Month: August 2011

The Credit Downgrade: Symptom of the Marxist Disease

Democrat Communist Marxist no difference by Ion Mihai Pacepa –
On August 5, 2011, the credit rating of the United States was downgraded for the first time in this country’s history. That was a shot across the bow warning that Marxism can damage even the almighty United States.

Native Americans say that if you really want to know someone, you have to walk a mile in his moccasins. I walked in Marxist shoes over many miles and for many years, and I am convinced that if the Democratic Party has its way, it will transform the United States into a socialist country in all but name. During the 2008 election campaign, its leaders loudly announced that they would drastically increase taxes on the American rich — American businesses and their owners — in order to finance programs for the poor. In other words, that they would start transforming capitalist America into a socialist state.

If there had been any doubt in my mind that the Democratic Party was following in the footsteps of Karl Marx, that doubt vanished when the Democrats began ferociously fighting against extending the Bush tax cuts for individuals making more than $200,000 per year. That is core Marxism at its fundamental best. [Read more…]

Obama Vineyards, while America Burns

Obama’s narcissism, callousness, and disregard (and dare we say hatred) for America reach new lows. While unemployment rises, inflation jumps, the stock market disintegrates, more layoffs announced, the dollar’s value crashes, the economy heading towards another Recession, with 45.8 Million Americans on food stamps, and tens of millions more suffering and struggling to survive, his majesty Emperor Obama and his entourage runs off to yet another luxurious vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, playground for the rich and famous.

Obama Vineyards, while America Burns
[Read more…]

A Response to an Open Letter on Homosexuality

Fr. John Whiteford
Fr. John Whiteford
by Fr. John Whiteford
In response to the debate about homosexuality that is currently going on in the OCA, there is now an “Open letter to OCA Holy Synod from college students and young adults” that has been sent to the bishops of the OCA, and is making the rounds on the internet.

This letter is a classic example of the use of politically correct arguments to shut down those whom liberals disagree with, rather then deal with the actual substance of the question. This tactic is not by accident. When you can’t deal with the substance of an issue, complaining about the tone of those you can’t answer will do, in a pinch.

In short, the letter complains about the tone of those who say homosexuality is a sin, without unequivocally stating what the correct teaching of the Church actually is on the subject. There is no acknowledgment that statements that are morally ambiguous might be of any legitimate concern, only condemnation of those who seek to make clear what the teaching of the Church is. [Read more…]

Silence of the Shepherds

American Thinker logo conservatives by Fay Voshell –

As early as 1867, Matthew Arnold warned that the ebbing of Christianity in England would disturb the societal order and usher in waves of violence. His famous poem, “Dover Beach,” noted the result of the weakening of Christianity would mean “we are here as on a darkling plain, Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

Years later, in 1919, surveying the aftermath of World War I, William Butler Yeats would write his equally famous poem “The Second Coming.” Like Arnold, the poet saw that the dissolution of the ideals foundational to Great Britain’s moral order, plus the dissolution of the global societal order imposed by the British Empire, would result in “anarchy loosed upon the world.” [Read more…]

British Degeneracy on Parade

British Violence Moral Failure by Theodore Dalrymple

The ferocious criminality exhibited by an uncomfortably large section of the English population during the current riots has not surprised me in the least. I have been writing about it, in its slightly less acute manifestations, for the past 20 years. To have spotted it required no great perspicacity on my part; rather, it took a peculiar cowardly blindness, one regularly displayed by the British intelligentsia and political class, not to see it and not to realize its significance. There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.

Three men were run over and killed as they tried to protect their property in the very area of Birmingham in which I used to work, and through which I walked daily; the large town that I live near when I’m in England has also seen rioting. Only someone who never looked around him and never drew any conclusions from the faces and manner of the young men he saw would have been surprised. [Read more…]

Couretas: Protect the Poor, Not Poverty Programs

John Couretas
John Couretas
by John Couretas

One of the disturbing aspects of the liberal/progressive faith campaign known as the Circle of Protection is that its organizers have such little regard – indeed are blind to — the innate freedom of the human person.

Their campaign, which has published “A Statement on Why We Need to Protect Programs for the Poor,” equates the welfare of the “least of these” in American society to the amount of assistance they receive from the government — a bizarre view from a community that trades in spiritual verities. Circle of Protection supporters see people locked into their circumstances, stratified into masses permanently in a one-down position, thrown into a class struggle where the life saving protection of “powerful lobbies” is nowhere to be found. And while they argue that budgets are moral documents, their metrics for this fiscal morality are all in dollars and cents. [Read more…]

Obama Downgraded, Tea Party Vindicated

Obama Fail Downgradedby Peter Ferrara

President Obama achieved the historic downgrading of America’s credit rating the old-fashioned way. He earned it.

He came into office with federal spending already near an historic peak, with a percent of GDP at 20.7 percent and having increased by one-seventh during the Bush years. One year earlier Bush had joined with then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to enact a pointless Keynesian stimulus package of $168 billion, which the record will show created exactly 0.00 jobs, and stimulated nothing but national debt.

Send In the Clowns
Barack Obama​ surveyed the continuing wreckage of the financial crisis, and decided to follow the advice of the reknowned economist Otter, “who famously said in ‘Animal House​,’ this situation ‘absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part,'” as quoted by Andy Kessler in Monday’s Wall Street Journal. [Read more…]

OCA Laity Urges OCA to Adopt “Sanctity of Marriage Sunday”

St. Nicholas Cathedral OCA Washington DC
St. Nicholas Cathedral in DC
From Parishioners of St. Nicholas Cathedral:

“St. Nicholas Cathedral in Washington DC has sent five resolutions to the OCA’s Resolution Committee for consideration at the upcoming 16th All American Council. The resolutions can be found at www.OCALaity.com. The resolutions deal with marriage, our OCA youth, monasteries, child sexual abuse, and a deaf outreach.

Of particular interest to most Orthodox Christians is the resolution calling for an annual Sanctity of Marriage Sunday. All are well aware of the continued assault on traditional marriage due to fornication, adultery, divorce, and same-sex unions. Presently six states and DC have passed same-sex marriage laws, and more states plan on taking up the issue. This resolution will hopefully encourage the Faithful to proclaim Holy Tradition’s teaching on sexuality and marriage, both in the church and in the public square.

We hope you view the site (www.OCALaity.com) so an early discussion on the merits of each resolutions can be made before the AAC. Please talk with your priest and parish council concerning your support for particular resolutions.”[Read more…]

The Persecution of Christians in the Middle East

Egyptian Coptic Church on Fire
Egyptian Coptic Church on Fire
by Cheryl Halpern –
The terrible violence in Oslo last month has brought the world’s attention to the ravings of a madman and a murderer — someone who was motivated to kill fellow Christians because he feels they had acquiesced to a takeover by Islam.

Our revulsion is appropriate — this was the killing of innocent people in the name of religious and political hatred. However, when the roles are reversed, and Christians are in the minority and Muslims in the majority, are we equally upset by murder, intimidation and religious hatred?

Sadly, we don’t appear to be. The world is standing silent as Christians living in Muslim-majority lands are killed, and their killers are venerated.

Today, Christians, regardless of affiliation, are being systematically harassed, persecuted, and murdered throughout the Middle East, the region of the globe from which Christianity first emerged. Churches have been bombed and those attending Christian services have been killed. Christian homes have been ransacked and cemeteries have been destroyed. Converts from Islam to Christianity are considered apostates and subject to severe punishment. [Read more…]

‘I’ Is for Indoctrination

Indoctrination of Children by Lucia Rafanelli –
“Back to school” may soon mean something more like “back to political education camp” if liberal regulators have their way.

If your child is looking to get a high school diploma in Maryland, reading, writing, and arithmetic may no longer be enough. Students may soon have to be able to “[e]xplain that differences in the behavior of individuals arise from the interaction of culture and experience” in order to graduate.

Despite it sounding more like the stuff of sociology than hard environmental science, that line is taken from a draft of the state’s new “Environmental Literacy Curriculum.” The draft, according to William Reinhard of the Maryland State Department of Education, is meant to “help guide local [school] systems as they develop their own plans” to integrate environmental literacy into their curricula. [Read more…]