I wanted to like Million Dollar Baby. If you haven’t seen the movie, and you have plans to see it, you might not want to read any further. I love movies with twists and turns. Being fooled plot-wise is a great artistic vehicle. My first encounter with the motif was with Charles Eric Maine’s science fiction novel The Man Who Owned the World,[1] a book I read when I was 13. [...]

Susette Kelo owns a house that she doesn’t want to sell. You would think that if she doesn’t want to sell something, she shouldn’t have to. The Constitution’s Fifth Amendment gives the power of “eminent domain” to governments. This allows governments to seize property as long as “just compensation” is given and the property will be put to “public use.” Historically, public use has meant railroads, [...]

John Harrison, who is a senior at Druid Hills High School in DeKalb County, a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, was miffed when he was rebuffed by parents at a private school when they refused to purchase a discount coupon for Domino’s Pizza. The money was to go to his public school’s art program. They told him, “We already contribute through taxes, and we pay for our children to go to school, so why do [...]

A German zoo was planning to introduce male penguins into a group of female penguins because the female penguins seem to be attracted to one another. Homosexual rights groups are angry with the plan because theybelieve the zoo’s actions are trying to turn the penguins straight. Here’s the premise: Whatever animals do in nature is natural. What’s natural is normal. What’s normal is moral. So if pen [...]

“The lesson the President has learned best—and certainly the one that has been the most useful to him—is the axiom that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. One of his Administration’s current favorites is the whopper about America having been founded on Christian principles. Our nation was founded not on Christian principles but on Enlightenment ones. God only entered the pic [...]

I’ve been watching the debate over privatizing some parts of Social Security and have been amazed at the reaction of liberals. The head of NOW does not support any type of privatization. When she was asked to explain her position in light of her pro-abortion stance of “choice,” she offered a smile and said the government is needed to protect citizens in their retirement years. Bu [...]

Death penalty opponents are protesting the use of doctors in executing criminals convicted of capital crimes. Because of the medicinal way executions are carried out in our more civilized day, doctors are needed to assist the administration of the deadly chemical cocktail that sends the condemned on his way to His Maker. The doctors do not actually inject the drugs. The Department of Corrections i [...]

Humphrey Bogart, playing the hard-boiled detective Philip Marlow, had some great lines in the film adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel The Big Sleep. This is one of my favorites: “He’ll kick my teeth out, and then punch me in the stomach for mumbling.” No matter what happens, even when the bad guy does it to him, Marlowe can’t win. They’ll be no satisfying the opposition even when the oppositio [...]

Writing a daily column for this website is a perilous enterprise. While most of the emails I get in response are complimentary, there are always a few spoilers. One letter writer was stridently opposed to my article on “Why We Need Rich People”. Like most socialists, he quotes the Bible sparingly and most often out of context. Here was my response (with some modifications): Dear Chris, Thanks for [...]

Germany is using Gestapo tactics against Christian families who want to educate their children at home. If talks with German officials break down, there’s a good chance that the children will be taken from their parents and turned over to the State. All of this sounds frightenly familiar. We’ve seen this before. By capturing the youth through education, Adolph Hitler knew that his dreams of [...]

Michael Newdow and other anti-Christian crazies want every reference to Christianity removed from the sight line of all Americans. It’s time that we forced their hand. Their creeping incrementalism has kept us off guard, bleeding us to death with a million small cuts. And since the majority of Americans probably don’t care one way or another whether the president is permitted to have a [...]

We just celebrated Martin Luther King Day. One aspect of King’s legacy that is often ignored by the mainstream press and liberal political pundits is that King was a minister. “As much as a civil activist as he was, as much as he did, Dr. King was a preacher,” said the Rev. Alexis Thomas of Pilgrim Rest Church in Phoenix. “Everything he did in society flowed out of the well of his relationship wit [...]

An editorial that appeared in The Marietta Daily Journal stated, “Judge [Clarence] Cooper’s ruling does not mean there is no God, or that one cannot believe in some combination of both evolution and God, or that after having learned the basics of evolution theory, that Cobb students cannot then choose to believe instead in creationism.” Students can believe anything they want, but they are being t [...]

When Social Security was implemented, the maximum amount any one person paid into the system was $60 per year—a total of two percent from employee and employer of a maximum $3000 per year. Today, the percentage is around 14% on $80,000+ per year. This compulsory “tax” is said to be a “contribution,” as in the “employers contribution portion of Social Security.” Try telling the Social Security Admi [...]

Michael Newdow is about to become as famous as Madelyn Murray O’Hair. For some of our younger readers, O’Hair was instrumental in getting prayer removed from public schools.[1] In a 1963 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a government sponsored prayer was unconstitutional. This has led to the banning of all things religious from public schools. The decision made O’Hair the cou [...]

Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan has told his followers that President Bush’s efforts to bring democracy to the Middle East represent “the rule of the devil.” Democracy is the “rule of the people,” and whatever the people rule is right. _Vox populi, vox dei—”_the voice of the people is the voice of god.” In Farrakhan’s case, the voice of the people is the voice of the devil—a counte [...]

Christie Todd Whitman, like so many disgruntled politicos who see their worldview being coopted by a shift in the political landscape, has written a book slamming the conservative shift in the Republican Party. She offers some advice on how to increase the Republican base in It’s My Party, Too: The Battle for the Heart of the GOP and the Future of America. She contends that the party has bee [...]

Students in public schools are often denied the right to discuss religion except in a multi-cultural way. If Christianity is discussed, it can only be studied in the context of other religious belief systems in their historical setting. But as we’ve seen, even this approach is no longer accepted in reference to Christianity. Steven Williams, a fifth-grade teacher at Stevens Creek School in the San [...]

Mel Gabler is not a household name, yet he had more influence in shaping recent American life than most people ever dream of. He and his wife Norma stood in the gap for over four decades, battling the tax-funded schools’ textbook Establishment. Time and time again, the Gablers inflicted enormous financial losses on textbook firms until the publishers learned to clear their textbooks in advan [...]

Arnold Schwarzenegger believes that Republicans can add to their growing majority by moving the party to the left. Here’s what he said in a recent German newspaper interview: “I would like the Republican Party to cross this line, move a little further left and place more weight on the center. This would immediately give the party 5 percent more votes without it losing anything elsewhere.” What he [...]