Orthodox Editors

Deficit Balloons Into National-Security Threat

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Wall Street Journal | Feb. 1, 2010

The federal budget deficit has long since graduated from nuisance to headache to pressing national concern. Now, however, it has become so large and persistent that it is time to start thinking of it as something else entirely: a national-security threat.

The budget plan released Monday by the Obama administration illustrates why this escalation is warranted. The numbers are mind-numbing: a $1.6 trillion deficit this year, $1.3 trillion next year, $8.5 trillion for the next 10 years combined—and that assumes Congress enacts President Barack Obama’s proposals to start bringing it down, and that the proposals work. [Read more…]

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What’s Wrong with Celebrating Life?

American Thinker | by Bob Weir | Jan. 31, 2010

University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow hasn’t even made it to the NFL yet, but he is going to be a star of the Super Bowl. The Heisman Trophy-winning passer for the Florida Gators is the first college football player to both rush and pass for twenty touchdowns in a season, and he is the first sophomore to win the highly coveted trophy. Nevertheless, his recent fame comes from an ad that will be placed among dozens of others during one of the most popular televised events of the year.

Even though the ad won’t be run until Super Bowl Sunday on February 7, Mr. Tebow is already becoming a household name. His premature celebrity comes not from his athletic ability on the gridiron, but from the mere fact that he’s alive. You see, during the thirty-second spot, his mother Pam reportedly will be talking about the fact that she became ill while pregnant with her fifth son during a mission in the Philippines. Ms. Tebow repudiated her doctor’s advice to abort the child, and she gave birth to Tim. Ordinarily, this would rank up there with many other heart-warming success stories that celebrate life. [Read more…]

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Thanks to Fathers Reardon and Hodges on Opposing Rowan Williams Honors

St George Slays DragonOrthodox Forum | by Cathy Tatusko | Jan. 28, 2010

I write in support of two Orthodox priests, Fr. Patrick Reardon and Fr. Mark Hodges, for their principled and public stance on the decision by St. Vladimir’s Seminary to invite Rowan Williams to deliver the Schmemann lecture and to confer upon him an honorary Doctorate of Divinity. As Fathers Reardon and Hodges so accurately and forcefully state, these actions are scandalous not only to many of the faithful Orthodox Christians in this country whose priests have been schooled and formed at this seminary, but also to the many Anglicans and other Protestants who may have been contemplating a move to the Orthodox Church to escape the immoral practices within their own communion with respect to homosexuality. [Read more…]

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State of the Union: Obama’s reality problem

Washington Post | by Michael Gerson | Jan. 27, 2010

President Obama’s primary problem is not rhetorical — though, about an hour into the State of the Union address, I gave up hoping that it might eventually build toward something remotely interesting. (For much of the speech Obama sounded like a commerce secretary at a professional conference on a particularly uninspired day.) Obama’s problem is not primarily political — though he seems in complete denial about the political dangers he faces. (He amazingly blamed his health-care failure on “not explaining it more clearly.”) Obama’s problem is not a vice president behind his right shoulder who can’t stop his distracting, sycophantic nodding — though it was certainly annoying.

Obama has a reality problem. [Read more…]

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The Lesson of an Affirmative Action President

American Thinker | by James Lewis | Jan. 28, 2010

You don’t pick brain surgeons by the color of their skin. You pick them by competence only. Same thing with airplane pilots. But we have allowed the profoundly irrational liberal media to persuade the American public that we are supposed to pick a U.S. president by affirmative action. Obama was elected to universal Hosannas because he is black. It wasn’t a secret. That’s why the Left around the world went into ecstasies when Obama ran and got elected. [Read more…]

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The Abdulmutallab Travesty

Many innocent lives may be lost because of the massive incompetence of this administration and their idiotic mishandling of a foreign terrorist with ties to Al Qaeda. The terrorist was provided with legal counsel and Mirandized before we could extract critical information about other threats to America. This is criminal negligence!

NRO | by Rich Lowry | Jan. 26, 2010

Intending to die in the act of destroying a jetliner, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab instead landed alive in Detroit as a kind of message in a bottle from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He knew more about its recruiting, training, and operations than anyone who is ever likely to fall into our arms babbling like a scared 23-year-old.

But the Obama administration shut him down. It didn’t go so far as to tell the Customs and Border Protection officers to cover their ears and try not to listen when Abdulmutallab made incriminating statements on the initial ride to the hospital, but it came close. It had an FBI team inform Abdulmutallab of his right to remain silent, after which he predictably remained silent. [Read more…]

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Miracle at Planned Parenthood

BreakPoint | by Chuck Colson | Jan. 26, 2010

People often ask me if I believe in miracles. Of course I do! I see them every day. Because a changed heart is nothing short of a miracle.

If your conscience required it, could you turn your back on the job you’d dedicated your entire adult life to?

That’s what Abby Johnson did. After nine years as director of the Planned Parenthood clinic in Bryan, Texas, Johnson left in October to join the Coalition for Life, a group that holds prayer rallies outside that same clinic—and a group of which she had once been a vocal critic. [Read more…]

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Forty Years of Feminism Now Bearing Fruit

American Thinker | by Pamela Geller | Jan. 26, 2010

A new documentary, Oral Sex Is the New Goodnight Kiss, chronicles America’s moral decay. Sharlene Azam, a Canadian filmmaker, says, “If you talk to teens [about oral sex], they’ll tell you it’s not a big deal. In fact, they don’t consider it sex. They don’t consider a lot of things sex.” In the documentary, teenage girls talk casually about their sexual experiences and even their forays into prostitution.

One girl sums up the new attitudes: “Five minutes and I got $100. If I’m going to sleep with them anyway because they’re good-looking, might as well get paid for it, right?” [Read more…]

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A Petition of Christian Conscience

BreakPoint | by Chuck Colson | Jan. 22, 2010

One of my all-time favorite movies reminds me that it often takes a bold act to awaken the conscience of a nation. It’s one of the most dramatic scenes in a really great movie. The movie is Amazing Grace. The scene is the House of Commons in the latter years of the eighteenth century. William Wilberforce stuns his parliamentary colleagues by unrolling an enormous scroll down the aisle. On the scroll were the signatures of 390,000 Englishmen, demanding that Parliament abolish the slave trade—the greatest moral issue of the day. [Read more…]

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Climategate: CRU Was But the Tip of the Iceberg

American Thinker | by Marc Sheppard | Jan. 22, 2010

Not surprisingly, the blatant corruption exposed at Britain’s premiere climate institute was not contained within the nation’s borders. Just months after the Climategate scandal broke, a new study has uncovered compelling evidence that our government’s principal climate centers have also been manipulating worldwide temperature data in order to fraudulently advance the global warming political agenda.

Not only does the preliminary report indict a broader network of conspirators, but it also challenges the very mechanism by which global temperatures are measured, published, and historically ranked. [Read more…]

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