorno's immensely influential book, "The Authoritarian Personality," published in 1950. They invented a bogus "F-scale" that purported to tie traditional beliefs on sexual morals, relations between men and women and questions touching on the family to support for fascism. Today, the favorite term the politically correct use for anyone who disagrees with them is "fascist."

Domination

The Frankfurt School again departed from orthodox Marxism, which argued that all of history was determined by who owned the means of production. Instead, they said history was determined by which groups, defined as men, women, races, religions, etc., had power or "dominance" over other groups. Certain groups, especially white males, were labeled "oppressors," while other groups were defined as "victims." Victims were automatically good, oppressors bad, just by what group they came from, regardless of individual behavior.

Though Marxists, the members of the Frankfurt School also drew from Nietzsche (someone else they admired for his defiance of traditional morals was the Marquis de Sade). They incorporated into their cultural Marxism what Nietzsche called the "transvaluation of all values." What that means, in plain English, is that all the old sins become virtues, and all the old virtues become sins. Homosexuality is a fine and good thing, but anyone who thinks men and women should have different social roles is an evil "fascist." That is what political correctness now teaches children in public schools all across America. (The Frankfurt School wrote about American public education. It said it did not matter if school children learned any skills or any facts. All that mattered was that they graduate from the schools with the right "attitudes" on certain questions.)

Media and entertainment

Led by Adorno, the Frankfurt School initially opposed the culture industry, which they thought "commodified" culture. Then, they started to listen to Walter Benjamin, a close friend of Horkheimer and Adorno, who argued that cultural Marxism could make powerful use of tools like radio, film and later television to psychologically condition the public. Benjamin's view prevailed, and Horkheimer and Adorno spent the World War II years in Hollywood. It is no accident that the entertainment industry is now cultural Marxism's most powerful weapon.

The growth of Marxism in the United States

After World War II and the defeat of the Nazis, Horkheimer, Adorno and most of the other members of the Frankfurt School returned to Germany, where the Institute re-established itself in Frankfurt with the help of the American occupation authorities. Cultural Marxism in time became the unofficial but all-pervasive ideology of the Federal Republic of Germany.

But hell had not forgotten the United States. Herbert Marcuse remained here, and he set about translating the very difficult academic writings of other members of the Frankfurt School into simpler terms Americans could easily grasp. His book "Eros and Civilization" used the Frankfurt School's crossing of Marx with Freud to argue that if we would only "liberate non-procreative eros" through "polymorphous perversity," we could create a new paradise where there would be only play and no work. "Eros and Civilization" became one of the main texts of the New Left in the 1960s.

Marcuse also widened the Frankfurt School's intellectual work. In the early 1930s, Horkheimer had left open the question of who would replace the working class as the agent of Marxist revolution. In the 1950s, Marcuse answered the question, saying it would be a coalition of students, blacks, feminist women and homosexuals – the core of the student rebellion of the 1960s, and the sacred "victims groups" of political correctness today. Marcuse further took one of political correctness's favorite words, "tolerance," and gave it a new meaning. He defined "liberating tolerance" as tolerance for all ideas and movements coming from the left, and intolerance for all ideas and movements coming from the right. When you hear the cultural Marxists today call for "tolerance," they mean Marcuse's "liberating tolerance" (just as when they call for "diversity," they mean uniformity of belief in their ideology).

The student rebellion of the 1960s, driven largely by opposition to the draft for the Vietnam War, gave Marcuse a historic opportunity. As perhaps its most famous "guru," he injected the Frankfurt School's cultural Marxism into the baby boom generation. Of course, they did not understand what it really was. As was true from the Institute's beginning, Marcuse and the few other people "in the know" did not advertise that political correctness and multi-culturalism were a form of Marxism. But the effect was devastating: a whole generation of Americans, especially the university-educated elite, absorbed cultural Marxism as their own, accepting a poisonous ideology that sought to destroy America's traditional culture and Christian faith. That generation, which runs every elite institution in America, now wages a ceaseless war on all traditional beliefs and institutions. They have largely won that war. Most of America's traditional culture lies in ruins.

A counter-strategy

Now you know who stole our culture. The question is, what are we, as Christians and as cultural conservatives, going to do about it?

We can choose between two strategies. The first is to try to retake the existing institutions – the public schools, the universities, the media, the entertainment industry and most of the mainline churches – from the cultural Marxists. They expect us to try to do that, they are ready for it, and we would find ourselves, with but small voice and few resources compared to theirs, making a frontal assault against prepared defensive positions. Any soldier can tell you what that almost always leads to: defeat.

There is another, more promising strategy. We can separate ourselves and our families from the institutions the cultural Marxists control and build new institutions for ourselves, institutions that reflect and will help us recover our traditional Western culture.

Several years ago, my colleague Paul Weyrich wrote an open letter to the conservative movement suggesting this strategy. While most other conservative (really Republican) leaders demurred, his letter resonated powerfully with grass-roots conservatives. Many of them are already part of a movement to secede from the corrupt, dominant culture and create parallel institutions: the homeschooling movement. Similar movements are beginning to offer sound alternatives in other aspects of life, including movements to promote small, often organic family farms and to develop community markets for those farms' products. If Brave New World's motto is "Think globally, act locally," ours should be "Think locally, act locally."

Thus, our strategy for undoing what cultural Marxism has done to America has a certain parallel to its own strategy, as Gramsci laid it out so long ago. Gramsci called for Marxists to undertake a "long march through the institutions." Our counter-strategy would be a long march to create our own institutions. It will not happen quickly, or easily. It will be the work of generations – as was theirs. They were patient, because they knew the "inevitable forces of history" were on their side. Can we not be equally patient, and persevering, knowing that the Maker of history is on ours?

William S. Lind has a B.A. in History from Dartmouth College and an M.A., also in History, from Princeton University. He serves as director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism of the Free Congress Foundation in Washington, D.C., and as a vestryman at St. James Anglican Church in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio.

Miranda Rights Apply to Terrorists, says Obama

From OneNewsNow
By Chad Groening

An author and expert on Islam is concerned that President Obama's decision to suspend military tribunals being conducted at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility could lead to a policy where U.S. soldiers might have to read captured enemy combatants their Miranda rights on the battlefield.

Recently a military judge agreed to Barack Obama's request to suspend the Guantanamo war crimes trial of Omar Khadr, who is accused of killing an American soldier with a grenade in Afghanistan in 2002. It is the first in a series of delays sought by Obama as his administration reviews the legal system for prosecuting alleged terrorists.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch, a project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He fears the Obama administration could adopt a policy that could seriously hinder soldiers on the battlefield.

"It creates an absurd situation because then we're facing the prospect of people being arrested on the battlefield and read their Miranda rights. And then people who are fighting wars -- soldiers -- will have to decide whether or not they can take action against the enemy or whether they will have to let them go because they won't be able to prove their case against him in a civilian court," he explains. "So it creates a ridiculous situation that will ultimately lead to military defeat."

Spencer points out that there is a great deal of evidence that Khadr is not only guilty of jihadist activities, but that his family also has been deeply involved with Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaida for years. He does not believe the suspect should have access to the U.S. court system.

Vatican Inaugurates YouTube Channel

From Catholic World News

The Vatican has launched its own YouTube channel, to offer daily news items and messages from the Holy Father. Vatican officials said that the channel was designed to take advantage of a popular new method of communications and also to exert some control over the use of the Pope's image, which is already being used by other internet sites-- sometimes without permission and for purposes hostile to the interests of the Church. The new Vatican YouTube channel-- available in English, Spanish, German, and Italian-- will feature short daily features and links to other Vatican resources. The initiative was launched on the same day that the Vatican released the text of Pope Benedict's message for the 43rd World Day of Social Communications [see today's CWN feature for more detail on that papal document]; in that text the Pontiff concentrated on the potential power of new communications technology in advancing the Gospel message.

Source(s): these links will take you to other sites, in a new window.

• The Vatican (YouTube)
• Vatican launches Pope YouTube channel (AP)
• New news channel on the Holy Father (VIS)

Obama to Reverse Mexico City Policy Today

Do you think it has ever occurred to this murderous ideologue that while African-Americans are 12% of the population, they account for 34% of the children killed by abortion? He must want to ensure that plenty of brown and yellow babies are included in the holocaust.

From Catholic World News

President Barack Obama will sign an executive order today reversing the Mexico City Policy instituted by President Ronald Reagan in 1984. Despite widespread media predictions, President Obama did not reverse the Mexico City Policy yesterday, the anniversary of the US Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade. President Bill Clinton had rescinded the policy on January 22, 1993; President George W. Bush had restored the policy on January 22, 2001.

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Obama White House Transparent as Mud

One can almost take pleasure in seeing the MSM awaking to the realization that their necks are also under the boot of the "liberal" fascism they helped impose on America.

Obama press aide gets bashed in debut

From The Washington Times
By Joseph Curl

The White House press operation got off to a fumbling and stumbling start Thursday, with the day's opening briefers insisting on being identified only as "senior administration officials," followed swiftly by the new president's spokesman accidentally outing one of the secret aides less than two minutes into his first White House briefing.

Although President Obama swept into office pledging transparency and a new air of openness, the press hammered spokesman Robert Gibbs for nearly an hour over a slate of perceived secretive slights that have piled up quickly for the new administration. It wasn't pretty.

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Hundreds of Thousands March for Life, Pro-Life People Invigorated to Stop Obama

From LifeNews.com
By Steven Ertelt

Hundreds of thousands of pro-life advocates marched for life today in the nation's capital and they displayed a renewed vigor to stop abortions. it appeared in the excitement in the crowd that the election of Barack Obama had one silver lining, the ability to motivate millions of pro-life advocates to get to work.

Congressman Chris Smith, who has been a pro-life leader on Capitol Hill for years, addressed the pre-march rally.

"Each of you are an integral part of the greatest human rights struggle on the face of the earth – the right to life movement," he said. "A selfless expression of tangible love, compassion and commitment to protecting women and children from the pain and violence of abortion and safeguarding all who are weak, frail, and unwanted."

Smith gave the marchers hope for survival during the next four years.

"Be encouraged – our cause is right, our faith unshakable; our resolve indomitable," he said. "Continue to speak truth to power. Tell the President and lawmakers that abortion methods dismember, chemically poison, or starve to death precious children. Remind them that abortion is child abuse."

"Tell them of the incredibly brave post-abortive women, who speak out, and remind us that there are at least two victims in every abortion – mother and child," Smith added.

"Let this be absolutely clear, pro-lifers will never quit, be discouraged or grow weary," he concluded.

Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, noticed that excitement and energy among the throngs of people.

"These marchers aren't a special interest group seeking recognition for themselves. Rather, they march for the day when unborn children are fully protected under law," he said.

Gary Bauer, the president of American Values, did as well and said the pro-life people there will do everything in their power to legally halt worst of the new administration’s pro-abortion agenda.

"We will oppose efforts to promote abortion. We will oppose attempts to force taxpayers to subsidize abortions. We will be a voice for the voiceless. We will speak up for the most defenseless in our society," he said.

"We will make the case for the sanctity of life in meetings with policy makers in Washington, and in editorials in major publications, and we will always encourage every American to celebrate life," he added.

Marchers came in by busloads from across the country to participate on the day when they mourned about 50 million abortions that have been done since Roe.

On the Anniversary of Roe v. Wade

Do Conservatives Need to Get Beyond Reagan?

From Imprimis
By Rush Limbaugh

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on December 4, 2008, at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., on the occasion of the ninth annual Hillsdale College Churchill Dinner.

THERE ARE ongoing discussions and debates among conservatives about the kind of president Barack Obama will prove to be, and about how they should react to him. But there is a larger and more important debate going on within conservatism—a debate about what conservatism is. Remarkably, we are hearing from a lot of people who are thought to be conservatives that conservatives need to "get beyond Reagan." After all, these people say, "The Reagan era is over." And the liberal media love to print their articles and broadcast their pronouncements to this effect. My response is, well, yes, the Reagan era is over in the sense that it has been 20 years since Reagan was president. But the funny thing is, I never heard the liberals saying that because the era of FDR was over-it ended in 1945-that they needed to "get beyond FDR." They didn't say that 35 years later when Reagan was first elected, or when he was reelected in 1984. They didn't say that when the liberals lost Congress in the 1994 election. Nor did they say it after the 2000 or 2004 elections. Instead, they kept arguing and fighting for the ideas they believe in. And now Mr. Obama is plausibly promising to revive the era of FDR.

So why are some so-called conservatives today arguing that we need to "get beyond Reagan," by which they mean that we need to abandon the ideas that Reagan stood for? To understand the roots of this argument, I think we only need to look back to the years when Reagan first emerged onto the national scene. There was a lot of resentment at that time among many of the elites in the Republican Party because Reagan hadn't gone to the right schools, he didn't come from the right part of the country, he had been an actor rather than a lawyer, he was a bumbling dunce, he was an extremist who was too far outside the mainstream to win, and so on. People have been making these kinds of arguments for a long time. They were saying that conservatives needed to get beyond Reagan even before the Reagan era began. A few of them are the same people. Many of them are new. But what they have in common is that none of them agree with the principles that Reagan stood for. And I would argue that this means that they are not conservatives.

Today the get-beyond-Reagan arguments are often put in so-called pragmatic terms of needing to create blocs of voters who will support the Republican Party. And in order to accomplish this, all that conservatives have to do, these self-proclaimed smart people say,iis embrace the idea of big government, because that's what the American people want and because only so-called big-government conservatives will be able to create blocs of voters by spending money to do them favors. But in answer to this, one has to ask the question-and I'm being a real pragmatist myself here-what's left for government to spend these days? It's already bailing people out right and left with taxpayer money that the government doesn't have. The spigot has been turned on under President Bush. The Obama administration, we can presume, is going to be even more generous in terms of bailouts. But honestly, when we look at auto executives being grilled on TV by liberal members of Congress about their irresponsibility, can we take it seriously? Has anyone ever been as irresponsible with money—and in their case other people's money—than these very same self-righteous members of Congress?

As history has amply demonstrated, down the line the kind of central planning that Mr. Bush has begun and that Mr. Obama plans to escalate isn't going to work. Although it may succeed in increasing the control of government over people's lives—which is how many liberals these days seem to define prosperity—it will fail miserably in restoring economic health to America. So in fact, during a time of economic trouble like this when liberals are in charge of both elected branches of government, conservatives have a golden opportunity to reintroduce to the American people the free market ideas and policies that have made our country the greatest and most prosperous country in human history.

My first point, then, is that there is no pragmatic reason today for conservatives to abandon the ideas of Reagan. It is worth remembering, after all, that despite the warnings of Republican "pragmatists" in the economically bleak 1970s that Reagan was too far outside the mainstream ever to be successful politically, Reagan won the presidency in two landslides-and that in 1994, his party took over the House of Representatives, for the first time in 40 years, using Reagan-like arguments.

But there is a second and more important point to be made in response to the argument that conservatives should get beyond Reagan. The main idea that animated Reagan wasn't anti-communism or supply side economics. Reagan's main idea was the main idea of the American founding—the idea of individual liberty—and the policies that he supported, both internationally and domestically, grew from that. America was founded on the idea that our individual freedoms derive from God, not from government, and that government should protect those freedoms and never violate them. Reagan argued, and history has shown, that America does best when it is true to its original idea. It does best when its people are left free to work in their individual self-interest—not meant in the sense of being selfish, but in the sense that they are left free to work to improve their own lives and the lives of their families, and for the good of their communities and of the nation at large. The biggest problem with the argument that conservatives should get beyond Reagan, then, is that the idea of individual liberty will never go out of style as long as America exists. To argue that the Reagan era is over is to argue that the era of freedom is over. And to argue that conservatives should abandon Reagan's principles is to argue that they should stop being conservatives.

There is no such thing, at least in America, as "big-government conservatism." A government that abides by the Constitution and protects our God-given freedoms is by definition limited. Rather than carving out blocs of voters by surrendering their principles, conservatives need to continue to tell the American people as a whole that the ideas of individual liberty and limited government are right and that the policies that come from those ideas work best to produce prosperity. Conservatives don't need to reinvent themselves. They need the courage to be once again who they were.

Fun Facts about the House Democrats' Massive Spending

From National Center for Policy Analysis

House Minority Leader John Boehner has compiled a useful list of "fun facts" about the House Democrats' $825 billion "stimulus" bill.

For example:

• The House Democrats' bill will cost each and every household $6,700 additional debt, paid for by our children and grandchildren.

• The total cost of this one piece of legislation is almost as much as the annual discretionary budget for the entire federal government.

• President-elect Obama has said that his proposed stimulus legislation will create or save three million jobs; this means that this legislation will spend about $275,000 per job. The average household income in the United States is $50,000 a year.
  
  
• The House Democrats' bill provides enough spending -- $825 billion -- to give every man, woman, and child in America $2,700.
  
  
• $825 billion is enough to give every person living in poverty in the United States $22,000.
  
  
• $825 billion is enough to give every person in Ohio $72,000.
  

Although the House Democrats' proposal has been billed as a transportation and infrastructure investment package, in actuality only $30 billion of the bill -- or 3 percent - is for road and highway spending, says Boehner. A recent study from the Congressional Budget Office said that only 25 percent of infrastructure dollars can be spent in the first year, making the one year total less than $7 billion for infrastructure.

Almost one-third of the so called tax relief in the House Democrats' bill is spending in disguise, meaning that true tax relief makes up only 24 percent of the total package -- not the 40 percent that President-elect Obama had requested.

$825 billion is just the beginning -- many Capitol Hill Democrats want to spend even more taxpayer dollars on their "stimulus" plan, says Boehner.

Source: John Boehner, "Biggest Boondoggle in American History," Powerline.com, January 18, 2009.

For text:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/01/022586.php

For more on Federal Spending & Budget Issues:

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=25

Kennedy Withdraws from Consideration for Senate Seat

From Associated Press
By Michael Gormley

Caroline Kennedy withdrew from consideration for the U.S. Senate seat once held by her slain uncle, Bobby Kennedy, after a night of turmoil and uncertainty over her intentions.

"I informed Governor Paterson today that for personal reasons I am withdrawing my name from consideration for the United States Senate," she said in a one-sentence statement released after midnight. Her spokesman, Stefan Friedman, wouldn't comment further.

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Bad News from Europe: Nazi Methods in Court

From The Brussels Journal
By Paul Belien

The Dutch judicial authorities are going to prosecute Geert Wilders, one of the 150 members of the Dutch Parliament, for making the movie Fitna. In this short documentary, which explains what happens if a number of verses of the Koran are taken seriously, Mr Wilders compares the Muslims’ holy book to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. He claims the Koran calls for violence against Jews and other non-Muslims. Fitna can be seen here.

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A Norwegian Thatcher?

From The Jerusalem Post
By Bruce Bawer and Daniel Johnson

These days nearly every Western European country has at least one of them - a large political party that's held at arm's length by the media, political establishment, academia and the chattering classes. Some of these black sheep - such as the British National Party, Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front and the late Jorg Haider's crew in Austria - really are beyond the pale; others are demonized simply because they challenge statist dogma and/or speak forbidden truths about Islamic immigration.

In Scandinavia, the home of statism at its statiest, the most high-profile such entity is probably Pia Kjaersgaard's Danish People's Party. Two months after 9/11, voter anxiety about Islamization swept out the Social Democrats (in power since 1924) and installed a conservative coalition - which, with strong DPP support, has since instituted effective, and popular, reforms (and stood foursquare for free speech during the cartoon crisis).

The picture in Sweden is different: Although the 2006 election exchanged Goran Persson's long-dominant Social Democrats for a "moderate" coalition, systemic changes have been modest, and the only major critics of the Swedes' essentially unmodified "see-no-evil" immigration policy have been the Sweden Democrats - a group, alas, that has a history of neo-Nazi ties and anti-Semitic rhetoric (and, in any case, has yet to win a single Riksdag seat).

Somewhere in between lies Norway, whose major antiestablishment faction is the Progress Party, or Fremskrittspartiet (FrP for short). Founded in 1973, it was run for 28 years by the charismatic Carl I. Hagen, whose tough-talking pugnacity made him a standout, in the '80s and '90s, in a largely bland political firmament. Though nothing in the party's program would raise eyebrows in, say, moderate Republican circles in the US, its rejection of long-standing Nordic assumptions about the role of the state has long led the media to caricature its ideology as dangerous, its supporters as unevolved lowbrows and Hagen as a demagogue.

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Barack Obama on the Environment

The National Mall on January 21, 2009

"As president, I hope to rally the entire world around the importance of us being good stewards of the land."

Obama Announces First and Foremost Priorities

Just back from the Presidential Prayer Service at the National Cathedral, and Obama has already announced his first and foremost agenda item -- economic recovery? national security? the war in Afghanistan?

Sadly, no, it is instead the agenda of the radical homosexual movement. The following are the President's priorities listed on the White House website:

Support for the LGBT Community

"While we have come a long way since the Stonewall riots in 1969, we still have a lot of work to do. Too often, the issue of LGBT rights is exploited by those seeking to divide us. But at its core, this issue is about who we are as Americans. It's about whether this nation is going to live up to its founding promise of equality by treating all its citizens with dignity and respect."

-- Barack Obama, June 1, 2007

• Expand Hate Crimes Statutes: In 2004, crimes against LGBT Americans constituted the third-highest category of hate crime reported and made up more than 15 percent of such crimes. President Obama cosponsored legislation that would expand federal jurisdiction to include violent hate crimes perpetrated because of race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, or physical disability. As a state senator, President Obama passed tough legislation that made hate crimes and conspiracy to commit them against the law.
  
  
• Fight Workplace Discrimination: President Obama supports the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and believes that our anti-discrimination employment laws should be expanded to include sexual orientation and gender identity. While an increasing number of employers have extended benefits to their employees' domestic partners, discrimination based on sexual orientation in the workplace occurs with no federal legal remedy. The President also sponsored legislation in the Illinois State Senate that would ban employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
  
  
• Support Full Civil Unions and Federal Rights for LGBT Couples: President Obama supports full civil unions that give same-sex couples legal rights and privileges equal to those of married couples. Obama also believes we need to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and enact legislation that would ensure that the 1,100+ federal legal rights and benefits currently provided on the basis of marital status are extended to same-sex couples in civil unions and other legally-recognized unions. These rights and benefits include the right to assist a loved one in times of emergency, the right to equal health insurance and other employment benefits, and property rights.
  
  
• Oppose a Constitutional Ban on Same-Sex Marriage: President Obama voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2006 which would have defined marriage as between a man and a woman and prevented judicial extension of marriage-like rights to same-sex or other unmarried couples.
  
  
• Repeal Don't Ask-Don't Tell: President Obama agrees with former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Shalikashvili and other military experts that we need to repeal the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. The key test for military service should be patriotism, a sense of duty, and a willingness to serve. Discrimination should be prohibited. The U.S. government has spent millions of dollars replacing troops kicked out of the military because of their sexual orientation. Additionally, more than 300 language experts have been fired under this policy, including more than 50 who are fluent in Arabic. The President will work with military leaders to repeal the current policy and ensure it helps accomplish our national defense goals.
  
  
• Expand Adoption Rights: President Obama believes that we must ensure adoption rights for all couples and individuals, regardless of their sexual orientation. He thinks that a child will benefit from a healthy and loving home, whether the parents are gay or not.
  
  
• Promote AIDS Prevention: In the first year of his presidency, President Obama will develop and begin to implement a comprehensive national HIV/AIDS strategy that includes all federal agencies. The strategy will be designed to reduce HIV infections, increase access to care and reduce HIV-related health disparities. The President will support common sense approaches including age-appropriate sex education that includes information about contraception, combating infection within our prison population through education and contraception, and distributing contraceptives through our public health system. The President also supports lifting the federal ban on needle exchange, which could dramatically reduce rates of infection among drug users. President Obama has also been willing to confront the stigma -- too often tied to homophobia -- that continues to surround HIV/AIDS.
  
  
• Empower Women to Prevent HIV/AIDS: In the United States, the percentage of women diagnosed with AIDS has quadrupled over the last 20 years. Today, women account for more than one quarter of all new HIV/AIDS diagnoses. President Obama introduced the Microbicide Development Act, which will accelerate the development of products that empower women in the battle against AIDS. Microbicides are a class of products currently under development that women apply topically to prevent transmission of HIV and other infections.

Will A Re-Do Make Him Legitimate?

We question whether any ceremonial formula will make "that one" legitimate, but some suggest he may not be President yet!

Did Obama Actually Get Sworn In? New President May Have To Re-Take Oath After 'Flub'

From The Daily Mail

It was the constitutional equivalent of a wardrobe malfunction.

But, minor as it appeared, it may be that the 1.8million spectators in Washington yesterday didn't actually witness Barack Obama being sworn in.

With his hand on the Lincoln Bible, held by his beaming wife, Mr Obama took the presidential oath of office yesterday - and flubbed it.

Flub: Barack Obama takes the oath given by Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr. (lower R) - but was it legitimate?

First, he began to repeat the 35-word oath before the Chief Justice reciting it had finished his line.

But the pair recovered safely from that gaffe - only to misquote the oath.

It wasn't Mr Obama's fault - Chief Justice John G. Roberts transposed the words, and Mr Obama merely repeated them.

He should have said he will 'faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States'. Instead, following the Chief Justice's lead, he said he will 'execute the office of the President of the United States faithfully'.

Constitutional law experts speaking to the Washington Post agreed that the gaffe was insignificant.

Even so, it could cause a legal headache. Two previous presidents - Calvin Coolidge and Chester A. Arthur - have had to repeat the oath privately because of similar issues.

Lawyers said Mr Obama need not be worried about the legitimacy of his presidency - but they also said a do-over couldn't hurt, the Post reported.

Charles Cooper, a former Ronald Reagan legal official, said that the incorrect recitation should be fixed - and that he would be surprised if it hadn't already happened.

It was the first time Chief Justice Roberts had administered the oath - and, coincidentally of course, the first time in history that any Chief Justice has administered the oath to a president who voted against his confirmation.

Just the Right Chopin to Close This Historic Day

"An American Coronation"

From The Monarchist

America has simply replaced the pomp and ceremony of hereditary monarchy with the pomp and ceremony of elected monarchy.

An American Coronation, writes the Los Angeles Times, and who can disagree with them given the lavish preparations now underway in Washington. Words can be deceiving, but appearances generally are not.

It was a century ago when Theodore Roosevelt explained that an American President is "an elective King", making the implausible point that the United States was essentially a monarchical country within a republican framework. Contrast the power of His Mightiness with the limitations of our own Monarch, and you see increasingly the reverse in Commonwealth countries; that is, republican governments camouflaged within a monarchical framework, to the point where they effectively become "crowned republics" completely sapped of their royalist spirit.

As David Flint points out in President Obama: the elective King inaugurated, "The considerable British jurist, Lord Hailsham explained that the American system centres on ‘an elective monarchy with a king who rules with a splendid court and even...a royal family, but does not reign.’ He contrasted this with the Westminster system which he said involves ‘a republic with an hereditary life president, who being a queen, reigns but does not rule’."

But the important fact here is that both trends run contrary to the conservative impulse, as both are marked by a distinct lack of constitutional deference. American republicans are weary of their countrymen swooning over Princess Obama and becoming a monarchy in all but name, and Commonwealth monarchists are concerned about the increasing emasculation of their own constitutions, with the creeping regicide of Her Majesty.

The BBC's Katty Kay, for her part, is somewhat appalled at "the coronation of King Obama":

So this is why you booted us out a couple of centuries ago. You simply replaced the pomp and ceremony of hereditary monarchy and with the pomp and ceremony of elected monarchy. OK, you didn't opt for the dynastic duo of Bush and Clinton, which really had us scratching our crowned European heads, but the fanfare with which Caroline Kennedy has entered the political picture suggests your infatuation with royal families is still not over.

This week Washington feels like London in the run up to one of our own grand royal events. Hostesses twitter on the phone, or just Twitter, to woo A-list guests to pre- and post-inauguration parties. A-list guests measure their piles of invites in feet, not inches...

Still, there is a more serious problem with treating Barack Obama as an elected monarch; one that affects us journalists, in particular. Put a man on a pedestal and suddenly it's hard for the press to drag him through the political wringer. It happened in 2003 in the run up to the invasion of Iraq and risks happening again.

In Britain, we invest the Queen with our ceremonial hopes which leaves us free to treat our prime minister as exactly what he is—an elected official, paid for by the taxpayers, and serving at the people's will. While George W. Bush was being asked patsy questions by a subdued White House press corps, Tony Blair was being drubbed by un-cowed political hacks. It is far easier to do when you don't stand the moment the man walks into the room.

Certainly it is no secret that the political ambition of the British Left is to abolish the British Monarchy, but how does one square that with the Kennedyesque tendency of the American Left to institute its own national dynasty? Probably because the Left wants untrammeled democracy, equality and "progress", and the Right wants limited democracy, liberty and constitutionalism.

That is why an elective monarchy is intuitively fine for an American Democrat, whereas hereditary monarchy is an insufferable anachronism for the British, Canadian and Anzac lib-laboury. What right does a hereditary monarch have to say no to an elected government they chime - that the individual person might legitimately seek the protection of the Crown against the wishes of the elected, is evidently and ironically lost on the human rights activist, or just not an important enough imperative when weighed against the collectivist agenda of the "Human Rights, Democracy and Global Justice" crowd.

And there is reason to believe that this contradiction at the heart of the American soul, which has in recent years led several congressman, including Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Harry Reid, to introduce legislation to repeal the Twenty-second Amendment, may continue to evolve towards monarchy USA. In each of 1997, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2009, Rep. Jose Serrano introduced a joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to repeal the 22nd Amendment, thereby removing the limitation on the number of terms an individual may serve as president. Each resolution, with the exception of the current one, died without ever getting past the committee.

But with Congress going formidably Democrat, and President Obama assuming Office, one has to believe they now have a fighting chance.

Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural Address

"In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

Imagine the Potential!

Obama Officials Confirm He Will Fund Foreign Abortions Starting Wednesday

From LifeNews
By Steven Ertelt

Officials with the incoming administration of Barack Obama have confirmed that he will indeed overturn a pro-life policy of President Bush on his first day in office. Despite campaigning on the rhetoric of wanting to reduce abortions, Obama will make one of his first actions promoting them globally.

Meanwhile, some 77 members of Congress have signed onto a letter asking Obama to back down from doing so.

President Bush used an executive order on his first day in office to reinstitute a pro-life policy that prevents forcing taxpayers to fund international groups that perform or promote abortions in other countries.

While U.S. law prohibits funding abortions directly, Bush's Mexico City Policy expands the law by also prohibiting the funding of pro-abortion groups that either do abortions overseas or lobby pro-life governments to sacrifice their abortion limits.

During the presidential election, pro-life groups issued a clarion call to voters telling them their tax money would be used if Obama were elected and saying he would likely reverse the Mexico City Policy immediately after taking office.

The capital publication Congressional Quarterly reports that top Washington officials tell it that the incoming president will reverse the pro-life measure on his first day as president, on Wednesday.

When Obama overturns the limits on global abortions, he will do so over the objections of dozens of members of Congress.

"As a new administration begins, it is our hope you will work, as you have pledged, to create a new era of bi-partisan cooperation. We urge you to continue the Mexico City Policy, which separates abortion and family planning in America's foreign aid programs," the bipartisan group of lawmakers wrote Obama on Friday.

They say the policy "ensures that United States family planning funds are not co-opted by groups who promote abortion as a method of family planning. Such activities would send a wrong message overseas that the United States promotes
abortion."

The members, led by Rep. Doug Lamborn of Colorado and Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania, also say it is "insulting" to other nations to promote pro-abortion groups that lobby them to overturn long-standing pro-life laws based on their culture and heritage.

"We also have a responsibility to respect the laws of many developing countries who have laws prohibiting or restricting abortion. It is an insult to fund organizations that are intent on overturning those laws by promoting the Western ideology of abortion on demand," they said.

Rep. Nita Lowey, a New York Democrat who sponsored legislation in Congress to reverse the provision, told CQ that somehow putting it in place endangers the health care people in third world nations receive.

But Douglas Johnson, the legislative director of National Right to Life, tells LifeNews.com the Mexico City Policy and Obama's reversing it is all about abortion.

Thus, it appears Obama's move will take money away from non-abortion groups that provide services to poor people in foreign nations.

"One effect of Obama's anticipated order will be to divert many millions of dollars away from groups that do not promote abortion, and into the hands of those organizations that are most militant in promoting abortion as a population-control method," Johnson explained.

"So, a president who not long ago told the American people that he wanted to reduce the number of abortions, is already effectively promoting the increased use of abortion as a means of population control," Johnson added.

President Reagan first put the Mexico City Policy in place and it is named for a population conference that took place in the Mexican capital in 1984 when he introduced it.

President George H.W. Bush continued the pro-life policy, President Clinton overturned it, and President George W. Bush kept it for eight years and threatened to veto any Congressional spending bill reversing it.

Under the Mexico City Policy, funding for family planning programs is not reduced.

Obama Enters the Great Game

From Stratfor
By George Friedman

U.S. President-elect Barack Obama will be sworn in on Tuesday as president of the United States. Candidate Obama said much about what he would do as president; now we will see what President Obama actually does. The most important issue Obama will face will be the economy, something he did not anticipate through most of his campaign. The first hundred days of his presidency thus will revolve around getting a stimulus package passed. But Obama also is now in the great game of global competition — and in that game, presidents rarely get to set the agenda.

The major challenge he faces is not Gaza; the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is not one any U.S. president intervenes in unless he wants to experience pain. As we have explained, that is an intractable conflict to which there is no real solution. Certainly, Obama will fight being drawn into mediating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during his first hundred days in office. He undoubtedly will send the obligatory Middle East envoy, who will spend time with all the parties, make suitable speeches and extract meaningless concessions from all sides. This envoy will establish some sort of process to which everyone will cynically commit, knowing it will go nowhere. Such a mission is not involvement — it is the alternative to involvement, and the reason presidents appoint Middle East envoys. Obama can avoid the Gaza crisis, and he will do so.

Obama’s Two Unavoidable Crises

The two crises that cannot be avoided are Afghanistan and Russia. First, the situation in Afghanistan is tenuous for a number of reasons, and it is not a crisis that Obama can avoid decisions on. Obama has said publicly that he will decrease his commitments in Iraq and increase them in Afghanistan. He thus will have more troops fighting in Afghanistan. The second crisis emerged from a decision by Russia to cut off natural gas to Ukraine, and the resulting decline in natural gas deliveries to Europe. This one obviously does not affect the United States directly, but even after flows are restored, it affects the Europeans greatly. Obama therefore comes into office with three interlocking issues: Afghanistan, Russia and Europe. In one sense, this is a single issue — and it is not one that will wait.

Obama clearly intends to follow Gen. David Petraeus’ lead in Afghanistan. The intention is to increase the number of troops in Afghanistan, thereby intensifying pressure on the Taliban and opening the door for negotiations with the militant group or one of its factions. Ultimately, this would see the inclusion of the Taliban or Taliban elements in a coalition government. Petraeus pursued this strategy in Iraq with Sunni insurgents, and it is the likely strategy in Afghanistan.

But the situation in Afghanistan has been complicated by the situation in Pakistan. Roughly three-quarters of U.S. and NATO supplies bound for Afghanistan are delivered to the Pakistani port of Karachi and trucked over the border to Afghanistan. Most fuel used by Western forces in Afghanistan is refined in Pakistan and delivered via the same route. There are two crossing points, one near Afghanistan’s Kandahar province at Chaman, Pakistan, and the other through the Khyber Pass. The Taliban have attacked Western supply depots and convoys, and Pakistan itself closed the routes for several days, citing government operations against radical Islamist forces.

Meanwhile, the situation in Pakistan has been complicated by tensions with India. The Indians have said that the individuals who carried out the Nov. 26 Mumbai attack were Pakistanis supported by elements in the Pakistani government. After Mumbai, India made demands of the Pakistanis. While the situation appears to have calmed, the future of Indo-Pakistani relations remains far from clear; anything from a change of policy in New Delhi to new terrorist attacks could see the situation escalate. The Pakistanis have made it clear that a heightened threat from India requires them to shift troops away from the Afghan border and toward the east; a small number of troops already has been shifted.

Apart from the direct impact this kind of Pakistani troop withdrawal would have on cross-border operations by the Taliban, such a move also would dramatically increase the vulnerability of NATO supply lines through Pakistan. Some supplies could be shipped in by aircraft, but the vast bulk of supplies — petroleum, ammunition, etc. — must come in via surface transit, either by truck, rail or ship. Western operations in Afghanistan simply cannot be supplied from the air alone. A cutoff of the supply lines across Pakistan would thus leave U.S. troops in Afghanistan in crisis. Because Washington can’t predict or control the future actions of Pakistan, of India or of terrorists, the United States must find an alternative to the routes through Pakistan.

When we look at a map, the two routes through Pakistan from Karachi are clearly the most logical to use. If those were closed — or even meaningfully degraded — the only other viable routes would be through the former Soviet Union.

• One route, along which a light load of fuel is currently transported, crosses the Caspian Sea. Fuel refined in Armenia is ferried across the Caspian to Turkmenistan (where a small amount of fuel is also refined), then shipped across Turkmenistan directly to Afghanistan and through a small spit of land in Uzbekistan. This route could be expanded to reach either the Black Sea through Georgia or the Mediterranean through Georgia and Turkey (though the additional use of Turkey would require a rail gauge switch). It is also not clear that transports native to the Caspian have sufficient capacity for this.
• Another route sidesteps the issues of both transport across the Caspian and the sensitivity of Georgia by crossing Russian territory above the Caspian. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan (and likely at least a small corner of Turkmenistan) would connect the route to Afghanistan. There are options of connecting to the Black Sea or transiting to Europe through either Ukraine or Belarus.
• Iran could provide a potential alternative, but relations between Tehran and Washington would have to improve dramatically before such discussions could even begin — and time is short.

Many of the details still need to be worked out. But they are largely variations on the two main themes of either crossing the Caspian or transiting Russian territory above it.

Though the first route is already partially established for fuel, it is not clear how much additional capacity exists. To complicate matters further, Turkmen acquiescence is unlikely without Russian authorization, and Armenia remains strongly loyal to Moscow as well. While the current Georgian government might leap at the chance, the issue is obviously an extremely sensitive one for Moscow. (And with Russian forces positioned in Azerbaijan and the Georgian breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Moscow has troops looming over both sides of the vulnerable route across Georgia.) The second option would require crossing Russian territory itself, with a number of options — from connecting to the Black Sea to transiting either Ukraine or Belarus to Europe, or connecting to the Baltic states.

(click image to enlarge)

Both routes involve countries of importance to Russia where Moscow has influence, regardless of whether those countries are friendly to it. This would give Russia ample opportunity to scuttle any such supply line at multiple points for reasons wholly unrelated to Afghanistan.

If the West were to opt for the first route, the Russians almost certainly would pressure Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan not to cooperate, and Turkey would find itself in a position it doesn’t want to be in — namely, caught between the United States and Russia. The diplomatic complexities of developing these routes not only involve the individual countries included, they also inevitably lead to the question of U.S.-Russian relations.

Even without crossing Russia, both of these two main options require Russian cooperation. The United States must develop the option of an alternative supply route to Pakistan, and in doing so, it must define its relationship with Russia. Seeking to work without Russian approval of a route crossing its “near abroad” will represent a challenge to Russia. But getting Russian approval will require a U.S. accommodation with the country.

The Russian Natural Gas Connection

One of Obama’s core arguments against the Bush administration was that it acted unilaterally rather than with allies. Specifically, Obama meant that the Bush administration alienated the Europeans, therefore failing to build a sustainable coalition for the war. By this logic, it follows that one of Obama’s first steps should be to reach out to Europe to help influence or pressure the Russians, given that NATO has troops in Afghanistan and Obama has said he intends to ask the Europeans for more help there.

The problem with this is that the Europeans are passing through a serious crisis with Russia, and that Germany in particular is involved in trying to manage that crisis. This problem relates to natural gas. Ukraine is dependent on Russia for about two-thirds of the natural gas it uses. The Russians traditionally have provided natural gas at a deep discount to former Soviet republics, primarily those countries Russia sees as allies, such as Belarus or Armenia. Ukraine had received discounted natural gas, too, until the 2004 Orange Revolution, when a pro-Western government came to power in Kiev. At that point, the Russians began demanding full payment. Given the subsequent rises in global energy prices, that left Ukraine in a terrible situation — which of course is exactly where Moscow wanted it.

The Russians cut off natural gas to Ukraine for a short period in January 2006, and for three weeks in 2009. Apart from leaving Ukraine desperate, the cutoff immediately affected the rest of Europe, because the natural gas that goes to Europe flows through Ukraine. This put the rest of Europe in a dangerous position, particularly in the face of bitterly cold weather in 2008-2009.

The Russians achieved several goals with this. First, they pressured Ukraine directly. Second, they forced many European states to deal with Moscow directly rather than through the European Union. Third, they created a situation in which European countries had to choose between supporting Ukraine and heating their own homes. And last, they drew Berlin in particular — since Germany is the most dependent of the major European states on Russian natural gas — into the position of working with the Russians to get Ukraine to agree to their terms. (Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited Germany last week to discuss this directly with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.)

The Germans already have made clear their opposition to expanding NATO to Ukraine and Georgia. Given their dependency on the Russians, the Germans are not going to be supporting the United States if Washington decides to challenge Russia over the supply route issue. In fact, the Germans — and many of the Europeans — are in no position to challenge Russia on anything, least of all on Afghanistan. Overall, the Europeans see themselves as having limited interests in the Afghan war, and many already are planning to reduce or withdraw troops for budgetary reasons.

It is therefore very difficult to see Obama recruiting the Europeans in any useful manner for a confrontation with Russia over access for American supplies to Afghanistan. Yet this is an issue he will have to address immediately.

The Price of Russian Cooperation

The Russians are prepared to help the Americans, however — and it is clear what they will want in return.

At minimum, Moscow will want a declaration that Washington will not press for the expansion of NATO to Georgia or Ukraine, or for the deployment of military forces in non-NATO states on the Russian periphery — specifically, Ukraine and Georgia. At this point, such a declaration would be symbolic, since Germany and other European countries would block expansion anyway.

The Russians might also demand some sort of guarantee that NATO and the United States not place any large military formations or build any major military facilities in the former Soviet republics (now NATO member states) of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. (A small rotating squadron of NATO fighters already patrols the skies over the Baltic states.) Given that there were intense anti-government riots in Latvia and Lithuania last week, the stability of these countries is in question. The Russians would certainly want to topple the pro-Western Baltic governments. And anything approaching a formal agreement between Russia and the United States on the matter could quickly destabilize the Baltics, in addition to very much weakening the NATO alliance.

Another demand the Russians probably will make — because they have in the past — is that the United States guarantee eventual withdrawal from any bases in Central Asia in return for Russian support for using those bases for the current Afghan campaign. (At present, the United States runs air logistics operations out of Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan.) The Russians do not want to see Central Asia become a U.S. sphere of influence as the result of an American military presence.

Other demands might relate to the proposed U.S. ballistic missile defense installations in the Czech Republic and Poland.

We expect the Russians to make variations on all these demands in exchange for cooperation in creating a supply line to Afghanistan. Simply put, the Russians will demand that the United States acknowledge a Russian sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union. The Americans will not want to concede this — or at least will want to make it implicit rather than explicit. But the Russians will want this explicit, because an explicit guarantee will create a crisis of confidence over U.S. guarantees in the countries that emerged from the Soviet Union, serving as a lever to draw these countries into the Russian orbit. U.S. acquiescence on the point potentially would have ripple effects in the rest of Europe, too.

Therefore, regardless of the global financial crisis, Obama has an immediate problem on his hands in Afghanistan. He has troops fighting there, and they must be supplied. The Pakistani supply line is no longer a sure thing. The only other options either directly challenge Russia (and ineffectively at that) or require Russian help. Russia’s price will be high, particularly because Washington’s European allies will not back a challenge to Russia in Georgia, and all options require Russian cooperation anyway. Obama’s plan to recruit the Europeans on behalf of American initiatives won’t work in this case. Obama does not want to start his administration with making a massive concession to Russia, but he cannot afford to leave U.S. forces in Afghanistan without supplies. He can hope that nothing happens in Pakistan, but that is up to the Taliban and other Islamist groups more than anyone else — and betting on their goodwill is not a good idea.

Whatever Obama is planning to do, he will have to deal with this problem fast, before Afghanistan becomes a crisis. And there are no good solutions. But unlike with the Israelis and Palestinians, Obama can’t solve this by sending a special envoy who appears to be doing something. He will have to make a very tough decision. Between the economy and this crisis, we will find out what kind of president Obama is.

And we will find out very soon.

Obama Selects New White House Pets

The decision has been made and the new White House pets are a trio of poodles that are submissive and eager to please their new master. The New York Times has the story.

Obama Reaches Out for McCain’s Counsel

By David D. Kirkpatrick

Not long after Senator John McCain returned last month from an official trip to Iraq and Pakistan, he received a phone call from President-elect Barack Obama.

As contenders for the presidency, the two had hammered each other for much of 2008 over their conflicting approaches to foreign policy, especially in Iraq. (He’d lose a war! He’d stay a hundred years!) Now, however, Mr. Obama said he wanted Mr. McCain’s advice, people in each camp briefed on the conversation said. What did he see on the trip? What did he learn?

It was just one step in a post-election courtship that historians say has few modern parallels, beginning with a private meeting in Mr. Obama’s transition office in Chicago just two weeks after the vote. On Monday night, Mr. McCain will be the guest of honor at a black-tie dinner celebrating Mr. Obama’s inauguration.

Over the last three months, Mr. Obama has quietly consulted Mr. McCain about many of the new administration’s potential nominees to top national security jobs and about other issues — in one case relaying back a contender’s answers to questions Mr. McCain had suggested.

Mr. McCain, meanwhile, has told colleagues “that many of these appointments he would have made himself,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and a close McCain friend.

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A Christian Clergyman ‘Horrified’ by ‘Aggressively Christian’ Prayers?

From The Fox Forum

By Lauren Green

The inauguration invocation is the high profile event for a member of the clergy. It’s only been around since 1937, but it’s grounded in a rich, religious history that’s helped shaped this country.

At President-elect Barak Obama’s inauguration, Pastor Rick Warren will have the honors. Pastor Warren is the senior minister of Saddleback Church in Southern California and the uber-bestselling author of “The Purpose Driven Life.” Liberals objected to Warren because of his conservative views, specifically his support of Proposition 8, the ballot initiative that banned gay marriage in California.

What some see as a move to placate the gay and Lesbian community was the selection of the openly-gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson to say the prayer for the star-studded, kick-off of the inaugural week. The Inaugural Committee says it wasn’t about “righting” a perceived “wrong.” They said Bishop Robinson had been on their list for a while and they chose him for his message of inclusive civil rights.

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Bush's Three Last Strikes Before He's Out

At the root of what many conservatives have come to loathe about the current administration, is its utter disregard and contempt for the United States Constitution. The incoming President, with his many references to the Constitution as "an imperfect document," offers little reason for hope.

In an excellent article at OpEdNews, Betsy Ross points out that "the most egregious violations of our U.S. Constitution normally occur by an outgoing Administration in the last 100 days in office." The Bush Administration has not missed the opportunity to take three last whacks at that document. Although little noticed now, the damage will be more enduring than their economic havoc.

Bush's Last 100 Days - What More Damage Can This Administration Do?

By Betsy Ross

It is a well known fact that the most egregious violations of our U.S. Constitution normally occur by an outgoing Administration in the last 100 days in office. Here are three such recent events that occurred in the final days of the Bush Administration which appears will continue well after January 20, 2009. Although at this point it is unclear whether the president elect had any foreknowledge, especially in regard to foreign policy and the War in Iraq it would appear more likely than not. Although these events will affect each and every American on a fundamental level, surprisingly again they got little coverage other than a blurb on the mainstream outlets.

1. The Continuing War in Iraq

During Mr. Bush's recent trip to Iraq on his last official visit, it was briefly announced that President Bush signed an "accord" with the Iraqi government calling for the beginning of troop withdrawals of our forces in Iraq. The agreed-to date of the initiation of such withdrawals/--2011, coincidentally just prior to the next presidential election. Was this war in Iraq clearly for political purposes? It would appear so, since a political date now is even involved in the initiation of troop withdrawals, although the American people have clearly spoken their feelings since the lie of weapons of mass destruction was revealed, and again as far back as 2006 when they elected a primarily Democratic Congress. Will Obama now be able to fulfill his promises of withdrawing troops "responsibly" and at the earliest opportunity. It would appear not, since subsequent Administrations cannot rescind treaties or accords without Congressional approval. In continually refunding this war, it is apparent that although the American people have spoken, Congress continues to uphold the war agenda at each and every opportunity, now even hiding the costs in pork bills and other superfluous legislation.

Mr. Obama himself has now made noise with respect to simply changing the theatres and shuffling troops around to Afghanistan (which we should never have left) and even expanding it to Pakistan, a message a great many Americans apparently missed and simply heard the campaign sell of withdrawal. Did Mr. Obama have foreknowledge or forewarning of this accord? Expect a denial, but don't expect this war will end anytime soon--not in an Obama Administration anyway, especially one in which he has appointed pro-war Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State (no matter how she defended her vote during her run for the presidency.) She has also declared herself an Iranian "first strike" war supporter.

2. The Department of Homeland Security's new VISA Waiver Program

In a little publicized ceremony at the Rose Garden, President Bush announced the expansion of the original 27 country "free pass" VISA Waiver program to be increased now to 34 countries. Wonder where all those deleted sums were for the needed border security and fencing post 9/11? It instead went into enlarging the Atlanta airport at a cost of several billion dollars in order to provide "welcome" videos for the new VISA waiver countries, one of which is Great Britain, home of the shoe bomber. This program can be viewed in detail on the website of the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), and provides for online approval of VISA applications with a mere 48-hour mandated turnaround time and security check. Not only does this program allow for minimal security checks, but appears that eventually the CAFTA countries will also be included in order to bring to U.S. shores all that great heroin from China and Colombia gold (since there is also pending in Congress a new trade deal with Colombia).

In light of the above information on the lack of screening that is to be done with respect to the visitors from these 34 countries, please see below the details on the immigration status of the 19 foreigners involved in 9/11:

Identity and Immigration Status of 9/11 Terrorists

According to authorities, all of the hijackers who committed the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were foreigners. All of them entered the country legally on a temporary visa, mostly tourist visas with entry permits for six months. Although four of them attended flight school in the United States, only one is known to have entered on an appropriate visa for such study, and one entered on an F-1 student visa. Besides the four pilots, all but one of the terrorists entered the United States only once and had been in the country for only three to five months before the attacks.

The four pilots had been in the United States for extended periods, although none was a legal permanent resident. Some had received more than one temporary visa, most of which were currently valid on September 11, but at least three of them had fallen out of status and were, therefore, in the United States illegally.

The terrorists had obtained U.S. identification that was used for boarding flights in the form of Florida, Virginia, California and New Jersey driver's licenses/ID cards. One of the terrorists, Mohamed Atta, was detained in Florida for driving without a license, but subsequently obtained one. Thirteen of the terrorists had Florida driver's licenses or ID cards, seven had Virginia driver's licenses, at least two had California licenses and two had New Jersey driver's licenses. According to the March 28, 2002 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Robert Thibadeau, director of Carnegie Mellon's Internet Security labratory, says that "the 19 terrorists on Sept. 11 were holding 63 state driver's licenses for identification."

All Americans might need to start checking the skies a little more often, or their flight schedules on transcontinental flights, since it appears this program insures not national security at all, but simply a challenge and incentive for the next 9/11 pilot to use Atlanta instead of New York for their next attempt.

3. The steadfast refusal to pardon both Ramos and Compean

If ever there were an action which was meant to scare off and silence border patrol agents, and as an indicator of the North American Union agenda and globalism as the goal of our present members of Congress in Washington and this past administration, other than the Patriot Act itself of course, it would be President Bush's steadfast refusal to pardon these two agents, while his Administration gave immunity and protection to a known Mexican drug dealer in order to facilitate their conviction by the U.S. Department of Injustice. Our appeasement policies with respect to Mexico have now gone so far as to enable foreigners in this country to even use our own courts in order to sue us, since it has been published that this drug dealer, although caught once again smuggling drugs into this country, is now suing the U.S. government for several million for his injuries (he was shot in the buttocks while crossing illegally). Foreigners in this country and without, have now been given federal protection and immunities far greater than natural born U.S. citizens under this Administration, and the Obama Administration is clearly in the globalism and globalist camp, not America and American sovereignty. He even campaigned in Europe. So Americans, Washington has spoken. Foreigners are sovereign subjects and our favored elite, even the terrorist element, we welcome all comers. We need these wars and government contractors to prosper. Commerce, not national security, is the new Rule of Law, and your posterity be damned. We can just replace them with the new generation of immigrants. The Mexicans and South Americans right now are our favored subjects. We'll provide, at taxpayer expense, the finest defense attorneys that money can buy from New York and L.A. We've even provided a federal statute in order to do so, although we may abridge citizen's due process rights through our courts such as in the Ramos and Compean case, we will make sure that foreigners get not only federal due process, but state and federal due process if need, gratis. Or seize that drug money and release it to your U.S. lawyer for your defense. We are a generous nation, generous with the lives, property and freedom of our own citizens who will bear no expense so that you foreigners may have rights that are denied our own. Our hospitality and generousity are legend, and will protect the sovereignty and borders of every other nation in the world, at the expense of our own and the lives and property of our citizens. Just look at Ramos and Compean for an example of the sacrifices we are willing to make for foreigners in this country for this public international precedent.

Be afraid Americans, be very afraid. The wheels are in motion, and at every level, including apparently your state and local governments. Have you heard a word or serious legal challenge from any one of them to this agenda, or continue to uphold the federal precedents and dictate's at the state level without serious question?

With the federal government holding the purse strings, and U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Council on Foreign Affairs dictating policy who are financially supported by the same international bankers owning the Federal Reserve, who actually is in control of Washington at this time? Bush and soon Obama or the bankers and "corporate" Federal Reserve and CFR members who fund their campaigns and in which they are indebted?

Global and corporate socialism now crosses party lines, as is evident by that one act in September, the historic and precedent-setting 700 billion bailout for Congress' personal bankers and CFR corporate members, in the interest of eventual world government and domination, the future of America and Americans be damned.

Libera - "Sanctus"

Young America's Foundation Names "Top Ten Conservative Colleges"

From Young America's Foundation

Young America’s Foundation is pleased to release our fifth annual “Top Ten Conservative College” list in response to the frequently asked question of which schools we recommend to those seeking conservative colleges.

Each year, hundreds of thousands of students begin their college search. Admission guides, seminars, advice from friends, and help from advisors all offer different perspectives. Presented with so many options, confusion often clouds this important decision-making process. Given the requests for Young America’s Foundation’s recommendations, and to aid in making the right decision, we are proud to release our fifth annual “Top Ten Conservative Colleges” list.

A wide variety of rankings exist for the market of American colleges and universities. Each year, U.S. News & World Report releases its “America’s Best Colleges” edition. The magazine grades each institution based on factors including peer assessment, graduation and retention rates, faculty resources, and student selectivity. Yet, U.S. News does not rank the overall experience that colleges offer. That is why Young America’s Foundation presents the following list of ten institutions that offer a conservative experience for students. Young America’s Foundation deemed these ten institutions the best, and they are listed in alphabetical order. We are also pleased to list additional colleges we feel deserve honorable mention.

Many conservative students seek alternatives in higher education, but they may not be fully aware of institutions that fit these criteria. The 2008-2009 “Top Ten Conservative College” list features institutions that proclaim, through their mission and programs, a dedication to discovering, maintaining, and strengthening the conservative values of their students.

The colleges offer an alternative to the liberal status quo, because they allow and encourage conservative students to explore conservative ideas and authors. They offer coursework and scholarship in conservative thought and emphasize principles including smaller government, strong national defense, free enterprise, and traditional values. Furthermore, they avoid trends in academe by continuing to study Western Civilization instead of straying toward the study of Marxism, feminism, sexuality, postmodernism, and other distractions that do not give students a complete understanding of our country, our culture, and its founding principles.

Young America’s Foundation highly recommends service academies such as West Point and Annapolis for people interested in serving their country and receiving a top-notch education. However, these schools do not appear in the top ten. They are not liberal arts colleges but rather military colleges that follow a training model for future officers. There is nothing more honorable than serving our country, and we strongly encourage qualified students to consider this option.

This is not an exhaustive list of conservative institutions and should not be taken as such. Nor should it be the only source consulted in a college search. Young America’s Foundation recommends that this list serve as a starting point. Parents and students should seek several information sources, read admissions materials thoroughly, consult with friends and counselors, and make visits. Additionally, Young America’s Foundation is not a college rating organization; we decided to publish this list to help address a frequently asked question.

If you have another college you think should be on this list, please contact us. For more information, please contact the listed colleges, or call Young America’s Foundation at 800-USA-1776 or visit our website at www.yaf.org.

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Christendom College
Front Royal, Virginia

Christendom College in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia is a Catholic college with more than 400 undergraduates. Six majors and a master’s degree in theological studies are offered. All undergraduate programs begin with a core curriculum that includes study of Catholic doctrine, as well as philosophy, mathematics, and science.

The college was founded in 1977 by a group of Catholics concerned with the direction of higher education, especially within the Catholic church. “Only an education which integrates the truths of the Catholic faith throughout the curriculum is a fully Catholic education,” stated the founders. Led by Dr. Warren H. Carroll, the visionaries also envisioned how, “the only rightful purpose of education is to know the truth and to live by it. The purpose of Catholic education is therefore to learn and to live by the truth revealed by Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ…”

The original vision of Christendom lives today through the institution’s devotion to Catholic theology and way of life. The core curriculum reinforces a Catholic worldview and teaches students to “distinguish truth from error or distortion, and then to communicate truth accurately, effectively, and convincingly to others.” Required courses include “Literature of Western Civilization,” “Introduction to Philosophy,” and “Fundamentals of Catholic Doctrine.”

For more information, contact Christendom College:

Christendom College Admissions
134 Christendom Drive
Front Royal, Virginia 22630
(800) 877-5456
www.christendom.edu

College of the Ozarks
Point Lookout, Missouri

The College of the Ozarks is a unique Christian college with about 1,400 students,
located in Point Lookout, Missouri. Dubbed as “Hard Work U.” by The Wall Street Journal, it has a special work-study program in which students work in lieu of paying tuition.

In addition to the 34 majors, 38 minors, and eight pre-professional programs it offers, the College of the Ozarks has an extensive character education program. As soon as students arrive for freshman orientation, they begin character education programs and abide by a dress code and an honor code.

A core liberal arts curriculum is required of all students and an optional character-based curriculum is available but not required. The general education curriculum is “purposefully complemented by an emphasis on the development of vital competencies,” such as writing, critical thinking, and interdisciplinary connections. Overall, the College of the Ozarks offers a robust array of programs and excellent opportunities to receive a well-rounded education.

One of the most distinctive features of the College of the Ozarks is the work-study program. All students work 15 hours per week instead of paying tuition. Many students find interesting jobs at the college such as working at the college’s own restaurant & lodge, in the print shop, as a campus landscaper, or on the farm. Two 40-hour weeks are also required during longer breaks, including Christmas or Easter.

For more information, contact College of the Ozarks:

College of the Ozarks Admissions
P.O. Box 17
Point Lookout, Missouri 65726
(800) 222-0525
www.cofo.edu

Franciscan University of Steubenville
Steubenville, Ohio

Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio is a dynamic Catholic university with 2,049 undergraduate students and 400 graduate students. Majors are available in 36 undergraduate subjects, and the college offers 33 undergraduate minors and seven graduate programs. As a devoutly Catholic institution, Franciscan lives by a conservative intellectual and social philosophy based on the strong liberal arts tradition and the teachings of the Catholic church.

Many of Franciscan’s programs are devoted to obtaining a deeper knowledge of the history, philosophy, and culture that shaped Western Civilization. For example, the university offers five specific programs in which students learn directly about Western Civilization and the role of the Catholic church in its formation. Franciscan also offers an honors program devoted to great books of the Western world.

Many faculty members have distinguished themselves in conservative scholarship. Political science professor Dr. Stephen Krason penned books about the founding fathers and the Constitution. Legal Studies program director Brian Scharnecchia authored a three-volume work outlining and advocating a conservative approach to family issues. The University sponsors the nation’s only human life studies minor, which teaches students to think, speak, and act intelligently on human life issues. Using reason and logic, the newly-established Institute of Bioethics at Franciscan University sponsors forums and provides advanced training for students on abortion, euthanasia, the institution of marriage and other issues that impact society.

Campus life at Franciscan is different than most colleges. Many students choose to live in a “household,” a mix between a fraternity and a faith-sharing group. Through sports, Bible study, prayer, and other social activities, households provide an essential bonding experience that parallels the mission of the university. A large portion of the student body’s free time is spent serving the community and attending Mass held on campus.

A factor that distinguishes Franciscan is the student body’s devotion to activism on traditional religious values. Public policy, civic participation, and conservative activism groups remain popular among students.

For more information, contact Franciscan University:
Franciscan University Admissions
1235 University Boulevard
Steubenville, Ohio 43952
(800) 783-6220
www.franciscan.edu

Grove City College
Grove City, Pennsylvania

Grove City College is a Christian college located north of Pittsburgh with 2,500 students. It offers 55 undergraduate majors. Its mission is to offer a rigorous academic education in a thoroughly Christian environment at an affordable cost.

As a liberal arts institution, its web site also states: “Rejecting relativism and secularism, [Grove City College] fosters intellectual, moral, spiritual, and social development consistent with a commitment to Christian truth, morals, and freedom.” The atmosphere created at Grove City College through its policies and programs encourages “the spiritual, moral, intellectual, and character development” of its students and staff.
Grove City has a commitment to conservative scholarship in various fields. For example, Dr. Paul Kengor (political science) has written several best-selling books and is an expert in the American presidency. Dr. Tracy Miller (economics) is an expert on international economics who has written on the subject. Many of Ludwig von Mises’ papers are housed and researched at the College. In addition, Grove City boasts a strong department of religion and a major in entrepreneurship. Engineering, education and business round out the most popular majors. Additionally, the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College is a think tank offering annual conferences, noted speakers and a chance for faculty members to share their editorials in media outlets around the country.

Given its legal and financial independence from the federal government, Grove City College’s tuition fees are surprisingly low. Annual tuition is about half the national average, thanks to the college’s fiduciary responsibility and private loan program. As a result, Grove City has been called a “best value” time and time again.

For more information, contact Grove City College:
Grove City College
100 Campus Drive
Grove City, Pennsylvania 16127
(724) 458-2100
www.gcc.edu

Harding University
Searcy, Arkansas

Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas is a robust Christian college with 6,500 students. Ninety majors, thirteen pre-professional programs, and twelve graduate and professional degrees encompass the academic offerings. As the largest private university in Arkansas, Harding offers a well-rounded intellectual experience in a Biblical context. The Honors College also offers in-depth and supplementary study for accelerated students.

Majors from all programs are required to fulfill liberal arts requirements that include seven categories: spiritual and moral values, communications and critical thinking, the individual and social environment, the natural world, the creative spirit, the historical perspective, and global literacy. A moral code signed by all students creates an atmosphere where everyone is held to high standards.

Each year, Harding students participate in a variety of programs from the American Studies Institute, including the Distinguished Lecture Series. Young America’s Foundation is proud to co-sponsor several lectures each year that expose students to conservative ideas. Past speakers include Margaret Thatcher, John Ashcroft, William F. Buckley Jr., Sean Hannity, Zell Miller, Lech Walesa, and J.C. Watts.

Harding’s American Studies Institute puts a strong emphasis on its entrepreneurial development programs. For example, the Belden Center for Private Enterprise Education, led by noted scholar Dr. Don Diffine, educates students on the importance of freedom and private enterprise in relation to the success of business.

For more information, contact Harding University:
Harding University Admissions
915 E. Market Street
Searcy, Arkansas 72143
(501) 279-4000
www.harding.edu

Hillsdale College
Hillsdale, Michigan

Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan is a liberal arts college with 1,300
students. Offering 34 traditional majors, eight interdisciplinary majors, and nine pre-professional programs, Hillsdale consistently ranks highly nationwide in U.S. News & World Report, among other publications. Its core curriculum exemplifies the tradition of a classic liberal arts program. All students, regardless of major, are required to take courses in humanities, natural science, and social science during their first two years. Highly respected conservative professors teach at Hillsdale including Dr. Burt Folsom (history), Dr. Ivan Pongracic (economics), and Dr. Mickey Craig (political science).

Students at this southern Michigan campus hear from one of the largest and most distinguished lecture programs in the country. Hillsdale’s Center for Constructive Alternatives (CCA) has sponsored more than 1,100 speakers since 1971, including conservative luminaries such as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Walter Williams. Students are required to attend two hours of CCA seminars in order to graduate.

Independence is an important theme at Hillsdale. Upon its founding in 1844, it was the nation’s first college to prohibit discrimination based on race, sex, or religion in its charter. Ever since, the institution has not taken a penny from the federal government. When some students received federal loans in the 1970s, Hillsdale quickly reacted by maintaining independence and rejecting government quotas. Even given the absence of government funding, Hillsdale remains a great value because it continually provides privately funded financial aid packages.

Hillsdale provides students with a well-rounded education that focuses on liberty. Students learn what liberty means and the moral conditions of its preservation. They develop the skills to be productive citizens and the character to be good ones. The mission statement sums up the college well. It reads: “The College considers itself a trustee of modern man’s intellectual and spiritual inheritance from the Judeo-Christian faith and Greco-Roman culture, a heritage finding its clearest expression in the American experiment of self-government under law.”

For more information, contact Hillsdale College:
Hillsdale College Admissions
33 East College Street
Hillsdale, Michigan 49242
(517) 607-2327
www.hillsdale.edu

Indiana Wesleyan University
Marion, Indiana

Indiana Wesleyan University is a Christ-centered academic community located in Marion, Indiana. As Indiana’s largest private university in total enrollment, it boasts approximately 15,400 students. Despite record enrollment, IWU has been able to maintain a 16:1 student-to-faculty ratio for the 3,200 students on the main campus in Marion. Among the members of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, the main organization of Evangelical schools of higher education in the U.S. and Canada, IWU has become its largest member with the Marion campus and at regional sites throughout Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky.

The bachelor’s degree curriculum at IWU is centered on a core of several requirements, including studies in Biblical literature and world civilization. The university is also home to several prominent scholars in conservative and libertarian thought. IWU faculty members have terminal degrees from institutions as prestigious as Oxford University, Pepperdine University, University of Michigan, Virginia Law School, University of Texas-Austin, University of Chicago, The Ohio State University, and Indiana University.

Academic Convocation speakers have included Attorney General Ed Meese, M. Stanton Evans, and Dr. James Dobson. Noted authors highlighted in the curriculum include Friedman, Toqueville, Bastiat, Hayek, and a course that discusses Ronald Reagan’s autobiography, An American Life. In addition, the university has worked with student organizers to bring in Young America’s Foundation speakers including Dinesh D’Souza, Star Parker, and Oliver North.

Lifestyle expectations at IWU promote a Christian atmosphere on campus. The primary values center on “Christ likeness,” and include commitment, learning, serving, and stewardship. IWU is defined by producing “world changers” through an “integrated experience of intellectual challenge, spiritual growth, and leadership development.” All first-year students take a course called “Becoming World Changers,” which provides a common experience that directs students toward fulfillment of IWU’s mission.

For more information, contact Indiana Wesleyan University:
Indiana Wesleyan University Admissions
4201 South Washington Street
Marion, Indiana 46953
(866) 468-6498
www.indwes.edu

Liberty University
Lynchburg, Virginia

Liberty University, founded in 1971 by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, is located in Lynchburg, Virginia, and is the largest evangelical university in the world with more than 40,000 students enrolled in residential and online programs. Total enrollment for the 2008-2009 school year is expected to top out at 50,000. The chancellor of Liberty University is Jerry Falwell, Jr.

The mission of Liberty University is, “to develop Christ-centered men and women with the values, knowledge, and skills essential to impact tomorrow’s world.” A common motto of the late Rev. Jerry Falwell for Liberty University was, “If it’s Christian it should be better.”

In turn, Liberty offers 56 majors and 33 minors, as well as 92 graduate programs. Notable schools include the Liberty University School of Law, the Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, and the Jesse Helms School of Government.

Liberty University students are known for their theologically, socially, and fiscally conservative views on issues like “…an absolute repudiation of ‘political correctness,’ a strong commitment to political conservatism, total rejection of socialism, and firm support for America’s economic system of free enterprise,” among other things. This was recently evidenced during the 2008 presidential election, where more than 80% of the Liberty University student body was registered to vote, the university closed for election day, bussed students to the polling places, and garnered international media attention (including a front page article in the Washington Post) for their trendsetting civic involvement.

Liberty’s faculty is committed to the universities Christian worldview and to furthering the mission of the University, and each faculty member begins their classes in prayer and adheres to the university doctrinal statement.

The Christian experience at Liberty does not stop with the classroom. Dormitories are supervised by a small army of “student leaders” who work to maintain the spiritual and social health of the halls. Liberty mentors one student leader for every five residential students, assuring that no single student is left without adequate social, spiritual, and academic support.

The thrice-weekly, university-wide chapel service plays hosts to 60 national leaders each school year. It is considered to be a required stop on the national, conservative campaign trail.

The university has gathered dozens of “Big South Conference Championships” through the 17 NCAA Division 1 sports offered at Liberty, has a national champion debate team, Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs, and hosts numerous special conferences devoted to Biblical and contemporary issues.

Liberty University Online is considered among the nation’s most respected, collegiate Distance Learning Programs (www.luonline.com). Liberty University also offers a residential and online K-12 program via Liberty Christian Academy and Liberty University Online Academy (www.libertyonlineacademy.com).

For more information, contact Liberty University:
Liberty University Admissions
1971 University Boulevard
Lynchburg, Virginia 24502
(434) 582-2000
www.liberty.edu

St. Vincent College
Latrobe, Pennsylvania

St. Vincent College is a traditional Catholic college in rural Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh. With almost 1,700 students, it offers a comprehensive liberal arts program in the Benedictine tradition.

Archabbot Wimmer, the founder of St. Vincent College, noted that students should learn “first what is necessary, then what is useful, and finally what is beautiful and will contribute to their refinement.” The college continues that vision with a strong core curriculum promoting hard work and the study of philosophy. In addition, St. Vincent boasts a strong writing program and is committed to theology, mathematics, and the natural sciences in the core curriculum.

The student life at St. Vincent is unique given its proximity to the monastery and influence of the Benedictine community. The college is committed to service learning and volunteering. Everyone in the first-year class participates in an orientation community service event. There is a very active campus ministry, and President Jim Towey takes a service group of 12 students each year to serve in Mother Theresa’s mission in Calcutta.

The Alex G. McKenna School of Economics and Government highlights conservative ideas through its programs including the Center for Political and Economic Thought, where internationally recognized guests interact with students and faculty through lectures and events. A focus on philosophy and principles instead of current events and polling data, especially in political science, allows students to learn more deeply about the importance of Western civilization.

For more information, please contact St. Vincent College:

St. Vincent College Admissions
300 Fraser Purchase Road
Latrobe, Pennsylvania 15650
(724) 537-4540
www.stvincent.edu

Thomas Aquinas College
Santa Paula, California

Thomas Aquinas College is a small Catholic college located in southern California with
351 students. No majors or minors are offered since all students participate in the prescribed great books curriculum. The somewhat secluded location in the hills of rural southern California provides a metaphor for the unique nature of this fine institution.

The “great books” of Western civilization comprise the entire curriculum of Thomas Aquinas College, and all students graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts. Works on many subjects are included in the program, including music, mathematics, and science as well as philosophy, language, and theology. Faculty members serve less as lecturers and more as facilitators using the Socratic method. Catholic faculty members publicly take the Oath of Fidelity and make a Profession of Faith at the beginning of their terms in office.

Campus life at Thomas Aquinas follows with traditional Catholic morality and teaching, and there are many groups in which students participate. For example, the St. Genesius Players is a drama group that puts on productions, the choir often performs, and the “bushwhackers” maintain local trails and organize hiking trips. Student groups are also involved with activism on issues related to traditional religious values.

For more information, please contact Thomas Aquinas College:

Thomas Aquinas College Admissions
10000 North Ojai Road
Santa Paula, California 93060
(800) 634-9797
www.thomasaquinas.edu

Honorable mentions:
Brigham Young University
Patrick Henry College
Regent University
The King’s College
Thomas More College

Homosexuality and Mental Health Problems

From the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality
By N. E. Whitehead, Ph.D.

Summary: Recent studies show homosexuals have a substantially greater risk of suffering from a psychiatric problems than do heterosexuals. We see higher rates of suicide, depression, bulimia, antisocial personality disorder, and substance abuse. This paper highlights some new and significant considerations that reflect on the question of those mental illnesses and on their possible sources.

The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its diagnostic list of mental disorders in 1973, despite substantial protest (see Socarides, 1995). The A.P.A. was strongly motivated by the desire to reduce the effects of social oppression. However, one effect of the A.P.A.'s action was to add psychiatric authority to gay activists' insistence that homosexuals as a group are as healthy as heterosexuals. This has discouraged publication of research that suggests there may, in fact, be psychiatric problems associated with homosexuality.

Read the rest of this entry >>

Why Geithner and Rangel Matter

From American Thinker

By C. Edmund Wright

The Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and the U.S. Treasury Secretary are literally the two highest ranking political figures with regard to the Internal Revenue Service. If any two people on the planet should set an example in their tax behavior, it is the two people who hold those positions and anyone who aspires to them.

Inspired by their recent behavior, I left a question on my corporate accountant's voice mail today. "Jim, I just want to know if I can simply pay taxes just the way the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee OR the incoming Secretary of the Treausurer pay them?"

He laughed, and replied "of course... as long as you don't mind doing some time." Well, this explains why we go to great pains to make sure our company is in compliance while preserving as much of our business capital as possible each and every year

Charles Rangel and Timothy Geithner are apparently somewhat more casual about tax compliance, taking hypocrisy and irony to new levels in the process.

As the Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rangel is literally the most influential member of Congress related to taxing and spending. As we found out in September, Rangel decided that he was above paying taxes on rental income on some houses he owned in the Dominican Republic

And as we found out days ago, the man appointed by Barack Obama to run the Treasury Department -- of which the IRS is a major part -- has also considered himself above the tax laws that haunt the rest of us.

Please understand these two people will have tremendous influence on how our tax laws are written and that they will expect every damned one of us to follow that 66 thousand page tax code to the letter. Or as Joe Biden would say, they expect us to "be patriotic" and to do so accurately.

Which makes the excuses rendered by Rangel jaw dropping. These are exuses I would not recommend you try at home. Look at some of the explanation from Rangel and his attorney Lanny Davis (along with some comments.)

"Mr. Davis said the congressman did not realize he had to declare the money as income, and was unaware of the semiannual payments from the resort because his wife, Alma, handled the family finances and conferred with their accountant, John Viardi, on tax matters." (New York Times, September 5).

Yeah, right. Let you or me try to claim the ignorant wife and accountant as a defense to the IRS.

"While I now know is [sic] although I had not personally received proceeds in cash, the fact that [sic] any reduction of the mortgage actually counted as income and should have been reported as such." (Rangel news conference, September 10)

Well yes, it should. It is called "taxable income," an understanding that should not escape the man who wants to dictate tax policy for the rest of us.

"I personally feel that I have done nothing morally wrong."

I am sure that will go a long way with IRS agents. By the way, just how low is your bar for "morally wrong."

Geithner, meanwhile, has few public comments on his issue to date, perhaps because one of his two problems is inexcusable and any comment will simply make the PR problem worse. While working for the International Monetary Fund, Geithner failed to pay taxes even though the IMF "grossed up" his pay to actually give him the money with which to pay his taxes. They also attached a stub that showed exactly what his pay was including how much had been grossed up (let me help you Obama voters or potential cabinet members: this means it showed exactly what taxes he owed on that particular income.) I mean, this was not complicated.

Not only that, but Geithner himself prepared his own tax returns for several of the years where this underpayment was made. Bottom line: He either is not capable of handling a rather pedestrian income statement for tax purposes or he flat out cheated. Frankly, I am not sure that either explanation gives me the utmost confidence in the "only man smart enough to understand the TARP" program. Based on his tax return, how can we be sure he even understands the business impact of "depreciation recapture" let alone "credit default swap."

Then again, he was appointed by the man who lost an impromptu debate on basic tax policy to a plumber from Ohio, clearly demonstrating an ignorance of what a capital gains tax is in the process.

Charlie Rangel. Tim Geithner. Barney "Fannie Mae" Frank. Chris "Countrywide" Dodds. Rahm Emanuel. And Barack Obama. And so on.

We have been told that these are the people who are going to lead our economy out of the Bush imposed wilderness and to the Promised Land. These are the people who will end the Republican's "culture of corruption" and "era of special interests" in Washington and clean things up. These people represent hope and change.

I think we can look at this and easily understand why the stock market is tanking. We can figure out how, for the second month in a row, the jobless report "stunned the experts." Investors and business owners do not live in the make believe world of Washington and its political gamesmanship. These people have skin in the game. These people suffer when they make bad decisions, and they are en masse deciding that to "take their ball and go home" as the only prudent decision. That's why people are dumping stocks and laying off employees.

When the people who make the rules are either too ignorant to understand their own rules or feel entitled to break them, the allure of playing is simply gone for the rest of us. Apparently, more than half the voters have no understanding of this concept. And no amount of bail-outs will change that.

It's an Injustice to NOT Marry Girls Aged 10, Says Saudi Cleric

Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Asheikh, the Kingdom's grand mufti, prays during the funeral of a Saudi woman and her daughter last February

From the Daily Mail

Ten-year-old girls are ready for marriage, according to Saudi Arabia's most senior cleric.

Sheikh Abdul-Aziz Al Sheikh, the country's grand mufti, told Al Hayat newspaper that those saying ten or 12-year-old girls are too young to marry are being 'unfair' to them.

Read the rest of this entry >>

Christians Have Nothing and No One To Fear, Pope Tells Pilgrims

In this year dedicated to St. Paul, Pope Benedict XVI continued a series of talks this week, telling 4000 pilgrims gathered in the Paul VI hall that those firmly united with Christ have nothing and no one to fear. The full text delivered by the Pope at his January 14 weekly audience follows:

BENEDICT XVI

GENERAL AUDIENCE

Paul VI Audience Hall
Wednesday, 14 January 2009

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Continuing our catechesis on Saint Paul, we turn to the “twin” letters: Colossians and Ephesians. Similar in language, they are unique in developing the theme of Christ as “head” – kephalé – not only of the Church, but also of the entire universe. These letters assure us that Christ is above any hostile earthly power. Christ alone “loved us and gave himself up for us” (Eph 5:2), so that if we remain close to him, we need not fear any adversity. It was God’s plan to “recapitulate” all things in Jesus “through whom all things were created”, so that “by the blood of his Cross” we might be reconciled to the Father. Christ’s headship also implies that, in a certain sense, he is greater than the Church in that his dominion extends beyond her boundaries, and that the Church, rather than the entire cosmos, is referred to as the Body of Christ. These letters are also notable for the spousal image they use to describe how Christ has “won” his bride – the Church – by giving his life for her (cf. Eph 5:25). What greater sign of love could there be than this? Christ thus desires that we grow more beautiful each day through irreproachable moral conduct, “without wrinkle or defect” (Eph 5:27). By living uprightly and justly, may we bear witness to the nuptial union which has already taken place in Christ as we await its fulfilment in the wedding feast to come.

* * *

I extend a warm welcome to all the English-speaking pilgrims present at today’s audience. May your time in Rome strengthen you to imitate Saint Paul in “giving thanks always and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God the Father” (Eph 5:20)

Homosexual ‘Pig Sex’ Orgy Planned for Obama Inaugural Weekend

WARNING: Graphic descriptions and photos.

Americans for Truth About Homosexuality has revealed the details of a homosexual orgy to be hosted by the Doubletree Hotel in Washington, D.C. during the Inaugural Weekend.

Two Cabinet Appointments, One Double Standard

The hypocrisy of many liberal Democrats and their Amen Chorus in the media is never more apparent than when a new administration is staffing up.

Eight years ago, President Bush nominated Linda Chavez for Secretary of Labor. She would have been the first Hispanic woman to serve in a President's cabinet. She had previously worked for the American Federation of Teachers and was a close associate of that union's iconic leader, Albert Shanker. However, she had subsequently served in the administrations of Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and her appointment as Labor Secretary in 2001 was bitterly opposed by big labor.

A national scandal erupted when, on the speculation of a neighbor, it was suggested that Chavez had illegally employed Marta Mercado, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala, and had failed to pay employer withholding taxes. Because of a storm of Congressional opposition, Chavez eventually withdrew her nomination. It was later established by an FBI investigation that Chavez was providing safe-haven for a victim of domestic abuse, had given her money, but had never employed the woman. Mercado and others familiar with the situation all confirmed that Chavez had acted as a good Samaritan.

Now we have in Treasury Secretary-designate Timothy Geithner, a man who did not pay self-employment taxes for several years, even though he had acknowledged his obligation to do so. He also failed to maintain the immigration status of a housekeeper who had worked for him. Although he earned $398,200 in 2007, he only settled a $34,000 debt to the IRS last November when it became clear that he was under consideration to be the nation's chief financial officer.

What is the response of Congressional leaders? Are they waiting to see how he explains the problem in Senate confirmation hearings scheduled for January 21? Hardly.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus has already announced that Geithner "will clearly be confirmed" by the Senate. No need to wait for any explanations, background investigations, or committee hearings; the matter has already been decided.

Do you think that when the nation has a scofflaw Treasury Secretary, the IRS will let you owe $34,000 over the course of years? This isn't change one can believe in; it's just the same old double standard.

Europe Reimports Jew Hatred

Adolf Hitler talking to the Palestinian leader, the Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al Husseini.

The mythical Arab Street now reaches deep into Paris, London, Berlin and Madrid.

From The Wall Street Journal
By Daniel Schwammenthal

Give Giancarlo Desiderati credit for his unintellectual honesty. While most left-wing detractors of Israel claim their animosity toward the Jewish state has nothing to do with anti-Semitism, the head of a small Italian union, Flaica-Uniti-Cub, wasted no time with such sophism. Having long called for a boycott of Israeli goods, Mr. Desiderati last week made the logical next step. "Do not buy anything from businesses run by the Jewish community," his group's Web site urged Italians.

Jews around Europe are increasingly under attack since Israel decided two weeks ago to defend itself after years of rocket fire at its civilian population. There have been arson attempts on synagogues in Britain, Belgium and Germany. Police last week arrested Muslim protesters who wanted to enter the Jewish quarter in Antwerp. Several Danish schools with large Muslim student bodies say they won't enroll Jewish kids because they can't guarantee the children's safety. In France, a group of teenagers attacked a 14-year-old girl last week, calling her "dirty Jew" while kicking her.

At rallies in Germany and the Netherlands over the past two weeks, protesters shouted, "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the Gas." In Amsterdam, Socialist lawmaker Harry van Bommel and Greta Duisenberg, widow of the first European Central Bank president, marched at the front of one such "peace" demonstration. They didn't join in the background chorus calling for another Holocaust. Instead, they chanted, "Intifada, Intifada, Free Palestine." Mr. Van Bommel later insisted this wasn't a call for Jewish blood but for "civil disobedience" -- a laughable defense given that terrorists during the last intifada murdered more than 1,000 Israelis.

Most of the anti-Jewish violence and protests in Europe come from immigrants. In what may have been a Freudian recognition of the changing face of Europe, CNN two weeks ago used footage of anti-Israeli protesters in London in a report about the growing anger in the "Arab and Muslim world." The mythical Arab Street now reaches deep into Paris, London, Berlin and Madrid.

After a burning car was rammed into a gate outside a synagogue in Toulouse last week, President Nicolas Sarkozy issued a statement that was as morally confused as his judgment of Israel's Gaza offensive. Mr. Sarkozy, who condemned both Hamas terror and Israel's attempt to stop it, also blurred the distinction between the victims and perpetrators of anti-Semitism in France.

His country "will not tolerate international tensions mutating into intercommunity violence," he warned, suggesting that the violence in France comes not only from French Muslims but Jews as well. Mr. Sarkozy's comments also suggest that the fighting in Gaza is the cause for attacks on Jews in France -- that is, that the Mideast conflict is fueling anti-Semitism in Europe. It is exactly the other way around.

The rage against the Jews that is exploding in Europe has been carefully nurtured; it is not spontaneous sympathy for fellow Muslims in Gaza. How else to explain the silence when Muslims in other conflicts, from Darfur to Chechnya, are being killed?

The depth of anti-Semitic propaganda in Palestinian and other Muslim societies is one of the most underreported facts about the Middle East. It is this anti-Semitism that predisposes Muslims in Europe to attack Jews and fuels the Mideast conflict. The hatred predates Israel's creation. To illustrate this point: The Palestinian leader during World War II, Hajj Amin al Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, conspired with Hitler to bring the Holocaust to Palestine. Luckily, the British stopped the German troops in Africa. The Mufti spent the war years in Berlin and was later indicted for war crimes but with the help of the Muslim Brotherhood escaped to Egypt. Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Hamas and other Islamists continue what the Mufti had helped to start: a blend of European anti-Semitism and Islam-inspired Jew hatred. The rejection of Israel's right to exist is what drives their attacks. The media, though, largely ignores Hamas's ideology and its crimes of hiding its leaders and weapons among its own civilian population, and demonizes Israel's attempt to protect its citizens.

Hamas and other Islamists are not even trying to hide their ideology. Just read the Hamas charter or check out Hamas TV, including children's programs, for a nauseating dose of murderous anti-Semitism. Last week, the French broadcasting authorities banned Hamas TV for inciting violence and hatred. Unfortunately, just like Hezbollah TV, which is also banned in Europe for its anti-Semitic and jihadi content, audiences here can still receive these programs due to Saudi Arabia's Arabsat and Egyptian satellite provider Nilesat.

The Islamist variation of Jew hatred is now being reimported to Europe. Muslims in Europe, watching Hamas and Hezbollah TV with their satellite dishes, are being fed the same diet of anti-Semitism and jihadi ideology that Palestinians and much of the Middle East consume.

This brings a unique challenge to the difficult integration of Muslims in Europe. When it comes to issues like Shariah law and terrorism, one can expect a true "clash of civilizations." There is no Western tradition that would justify "honor killings." Anti-Semitism, on the other hand, is not alien to Europe's culture -- to the contrary, the Continent once excelled at it and many still share the feeling.

A Pew study from September shows 25% of Germans and 20% of French are still affected by this virus. In Spain, 46% have unfavorable views of Jews. Is there really no connection between this statistic and the fact that the Spanish media and government are among Europe's most hostile toward the Jewish state? Is it just a coincidence that Europe's largest anti-Israel demonstration took place Sunday in Spain, with more than 100,000 protesters?

A 2006 study in the Journal of Conflict Resolution based on the survey in 10 European countries suggests otherwise. Yale University's Edward H. Kaplan and Charles A. Small found "that anti-Israel sentiment consistently predicts the probability that an individual is anti-Semitic, with the likelihood of measured anti-Semitism increasing with the extent of anti-Israel sentiment observed."

With little hope that the media coverage will become more balanced and the incitement of the growing Muslim community will abate, the Jews in Europe are facing uncertain times.


Mr. Schwammenthal edits the State of the Union column.

Pat Buchanan Compares George W. Bush to Harry Truman

There is very little that Pat Buchanan has ever written with which we disagree here at Sunlit Uplands. In summing up the Bush presidency, he seems to us a bit restrained in his criticism; there is so much more that could be said. But we take strong exception to comparing George W. Bush with Harry S Truman as two "unreflective" and failed Presidents. Indeed, we rank Harry Truman among the greatest of Presidents.

Truman had more momentous decisions to make than did any other twentieth century president. His decision to use nuclear weapons on Japan, brought an end to the war and saved an estimated 1 million American military personnel from a deadly invasion of the Japanese mainland. He integrated the armed services. He met the Communist challenge in Greece and Turkey. He authorized the Berlin airlift, broke the communist blockade and secured that city's freedom. He established NATO which secured the West through the Soviet era and is expanding today to guarantee a Europe that is free and whole. Perhaps most monumental of all, his Marshall Plan saved thousands of lives, rebuilt a shattered Europe, and protected those countries from succumbing to internal communist threats. Indeed, Truman was the architect of the world we have occupied in the last half century. The first battles in the war that Ronald Reagan ultimately won, were fought by Harry Truman. He was bold and decisive and was guided by deep faith, Midwestern common sense, and decency. None other than our greatest hero, Sir Winston Churchill, said to Truman: "I misjudged you badly. Since that time, you, more than any other man, have saved Western civilization." And history has vindicated the decisions of Truman and the judgment of Churchill.

Unlike our current President, he had a zealous regard for the Constitution and the limits of Executive and Federal power. He retained an extraordinary humility and humor. When his service was done, he went quietly home. He refused all opportunities to serve on corporate boards and to reap hefty honoraria for speeches, believing that to profit from his Presidency would demean the office he held and be disrespectful to the Constitution he revered.

We love and admire Pat Buchanan at Sunlit Uplands, but let the record show that on this point we respectfully disagree. George W. Bush is no Harry Truman!

Google to China: "We're Sorry for the Porn"

From OneNewsNow
By Charlie Butts

The Internet search engine Google has bowed to China's demand that it clean up its act.

Google and other major Internet sites were threatened by China because of the proliferation of pornography. But Pat Trueman of Alliance Defense Fund reports Google formally apologized.

"They said they would eliminate all vulgar material 'which may have had a negative effect on web users,'" Trueman notes. "Well, of course it has a negative effect. Child pornography and hardcore adult pornography harm people -- and Google apologized to the Chinese."

Google's statement, which was posted in the company blog on its Chinese side, added: "Google is willing to be a law-abiding citizen in China."

Trueman contends that Google and others can control pornography just as much for America as they can for China. "They should apologize to the world -- particularly to the United States of America, where they are a facilitator of child pornography and hardcore adult pornography," says the pro-family attorney.

Google was one of 20 Internet companies singled out earlier this month by the Chinese government, accusing them of spreading porn and other material that could corrupt young people. China's most popular search engine, Baidu, also issued an apology "for the negative impacts we brought upon the society."

The Face of Hate in San Francisco

In the topsy-turvy world of the radical left, fascism is called liberal, evil becomes a good, hate is regarded as compassion, and terrorists become innocent victims. Hat tip to American Thinker and Zombie Time for exposing the face of hate in the streets of San Franciso.

See all pictures of Gaza War Protest and Anti-Israel Rally >>



And here's a look at the "culture" these radicals support:

A Preview of "The Next Hundred Years"

The highly regarded global intelligence and geopolitical forecasting website, Stratfor, is written by some of the world's most distinguished former intelligence officers, diplomats and scholars. It has just published a new book titled The Next 100 Years that offers an extraordinary glimpse into the future. The following excerpt from that book will shock you.

OVERTURE

An Introduction to the American Age

Imagine that you were alive in the summer of 1900, living in London, then the capital of the world. Europe ruled the Eastern Hemisphere. There was hardly a place that, if not ruled directly, was not indirectly controlled from a European capital. Europe was at peace and enjoying unprecedented prosperity. Indeed, European interdependence due to trade and investment was so great that serious people were claiming that war had become impossible—and if not impossible, would end within weeks of beginning—because global financial markets couldn’t withstand the strain. The future seemed fixed: a peaceful, prosperous Europe would rule the world.

Imagine yourself now in the summer of 1920. Europe had been torn apart by an agonizing war. The continent was in tatters. The Austro-Hungarian, Russian, German, and Ottoman empires were gone and millions had died in a war that lasted for years. The war ended when an American army of a million men intervened—an army that came and then just as quickly left. Communism dominated Russia, but it was not clear that it could survive. Countries that had been on the periphery of European power, like the United States and Japan, suddenly emerged as great powers. But one thing was certain—the peace treaty that had been imposed on Germany guaranteed that it would not soon reemerge.

Imagine the summer of 1940. Germany had not only reemerged but conquered France and dominated Europe. Communism had survived and the Soviet Union now was allied with Nazi Germany. Great Britain alone stood against Germany, and from the point of view of most reasonable people, the war was over. If there was not to be a thousand-year Reich, then certainly Europe’s fate had been decided for a century. Germany would dominate Europe and inherit its empire.

Imagine now the summer of 1960. Germany had been crushed in the war, defeated less than five years later. Europe was occupied, split down the middle by the United States and the Soviet Union. The European empires were collapsing, and the United States and Soviet Union were competing over who would be their heir. The United States had the Soviet Union surrounded and, with an overwhelming arsenal of nuclear weapons, could annihilate it in hours. The United States had emerged as the global superpower. It dominated all of the world’s oceans, and with its nuclear force could dictate terms to anyone in the world. Stalemate was the best the Soviets could hope for—unless the Soviets invaded Germany and conquered Europe. That was the war everyone was preparing for. And in the back of everyone’s mind, the Maoist Chinese, seen as fanatical, were the other danger.

Now imagine the summer of 1980. The United States had been defeated in a seven-year war—not by the Soviet Union, but by communist North Vietnam. The nation was seen, and saw itself, as being in retreat. Expelled from Vietnam, it was then expelled from Iran as well, where the oil fields, which it no longer controlled, seemed about to fall into the hands of the Soviet Union. To contain the Soviet Union, the United States had formed an alliance with Maoist China—the American president and the Chinese chairman holding an amiable meeting in Beijing. Only this alliance seemed able to contain the powerful Soviet Union, which appeared to be surging.

Imagine now the summer of 2000. The Soviet Union had completely collapsed. China was still communist in name but had become capitalist in practice. NATO had advanced into Eastern Europe and even into the former Soviet Union. The world was prosperous and peaceful. Everyone knew that geopolitical considerations had become secondary to economic considerations, and the only problems were regional ones in basket cases like Haiti or Kosovo.

Then came September 11, 2001, and the world turned on its head again. At a certain level, when it comes to the future, the only thing one can be sure of is that common sense will be wrong. There is no magic twenty-year cycle; there is no simplistic force governing this pattern. It is simply that the things that appear to be so permanent and dominant at any given moment in history can change with stunning rapidity. Eras come and go. In international relations, the way the world looks right now is not at all how it will look in twenty years . . . or even less. The fall of the Soviet Union was hard to imagine, and that is exactly the point. Conventional political analysis suffers from a profound failure of imagination. It imagines passing clouds to be permanent and is blind to powerful, long- term shifts taking place in full view of the world.

If we were at the beginning of the twentieth century, it would be impossible to forecast the particular events I’ve just listed. But there are some things that could have been—and, in fact, were—forecast. For example, it was obvious that Germany, having united in 1871, was a major power in an insecure position (trapped between Russia and France) and wanted to redefine the European and global systems. Most of the conflicts in the first half of the twentieth century were about Germany’s status in Europe. While the times and places of wars couldn’t be forecast, the probability that there would be a war could be and was forecast by many Europeans.

The harder part of this equation would be forecasting that the wars would be so devastating and that after the first and second world wars were over, Europe would lose its empire. But there were those, particularly after the invention of dynamite, who predicted that war would now be catastrophic. If the forecasting on technology had been combined with the forecasting on geopolitics, the shattering of Europe might well have been predicted. Certainly the rise of the United States and Russia was predicted in the nineteenth century. Both Alexis de Tocqueville and Friedrich Nietzsche forecast the preeminence of these two countries. So, standing at the beginning of the twentieth century, it would have been possible to forecast its general outlines, with discipline and some luck.

the twenty-first century

Standing at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we need to identify the single pivotal event for this century, the equivalent of German unification for the twentieth century. After the debris of the European empire is cleared away, as well as what’s left of the Soviet Union, one power remains standing and overwhelmingly powerful. That power is the United States. Certainly, as is usually the case, the United States currently appears to be making a mess of things around the world. But it’s important not to be confused by the passing chaos. The United States is economically, militarily, and politically the most powerful country in the world, and there is no real challenger to that power. Like the Spanish-American War, a hundred years from now the war between the United States and the radical Islamists will be little remembered regardless of the prevailing sentiment of this time.

Ever since the Civil War, the United States has been on an extraordinary economic surge. It has turned from a marginal developing nation into an economy bigger than the next four countries combined. Militarily, it has gone from being an insignificant force to dominating the globe. Politically, the United States touches virtually everything, sometimes intentionally and sometimes simply because of its presence. As you read this book, it will seem that it is America- centric, written from an American point of view. That may be true, but the argument I’m making is that the world does, in fact, pivot around the United States.

This is not only due to American power. It also has to do with a fundamental shift in the way the world works. For the past five hundred years, Europe was the center of the international system, its empires creating a single global system for the first time in human history. The main highway to Europe was the North Atlantic. Whoever controlled the North Atlantic controlled access to Europe—and Europe’s access to the world. The basic geography of global politics was locked into place.

Then, in the early 1980s, something remarkable happened. For the first time in history, transpacific trade equaled transatlantic trade. With Europe reduced to a collection of secondary powers after World War II, and the shift in trade patterns, the North Atlantic was no longer the single key to anything. Now whatever country controlled both the North Atlantic and the Pacific could control, if it wished, the world’s trading system, and therefore the global economy. In the twenty-first century, any nation located on both oceans has a tremendous advantage.

Given the cost of building naval power and the huge cost of deploying it around the world, the power native to both oceans became the preeminent actor in the international system for the same reason that Britain dominated the nineteenth century: it lived on the sea it had to control. In this way, North America has replaced Europe as the center of gravity in the world, and whoever dominates North America is virtually assured of being the dominant global power. For the twenty-first century at least, that will be the United States.

The inherent power of the United States coupled with its geographic position makes the United States the pivotal actor of the twenty-first century. That certainly doesn’t make it loved. On the contrary, its power makes it feared. The history of the twenty-first century, therefore, particularly the first half, will revolve around two opposing struggles. One will be secondary powers forming coalitions to try to contain and control the United States. The second will be the United States acting preemptively to prevent an effective coalition from forming.

If we view the beginning of the twenty-first century as the dawn of the American Age (superseding the European Age), we see that it began with a group of Muslims seeking to re- create the Caliphate—the great Islamic empire that once ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Inevitably, they had to strike at the United States in an attempt to draw the world’s primary power into war, trying to demonstrate its weakness in order to trigger an Islamic uprising. The United States responded by invading the Islamic world. But its goal wasn’t victory. It wasn’t even clear what victory would mean. Its goal was simply to disrupt the Islamic world and set it against itself, so that an Islamic empire could not emerge.

The United States doesn’t need to win wars. It needs to simply disrupt things so the other side can’t build up sufficient strength to challenge it. On one level, the twenty-first century will see a series of confrontations involving lesser powers trying to build coalitions to control American behavior and the United States’ mounting military operations to disrupt them. The twenty-first century will see even more war than the twentieth century, but the wars will be much less catastrophic, because of both technological changes and the nature of the geopolitical challenge.

As we’ve seen, the changes that lead to the next era are always shockingly unexpected, and the first twenty years of this new century will be no exception. The U.S.–Islamist war is already ending and the next conflict is in sight. Russia is re-creating its old sphere of influence, and that sphere of influence will inevitably challenge the United States. The Russians will be moving westward on the great northern European plain. As Russia reconstructs its power, it will encounter the U.S.-dominated NATO in the three Baltic countries—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—as well as in Poland. There will be other points of friction in the early twenty-first century, but this new cold war will supply the flash points after the U.S.–Islamist war dies down.

The Russians can’t avoid trying to reassert power, and the United States can’t avoid trying to resist. But in the end Russia can’t win. Its deep internal problems, massively declining population, and poor infrastructure ultimately make Russia’s long- term survival prospects bleak. And the second cold war, less frightening and much less global than the first, will end as the first did, with the collapse of Russia.

There are many who predict that China is the next challenger to the United States, not Russia. I don’t agree with that view for three reasons. First, when you look at a map of China closely, you see that it is really a very isolated country physically. With Siberia in the north, the Himalayas and jungles to the south, and most of China’s population in the eastern part of the country, the Chinese aren’t going to easily expand. Second, China has not been a major naval power for centuries, and building a navy requires a long time not only to build ships but to create well-trained and experienced sailors.

Third, there is a deeper reason for not worrying about China. China is inherently unstable. Whenever it opens its borders to the outside world, the coastal region becomes prosperous, but the vast majority of Chinese in the interior remain impoverished. This leads to tension, conflict, and instability. It also leads to economic decisions made for political reasons, resulting in inefficiency and corruption. This is not the first time that China has opened itself to foreign trade, and it will not be the last time that it becomes unstable as a result. Nor will it be the last time that a figure like Mao emerges to close the country off from the outside, equalize the wealth—or poverty—and begin the cycle anew. There are some who believe that the trends of the last thirty years will continue indefinitely. I believe the Chinese cycle will move to its next and inevitable phase in the coming decade. Far from being a challenger, China is a country the United States will be trying to bolster and hold together as a counterweight to the Russians. Current Chinese economic dynamism does not translate into long-term success.

In the middle of the century, other powers will emerge, countries that aren’t thought of as great powers today, but that I expect will become more powerful and assertive over the next few decades. Three stand out in particular. The first is Japan. It’s the second- largest economy in the world and the most vulnerable, being highly dependent on the importation of raw materials, since it has almost none of its own. With a history of militarism, Japan will not remain the marginal pacifistic power it has been. It cannot. Its own deep population problems and abhorrence of large- scale immigration will force it to look for new workers in other countries. Japan’s vulnerabilities, which I’ve written about in the past and which the Japanese have managed better than I’ve expected up until this point, in the end will force a shift in policy.

Then there is Turkey, currently the seventeenth-largest economy in the world. Historically, when a major Islamic empire has emerged, it has been dominated by the Turks. The Ottomans collapsed at the end of World War I, leaving modern Turkey in its wake. But Turkey is a stable platform in the midst of chaos. The Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Arab world to the south are all unstable. As Turkey’s power grows—and its economy and military are already the most powerful in the region—so will Turkish influence.

Finally there is Poland. Poland hasn’t been a great power since the sixteenth century. But it once was—and, I think, will be again. Two factors make this possible. First will be the decline of Germany. Its economy is large and still growing, but it has lost the dynamism it has had for two centuries. In addition, its population is going to fall dramatically in the next fifty years, further undermining its economic power. Second, as the Russians press on the Poles from the east, the Germans won’t have an appetite for a third war with Russia. The United States, however, will back Poland, providing it with massive economic and technical support. Wars—when your country isn’t destroyed—stimulate economic growth, and Poland will become the leading power in a coalition of states facing the Russians.

Japan, Turkey, and Poland will each be facing a United States even more confident than it was after the second fall of the Soviet Union. That will be an explosive situation. As we will see during the course of this book, the relationships among these four countries will greatly affect the twenty-first century, leading, ultimately, to the next global war. This war will be fought differently from any in history—with weapons that are today in the realm of science fiction. But as I will try to outline, this mid-twenty-first century conflict will grow out of the dynamic forces born in the early part of the new century.

Tremendous technical advances will come out of this war, as they did out of World War II, and one of them will be especially critical. All sides will be looking for new forms of energy to substitute for hydrocarbons, for many obvious reasons. Solar power is theoretically the most efficient energy source on earth, but solar power requires massive arrays of receivers. Those receivers take up a lot of space on the earth’s surface and have many negative environmental impacts—not to mention being subject to the disruptive cycles of night and day. During the coming global war, however, concepts developed prior to the war for space- based electrical generation, beamed to earth in the form of microwave radiation, will be rapidly translated from prototype to reality. Getting a free ride on the back of military space launch capability, the new energy source will be underwritten in much the same way as the Internet or the railroads were, by government support. And that will kick off a massive economic boom.

But underlying all of this will be the single most important fact of the twenty-first century: the end of the population explosion. By 2050, advanced industrial countries will be losing population at a dramatic rate. By 2100, even the most underdeveloped countries will have reached birthrates that will stabilize their populations. The entire global system has been built since 1750 on the expectation of continually expanding populations. More workers, more consumers, more soldiers—this was always the expectation. In the twenty-first century, however, that will cease to be true. The entire system of production will shift. The shift will force the world into a greater dependence on technology—particularly robots that will substitute for human labor, and intensified genetic research (not so much for the purpose of extending life but to make people productive longer).

What will be the more immediate result of a shrinking world population? Quite simply, in the first half of the century, the population bust will create a major labor shortage in advanced industrial countries. Today, developed countries see the problem as keeping immigrants out. Later in the first half of the twenty-first century, the problem will be persuading them to come. Countries will go so far as to pay people to move there. This will include the United States, which will be competing for increasingly scarce immigrants and will be doing everything it can to induce Mexicans to come to the United States—an ironic but inevitable shift.

These changes will lead to the final crisis of the twenty-first century. Mexico currently is the fifteenth-largest economy in the world. As the Europeans slip out, the Mexicans, like the Turks, will rise in the rankings until by the late twenty-first century they will be one of the major economic powers in the world. During the great migration north encouraged by the United States, the population balance in the old Mexican Cession (that is, the areas of the United States taken from Mexico in the nineteenth century) will shift dramatically until much of the region is predominantly Mexican.

The social reality will be viewed by the Mexican government simply as rectification of historical defeats. By 2080 I expect there to be a serious confrontation between the United States and an increasingly powerful and assertive Mexico. That confrontation may well have unforeseen consequences for the United States, and will likely not end by 2100.

Much of what I’ve said here may seem pretty hard to fathom. The idea that the twenty-first century will culminate in a confrontation between Mexico and the United States is certainly hard to imagine in 2009, as is a powerful Turkey or Poland. But go back to the beginning of this chapter, when I described how the world looked at twenty-year intervals during the twentieth century, and you can see what I’m driving at: common sense is the one thing that will certainly be wrong. Obviously, the more granular the description, the less reliable it gets. It is impossible to forecast precise details of a coming century—apart from the fact that I’ll be long dead by then and won’t know what mistakes I made.

But it’s my contention that it is indeed possible to see the broad outlines of what is going to happen, and to try to give it some definition, however speculative that definition might be. That’s what this book is about.

Obama's Big Plans for Lindsey Graham

Reed Galen, a California political strategist and Deputy Campaign Manager for John McCain until July 2007, has catalogued Obama's deft and extraordinary courting of John McCain.

Why, he asks, "would the President-Elect go to all the trouble of giving so much consideration to an opponent whom he soundly defeated?" It's not surprising that the sellout from Seneca plays a role.

Galen explains:

Obama understands that having John McCain as an ally in the United States Senate is a major boon to his policy initiatives. As the recent standard-bearer for the GOP, McCain will be enormously helpful; any Republican imprimatur on Obama legislation could help clear stubborn obstacles. The prospect of having a troika of votes in the Senate (McCain, Lieberman and Lindsay Graham) may have also played into the strategy; pushing a bill from 58 or 59 to the magic level of 60 votes is invaluable as the Democrats stand on the cusp of their magic number.

I wonder if those Republicans in South Carolina who voted for Lindsey Graham last year recognized how crucial a role he would play in the socialist plans of the new administration. Congratulations to you all. While Obama appears not to have been able to find anyone from the South to staff the cabinet and sub-cabinet positions he has filled, there is at least one useful idiot on whom he is depending.

Dr. Gore, Please Call Your Office: Earth on Brink of an Ice Age

From Pravda

The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.

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Obama Climate Czar Has Socialist Ties

The Washington Times is reporting today that Obama's pick for "climate czar" has been in a leadership role with an international organization advocating one-world government. According to the Times, Carol M. Browner, "was listed as one of 14 leaders of a socialist group's Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which calls for 'global governance' and says rich countries must shrink their economies to address climate change.

By Thursday, Mrs. Browner's name and biography had been removed from Socialist International's Web page, though a photo of her speaking June 30 to the group's congress in Greece was still available."

As Arctic air grips much of the United States and record low temperatures are recorded throughout the northern hemisphere, perhaps Mrs. Browner's would-be world citizen-slaves might ponder the real reasons international elites are whipping up hysteria over an issue that thousands of serious scientists have declared to be a fraud and a scam.

Charter Schools Can Close the Education Gap

From The Wall Street Journal
By Joel I. Klein and Al Sharpton

It is not acceptable for minority students to be four grade levels behind.

Dear President-elect Barack Obama,

In the afterglow of your election, Americans today run the risk of forgetting that the nation still faces one last great civil-rights battle: closing the insidious achievement gap between minority and white students. Public education is supposed to be the great equalizer in America. Yet today the average 12th-grade black or Hispanic student has the reading, writing and math skills of an eighth-grade white student.

That appalling four-year gap is even worse in high-poverty high schools, which often are dropout factories. In Detroit, just 34% of black males manage to graduate. In the nation's capital -- home to one of the worst public-school systems in America -- only 9% of ninth-grade students go on to graduate and finish college within five years. Can this really be the shameful civil-rights legacy that we bequeath to poor black and Hispanic children in today's global economy?

This achievement gap cannot be narrowed by a series of half-steps from the usual suspects. As you observed when naming Chicago superintendent Arne Duncan to be the next secretary of education, "We have talked our education problems to death in Washington." Genuine school reform, you stated during the campaign, "will require leaders in Washington who are willing to learn from students and teachers...about what actually works."

We, too, believe that true education reform can only be brought about by a bipartisan coalition that challenges the entrenched education establishment. And we second your belief that school reformers must demonstrate an unflagging commitment to "what works" to dramatically boost academic achievement -- rather than clinging to reforms that we "wish would work."

Those beliefs led us to form a nonpartisan coalition last year, the Education Equality Project (EEP), which seeks to greatly narrow, if not eliminate, the achievement gap. Mr. Duncan has signed on to the EEP, as have most of the nation's leading big-city school superintendents, such as Paul Vallas in New Orleans, Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C., and Colorado's new U.S. senator, former Denver superintendent Michael Bennet. Mayors Richard M. Daley in Chicago, Michael Bloomberg in New York City, Adrian Fenty in Washington, D.C., and Cory Booker in Newark, N.J., are on board, too. Several prominent Republicans, including John McCain and Newt Gingrich, have joined our coalition as well.

EEP seeks to ensure that America's schools provide equal educational opportunity, judged by one measuring stick: Does a policy advance student learning? It's an obvious litmus test. Yet the current K-12 school system is designed to serve the interests of adults, not children.

EEP's mission thus turns out to be unexpectedly radical -- and we have run afoul at times of longtime Democratic allies. While we recognize that the No Child Left Behind law has numerous flaws that need correcting, we staunchly support NCLB's core concept that schools should be held accountable for boosting student performance. Dismissing the potential of schools to substantially boost minority achievement, as is now fashionable in some Democratic circles, is ultimately little more than a recipe for defeatism. Like you, we also support expanding parental choice. High-performing urban charter schools such as the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools are showing that minority students can close the achievement gap if given access to high-quality instruction.

Finally, our coalition also promotes the development and placement of effective teachers in underserved schools and supports paying them higher salaries. By contrast, we oppose rigid union-tenure protections, burdensome work rules, and antiquated pay structures that shield a small minority of incompetent teachers from scrutiny yet stop good teachers from earning substantial, performance-based pay raises.

What can you and your administration do to close the achievement gap? Although the funding and oversight of public schools is chiefly a state and local responsibility, you still retain the power of the bully pulpit. Beyond expanding federal support for charter schools, as you have proposed, we would urge you to press forward with two other, far-reaching policy reforms.

First, the federal government, working with the governors, should develop national standards and assessments for student achievement. Our current state-by-state approach has spawned a race to the bottom, with many states dumbing down standards to make it easier for students to pass achievement tests. Even when students manage to graduate from today's inner-city high schools, they all too frequently are still wholly unprepared for college or gainful employment.

Second, the federal government should take most of the more than $30 billion it now spends on K-12 education and reposition the funding to support the recruitment and retention of the best teachers in underserved urban schools. High-poverty urban schools have many teachers who make heroic efforts to educate their students. But there is no reward for excellence in inner-city schools when an outstanding science teacher earns the same salary as a mediocre phys-ed instructor.

Study after study shows that good teachers have, by far, the highest impact on student learning. "The single most important factor in determining [student] achievement is not the color of [a student's] skin or where they come from," you stated on the campaign trail. "It's not who their parents are or how much money they have -- it's who their teacher is." We couldn't agree more. To close the achievement gap, start with a three-word solution: Teachers, teachers, teachers. The fierce urgency of now cannot be allowed to dissipate into the sleepy status quo of tomorrow.

Mr. Klein, chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, and Rev. Sharpton, president of the National Action Network, are co-chairmen of the Education Equality Project.

Elliot Institute Commends Michigan Efforts to End Coerced Abortions, Calls on Other States to Follow Suit

From The Elliot Institute

A leading researcher and expert on post-abortion issues is commending a new package of bills introduced by legislators in Michigan that aims to put an end to coerced abortions.

Five women sponsored the Coercive Abortion Prevention Act, which makes it a crime to coerce a woman into an unwanted abortion. It also requires abortion clinics to ask women if they are being coerced and provide referrals to domestic violence programs or other resources that can help them escape abusive situations.

The bill defines coercion to include physical violence or engaging in "a willful course of conduct involving repeated and continual harassment" that could cause a woman "to reasonably feel terrorized, frightened, intimidated, threatened, or harassed"-- including threatening to end the relationship or withdraw financial support if the woman does not abort.

A study of American and Russian women that was published in the Medical Science Monitor in 2004 found that, among American women who had undergone abortions, 64 percent reported that they had felt pressured by others to abort. Elliot Institute director David Reardon, one of the co-authors of the study, said that the pressure placed on women to abort can be subtle or overt, but the end goal--getting her to submit to an unwanted abortion--is the same.

"Coercion can involve playing the 'guilt trip' game--'if you don't abort, you'll ruin my life'--or threatening to withdraw emotional and practical support unless the woman agrees to end the pregnancy," Reardon said. "For a woman whose life is already turned upside down by an unplanned pregnancy, this type of emotional blackmail could be the last straw that pushes her toward an unwanted abortion."

If such tactics don't work, anger and verbal abuse can escalate to physical violence, Reardon said. Studies have found that murder is the leading cause of death among pregnant women, and in many cases, police and witnesses have reported that the killer wanted to stop the woman from giving birth to her unborn child.

"Studies have also indicated that being pregnant places a woman at higher risk of being physically attacked," Reardon said. "Although some women in abusive relationships have reported that they experienced decreased violence during pregnancy, the findings indicate that abusive men are more likely to reject the pregnancy than to accept it. One study of battered women found that the target of battery during pregnancy shifted to the woman's abdomen, suggesting hostility toward the unborn child."

Reardon said that efforts to ban coerced abortion are vital to helping protect teens and young girls from sexual exploitation and abuse. He points to an undercover investigation carried out by Life Dynamics in which a staff member phoned abortion clinics pretending to be a 13-year-old girl impregnated by her adult boyfriend. According to recordings and transcripts of the calls made by Life Dynamics, many staff members advised the caller to lie or withhold information so that she could obtain an abortion and the abusive situation would not be reported to authorities.

"Anytime a young girl comes to a clinic with an older partner, this should raise a red flag that she is being exploited and abused," Reardon said. "Tragically, these young girls are often given unwanted abortions, no questions asked, and returned to the same abusive relationship. Forcing abortion clinics to ask questions about whether she really wants the abortion could go a long way toward helping to end this kind of abuse."

However, Planned Parenthood affiliates in Michigan are opposing the bill, saying it is just another legal barrier preventing women from accessing abortion services. But Reardon argues that coerced abortion is widespread and criticized the group for putting "profits and ideology" ahead of women's well-being.

"Regardless of politics, everyone should be able to agree that no woman should be coerced into having an unwanted abortion," Reardon said. "Women's rights should not take a backseat to the ideology of promoting abortion. I hope that other states will follow Michigan's lead and enact legislation that will help reduce the epidemic of unwanted abortions."

A free, downloadable report on coerced abortions is available online at www.unfairchoice.info/resources.htm.

Father George Rutler on The Baptism of The Lord

Father Rutler was ordained to the diaconate in Rome by His Eminence William Cardinal Baum in 1980 and received priestly ordination in St. Patrick's Cathedral at the hands of His Eminence Terence Cardinal Cooke in 1981. For ten years he was National Chaplain of Legatus, the organization of Catholic business leaders and their families, engaged in spiritual formation and evangelization. A board member of several schools and colleges, he is also Chaplain of the New York Guild of Catholic Lawyers and has long been associated with the Missionaries of Charity, and other religious orders, as a retreat master. Since 1988 his weekly television program has been broadcast worldwide on EWTN. Father Rutler has lectured and given retreats in many nations, frequently in Ireland and Australia. Cardinal Egan appointed him Pastor of the Church of Our Saviour in New York City, effective September 17, 2001.

Born in 1945 and reared in the Episcopal tradition in New Jersey and New York, Father Rutler was an Episcopal priest for nine years, and the youngest Episcopal rector in the country when he headed the Church of the Good Shepherd in Rosemont, Pennsylvania. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1979 and was sent to the North American College in Rome for seminary studies. His parents, Adolphe and Dorothy, both now deceased, were received into the Church in 1982 by Cardinal Cooke. Father Rutler graduated from Dartmouth, where he was a Rufus Choate Scholar, and took advanced degrees at the Johns Hopkins University and the General Theological Seminary. He holds several degrees from the Gregorian and Angelicum Universities in Rome, including the Pontifical Doctorate in Sacred Theology, and studied at the Institut Catholique in Paris. In England, in 1988, the University of Oxford awarded him the degree Master of Studies.

Father Rutler contributes to numerous scholarly and popular journals and has published 14 books on theology, history, cultural issues, and the lives of the saints, and also one book on sports, as a member of the U.S. Squash Racquets Association.

Vienna Boys' Choir

"Gloria"



"Agnus Dei"

Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Fuel, And Big Fascism

From NewsWithViews
By Alan Stang

What form of government are we supposed to have? The Founders of this country bequeathed us a system we used to call Free Enterprise, in which the government was supposed to leave business alone. Because of that system, endorsed by scripture, we became the greatest nation known to history.

Now, what kind of system do we actually have today? Because the original system has been perverted – first by ordinary criminals, then by the conspiracy for world government – the system we have now, the perversion, began as “mercantilism” and today is best described as Fascism.

“Mercantilism” was the system the Founding Fathers designed our new country to reject. In part, it meant government control of the economy and colonies controlled by force of arms. One example of a mercantilist enterprise was the British East India Company, which ruled that country for the Queen. Another was the Dutch East India Company, which, at the height of its power, had forty warships.

A man named Benito Mussolini renamed this system and installed it in Italy after World War I. He called it “Fascism.” Remember that Fascism had nothing to do with oppressing Jews. Mussolini came to power legally in 1922, after the infamous March on Rome, when no one had ever heard of former Corporal Hitler. Hitler would not become Chancellor, legally, for an