OrthodoxNet.com Blog

American Thinker | J.R. Dunn | July 15, 2008

It’s difficult to avoid exasperation over the left’s absolute refusal to acknowledge the new realities of the Iraq war. The surge, the Anbar awakening, the collapse of the militias (particularly that belonging to everybody’s favorite would-be caliph, Moqtada al-Sadr) — it’s as if none of it ever happened, as if one the most impressive turnabouts in modern military annals never took place.

The left, including its Democratic political wing and placeholders in the media, continue on with the same defeatist drone that we’ve heard since 2003, concentrating on lone (and mercifully rare) suicide bombers, emphasizing Coalition casualties, and highlighting the new government’s difficulties. Continue Reading »

FrontPageMag | Mark D. Tooley | July 14, 2008

Officials of the declining 4.9 million Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) have revealed what God’s priorities are in the U.S. presidential campaign. And remarkably, the divine priorities was very akin to the Democratic Party’s priorities, if not further to the left.

Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson, with three other ELCA officials generously wrote both presidential candidates a public letter with the divine guidance. Although famed Protestant Reformer Martin Luther championed the Bible as God’s exclusive revelation, modern ELCA activists have located more useful counsel in the secular welfare state and environmental agenda. Continue Reading »

Townhall.com | Dennis Prager | July 8, 2008

Last week in Denver, almost all the values of the post-1960s left were exhibited in one act.

It happened on the Denver mayor’s most important day — the one in which he was to deliver his annual State of the City Address. The day was to begin with the singing of the National Anthem by the black jazz singer Rene Marie. But Ms. Marie had, by her own admission, long had other plans. Instead of the National Anthem, she sang “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” a song written in 1899 and often referred to today as the Black National Anthem.

What Marie did embodied a plethora of leftist ideals and characteristics: Ethical relativism, multiculturalism, the supremacy of feelings, the belief that artists are above normal ethical standards and group victimization. Continue Reading »

Thoughts of a Conservative Christian | July 1, 2008

FIRST… do you know what ANWR is? ANWR = Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Only 2,000 acres out of 19 million acres of barren tundra are needed to provide America with critically needed oil supplies. Wildlife and the environment will NOT be affected. Continue Reading »

Human Events | Terry Easton | Jul 4, 2008

You would think that this story is right out of science fiction. But the facts appear to be that the US Democrat-controlled Congress intends to destroy the Republican middle class with $11 per gallon gasoline.

The Democrats’ base — wealthy white “limousine liberals”, and very poor people — won’t be harmed, but the families who live in suburbia will be devastated.

The multi-millionaires like billionaire Senators John Kerry & Jay Rockefeller, financial speculator George Soros, filmmaker Michael Moore, and actors George Clooney & Meg Ryan can easily pay for their auto and private jet fuel. Poor people are forced to take public transit. Continue Reading »

Human Events | Michael Reagan | Jul 4, 2008

Americans are worried. Americans are angry. Soaring gas prices are seriously crippling our economy and hitting us where it hurts the most — in our pockets.

We have a right to be angry, but anger is no longer enough. It’s time for rage — good, old American rage aimed at those elitist Democrats who prefer to see the folks beggared by soaring fuel prices rather than take the action this very real economic crisis demands. Drill. Continue Reading »

American Thinker | Christopher Chantrill | Jun 30, 2008

Every now and again our learned scholars in the liberal university come up with a study, financed by taxpayers’ money, that concludes what every liberal already knows. Conservatives are rigid and not very intelligent. In fact, as one study by two Berkeley professors claimed, the the “whiny, insecure kid in nursery school” probably grew up to be a conservative.

Of course two can play at that game, and so conservative Peter Schweizer took a look at the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey and a few other generally available opinion surveys and came to the opposite conclusion in his book Makers and Takers. He found that conservatives are the good guys and liberals are the whiners. Continue Reading »

FrontPageMag | Mark D. Tooley | Jun 27, 2008

Pakistani-born Bishop Michael Nazir Ali of the Church of England continues to roil his leftist and Islamist critics by recently defending the right of Christians to share the Gospel with Muslims.

“Just as Muslims have the right to exercise Da’wa - an invitation to Islam - so Christians must have the freedom to invite people to follow Jesus Christ,” explained the bishop at a press conference in Jerusalem on June 24. “Dialogue proceeds on the understanding that each is a missionary faith.” Continue Reading »

Investor’s Business Daily | Jun 27, 2008

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi intends to restore the “Fairness Doctrine” regulating political speech — proof that in the Internet Age, Democrats have lost the communications war.

Forty years ago, Walter Cronkite could declare on the evening news that the Vietnam War was lost, and that’s the way it was. Do Americans want to return to those days by reviving the so-called Fairness Doctrine? Continue Reading »

A Short Course in Brain Surgery highlights the plight of an Ontario man with a cancerous brain tumor who crossed the border to the U.S. to get the medical care that is rationed in his home country.
Continue Reading »

American Thinker | Geoffrey P. Hunt | Jun 23, 2008

According to the popular press, carbon has now joined toxic heavy metals such as arsenic, mercury, lead and cadmium on Peck’s Bad Boy list. The phrase “carbon footprint” in the lexicon of lazy pseudo science writers and amateur climatologists provokes images of radioactive dirty shoes betraying our every move leaving deadly indelible impressions on the path to oblivion.

Why has the image of carbon been so distorted and demonized? Most of us even having a glancing familiarity with organic chemistry at one time knew that carbon is the building block of life on earth. From simple sugars to amino acids and DNA from industrial polymers to Q-tips, carbon is everywhere on earth, as it necessarily must be as carbon’s structure invites nearly every other element to bond with it. Continue Reading »

Salvo Magazine | Karen Swallow Prior | Spring, 2008

In 2005, according to an annual survey of college freshmen by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, “only” 54.5 percent of first-year students agreed that “abortion should be legal.” What this tells us is that when college kids first arrive on campus, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with idealism, they exhibit a relative enthusiasm for life—that is, until the leftists and secularists who overwhelm academia dig their claws into them. Once this happens, research indicates that even the sizable minority who go so far as to actually count themselves pro-life is doomed to diminish. (And this surely can’t be the result of learning per se, since virtually all of history’s great thinkers—from Hippocrates to Maimonides to Mary Wollstonecraft—have opposed elective abortion.) Continue Reading »

American Thinker | AWR Hawkins | Jun. 21, 2008

Karl Marx, (1818-1883), believed capitalism was the next to last stage in the evolution to an earthly utopia, which would be ushered in through revolution; a revolution resulting from the tensions that existed between workers and the owners of production. According to Marx, the final stage of this evolution toward utopia would result when workers rose up in revolution to overthrow the business owners who were exploiting them through a capitalistic economy. We know Marx’s “utopia” and other aspects of his philosophy by their more prominent name: communism. Continue Reading »

American Thinker | Lance Fairchok | Jun. 21, 2008

We all knew it even though Democrat spokespersons denied it. Worried that the negative connotations would affect their electability and their eyes glued to the capricious winds of public opinion, they invented new words for the old ideology such as progressivism and communitarianism. Apparently, the camouflage is no longer needed. The masks are off. They now openly call for the nationalization of private business, the establishment of universal entitlements and increased taxation to pay for them. Why worry about socialist labels? The electorate is complacent, prosperity has numbed our senses and the left has worked diligently for many years to sap our national pride and deface our self-image. Continue Reading »

American Thinker | Rick Moran | Jun. 19, 2008

The worrying thing is that the Congressman - Maurice Hinchey - isn’t getting laughed out of Washington for proposing a nationalization scheme for the refinery industry. Even at the height of liberalism’s power back in the 1960’s, no Democrat would have seriously entertained the notion.

But a recent Rasmussen poll found a staggering 37% of Democrats - a plurality - support nationalizing the oil companies. This makes one wonder if some kind of serious move might be made to actually bring the industry under government control: Continue Reading »

OrthodoxyToday.org | Timothy Birdnow | May 26, 2008

This is what “progressive” social policies and good intentions have wrought! (What is paved with good intentions?) Feminism, welfare, and the sexual revolution, along with the explosion of narcotics, have completely destroyed the black family. This woman had a father, who was probably a drug addict or alcoholic and who likely lived on welfare. In another time, he would have been poor and uneducated, but would have worked and cared for his children. Thanks to the compassion of the Left, he was freed of any responsibility and could destroy himself and everyone around him at his leisure. Because more children mean more government largesse, poor women frequently become baby factories, spitting out more hopeless welfare recipients and keeping our prisons full. Continue Reading »

American Thinker | Marc Sheppard | Jun. 13, 2008

Just as class struggle forms the nucleus of Marxism, so does it sit at the very core of the Left’s climate alarmism. At a glance, the regressive nature of fiscal Carbon control schemes, be they taxation or cap-and-trade, would appear to be antithetical to liberal thinking. But beneath the veneer of both the domestic and international green agenda lies a devious wealth-redistribution plan compared to which all predecessors pale. Continue Reading »

American Thinker | Paul Kengor | Jun. 13, 2008

Since literally the founding of the American Communist Party in 1919, the extreme left — specifically, the communists — have relied upon genuine liberals to be dupes, or suckers, to help further their cause. Here’s how it typically worked: the communists would engage in some sort of work or agenda, very focused, and which they would be prepared to publicly deny. Anyone who has done any work with or on communists, from New York City to Moscow, can speak at length about how they operated with deceit. As Vladimir Lenin had said, in a favorite quote cited often by Ronald Reagan, the only morality that communists recognized was that which furthered their interests. Continue Reading »

FrontPageMag | Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson | Jun. 10, 2008

A recent International Monetary Fund research report listed the countries expected to suffer the worst currency depreciation—that is, the worst inflation—this year. Zimbabwe (a mind-boggling 300,000 percent-plus), Venezuela (25.7 percent), Bolivia (15.1 percent), Nicaragua (13.8 percent), and Argentina (9.2 percent) are the top five. What do these countries have in common? You could reply in two ways: 1) they are poorly governed; 2) they are leftist governments, which is simply another way of saying that they are poorly governed. Continue Reading »

FrontPageMag | Mark D. Tooley | Jun. 9, 2008

Left-wing evangelist Tony Campolo, one of Bill Clinton’s post-Monica counselors, has declared that America’s ostensibly aggressive war policies against Muslims are inhibiting the spread of the Gospel. And he rather uncharitably lambasted American evangelicals who do not share his leftist perspective as “jingoistic” and motivated by oil “lust.” Continue Reading »