When the Obama Backlash Comes

American Thinker | Jeff Lukens | Apr. 29, 2009

The contradictions between Obama’s words and actions are many. He opposes big government, and then he vastly expands it. He says he favors bipartisanship, but doesn’t practice it. He says he is against earmarks, and then signs the largest pork package in history. And that is just to name a few.

Such inconsistencies are contributing to a lack of confidence in Obama and his economic policies. The budget deficits he proposes are staggering. The trillions of dollars he wants to spend are incomprehensible. There is no evidence that stimulative government spending even works. Obama is apparently racing to remake America in a socialist mold before public sentiment turns against him. One wonders whether his political capital will run out before financial capital of the country runs out. [Read more…]

9 Questions the Left Needs to Answer About Torture

FrontPageMagazine.com | Dennis Prager | Apr. 28, 2009

Any human being with a functioning conscience or a decent heart loathes torture. Its exercise has been a blight on humanity. With this in mind, those who oppose what the Bush administration did to some terror suspects may be justified. But in order to ascertain whether they are, they need to respond to some questions:

1. Given how much you rightly hate torture, why did you oppose the removal of Saddam Hussein, whose prisons engaged in far more hideous tortures, on thousands of times more people, than America did — all of whom, moreover, were individuals and families who either did nothing or simply opposed tyranny? One assumes, furthermore, that all those Iraqi innocents Saddam had put into shredding machines or whose tongues were cut out and other hideous tortures would have begged to be waterboarded. [Read more…]

Obama Embraces Amnesty

Human Events | James R. Edwards, Jr. | Apr. 27, 2009

It’s official: The Obama administration plans to push a mass amnesty. It became official even before the New York Times reported the president’s plan to look “for a path for illegal immigrants to become legal,” said “a senior administration official.”

The White House website says that the president supports a plan to, “Bring People Out of the Shadows,” which it describes as “…a system that allows undocumented immigrants who are in good standing to pay a fine, learn English, and go to the back of the line for the opportunity to become citizens.” [Read more…]

The New America – Deja Vu All Over Again

Big Hollywood | Gary Graham | Apr. 14, 2009

The simple catch-phrase slogans bandied about for the past year were the thing of pop culture legend. Hope. Change We Need. Change We Can Believe In. Yes We Can.

Pabulum to the ‘downtrodden’… manna to the Constitutional deconstructionists… and justification to history revisionists everywhere. But prior to the election these euphemistic phrases were long on emotional incitement and glaringly short on substance. If words can be taken to mean anything…ultimately, they mean nothing. Or so we thought.

Five months after the election we are starting to see that President Obama meant something very specific with these slogans that helped garner him the election. It just wasn’t quite what any of us Americans thought he meant. [Read more…]

Moral Education for the New Order

AmericanThinker | Kyle-Anne Shiver | Apr. 14, 2009

The Rasmussen folks last week revealed a poll wherein American young people are just about evenly divided on whether they prefer capitalism to socialism. Among our under-30 crowd, 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided.

Sucking at the teat of the state has never looked so good, apparently. Well, this certainly helps explain Obamamania. [Read more…]

Congressional Black Caucus Smitten With Castro

AmericanThinker | Humberto Fontova | Apr. 9, 2009

Cuba’s atrocious record on race was somehow overlooked by the Congressional Black Caucus. Last week the Stalinist regime that jailed and tortured the longest suffering black political prisoner in modern history (Eusebio Penalver) rolled out the red carpet for 6 smitten members of the CBC. All of these U.S. legislators met with “President” Raul Castro while a lucky three secured back-stage passes to meet Fidel himself.

Not since Ann Margaret’s reaction to Conrad Birdie’s kiss has anything been recorded to match these U.S. legislators’ reaction to these meetings. [Read more…]

Those arrogant Americans

AmericanThinker | James Lewis | Apr. 6, 2009

We have a rock star president who for the first time in American history fired the President of a private corporation, General Motors, then immediately flew to Europe with an entourage of 500 courtiers and a worshipful media, bowed waist-deep to the King of Saudi Arabia, and proceeded to accuse his own country of arrogance. In France, of all places. [Read more…]

Is Socialism Overtaking Capitalism In The Way Schumpeter Foresaw?

Investor’s Business Daily | John Tamny | March 19, 2009

In his 1942 book, “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy,” Joseph Schumpeter asked the essential question: “Can capitalism survive?” His unsettling answer was, “No. I do not think it can.”

Schumpeter’s words were in no way meant to denigrate capitalism. Instead, he felt “its very success undermines the social institutions which protect it.” History in many ways proved his views prophetic.

The success of capitalism means that many are allowed to do things that have nothing to do with productivity. And from government and academic elites that frequently seek to undermine the very system that enabled their cushy jobs, to foundations created by capitalist profits that often dismiss same, the commercial success wrought by the pursuit of profit has created an unproductive elite that lives off the very business profits that it regularly casts a skeptical eye on. [Read more…]

Pushing the Gay Agenda in the Greek Archdiocese

Michael Huffington Gay Agenda Greek Orthodox by Glen Chancy — March 2, 2009

Globally, Orthodox Christianity is known to be highly conservative concerning what is frequently referred to as “traditional Christian morality.” In Europe, for example, more progressive and liberal elements of society spare no effort in attacking the Church as a bastion of traditionalist repression, especially concerning homosexuality.

Ironically, however, in the United States an image seems to be growing of the Orthodox Church as more liberal towards sexual sins than, for example, the Evangelical denominations. Quite a few people, judging by chatter on the Internet, are getting the impression that Orthodoxy is similar to the Episcopal Church in respect to moral issues.

Part of this confusion stems from the book Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe by John Boswell. This book, published in 1994, asserted that certain Greek Orthodox medieval rituals were really ecclesiastical blessings of homosexual unions. Boswell especially singled out the Greek Orthodox Rite known as adelphopoiesis or “brother-making,” as one such example.

Since the book’s publication, Orthodox sources have roundly debunked Boswell. (One such effort can be found here.) Even so, a casual stroll through Google will find Boswell’s claims widely repeated on Websites associated with homosexual issues. (LGBT sites in the common parlance of today.) The fiction created by Boswell is useful for sexually active homosexuals, both within the Orthodox Church and without. [Read more…]

What is Marxism?

AmericanThinker | Steven Plaut | March 16, 2009

Marxists claim that Marxism is a science. It is not. It is a sort of pagan religious cult. It is a theology. It is a form of superstition.

Marxists claim that Karl Marx understood capitalism and economics. He did not. They also claim that the entire validity of Marx’s set of theories on all subjects rests ultimately on how valid Marxist economic thought is. Marxist economic thought was completely wrong. [Read more…]