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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

A number of critics of the war in Iraq have criticized the Pentagon’s “use of deception and disinformation against enemies, real or imagined, abroad.” The question is, In a time of war, should governments always tell the truth to the enemy? The architects of the D-Day invasion, for example, used deception to mislead the Nazis. Was this wrong? Is wearing camouflage, a form of deception, unethical? [...]

Leftist pundits continue to raise fears about a Taliban-type Christian theocracy. The evangelical and moral vote scared the daylights out of a cabal of frenzied popping jays who have had a near monopoly on the flow of editorial comment over the last 20 years. There’s even a “theocracy watch” website for those who care about such things. Maureen Dowd, Garry Wills, Bill Moyers, and [...]

Just what we need, another prominent evangelical making it theologically easier for Christians not to get involved in the political process. Franklin Graham begins his article on “Christians must focus on God, not politics” with the obligatory acknowledgment that he has “always used whatever influence and platform [he] had to urge everyone to vote.” Then comes the inevitabl [...]

Most of us don’t remember that Arlen Specter was considering a run for the presidency in 1995.[1] Specter ran for president because he didn’t like the “exclusionary attitudes” of Christian conservatives, especially their pro-life agenda. He believed then, like he believes now, that the Republican Party is “so captive to the demands of the intolerant right that we end up re-electing a president on [...]

Those familiar with recent history will remember that one of the attack groups that got Chief Justice Roy Moore removed from office was the Southern Poverty Law Center located in Montgomery, Alabama. Richard Cohen, a lawyer for the SPLC, led the charge against Moore. After their success in getting Moore removed, the SPLC, the ACLU, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State sued the s [...]

Garrison Keillor, the soft-spoken, folksy host of “A Prairie Home Companion,” has shown his dark side with comments he made during a speech at Chicago’s Rockefeller Memorial Chapel and during his radio monologue the Saturday after the election. According to a transcript of the show, Keillor said, “I am now the chairman of a national campaign to pass a constitutional amendment to take the rig [...]

Now that moral issues have hit the liberal Left like a ton of red bricks, they are trying to figure out how to extricate themselves from the weight of the pile. They are being counseled to talk about values. Good enough. But whose values? What values? Unless they change their views on homosexuality and abortion, to name only two value-laden issues, they can only talk about values. Those on the Lef [...]

Fallout from the election continues. Garry Wills, author of numerous books and articles on America’s cultural mood, has entered the debate over what went wrong when most voting Americans rejected John Kerry and elected George Bush. Here’s how Wills states it in his New York Times article “The Day the Enlightenment Went Out” (Nov. 4, 2004): “Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin B [...]

One distraught voter drove to Ground Zero and killed himself after he learned that John Kerry had lost the election. He was only 25. It’s a shame that government has become a god to so many. The disillusionment that comes when your god turns out to be a well-constructed fiction can be devastating. While no editorial writers have done themselves in over the election results, many of them are [...]

In yesterday’s web article, I issued a call to action to put the brakes on Arlen Spector’s elevation to the head of the Judiciary Committee. Apparently others had the same idea. Spector has backed off his comments, even denying that he ever said them. There is a new day in Washington as the media pundits are falling all over themselves trying to figure out the “values vote.&rdquo [...]

Surveys conducted after the election show that morality topped the list of important issues that brought voters to the polls. This astounded the press in England. Europe no longer has a moral center. In time, if population trends continue, Eurabia will be a reality in 30 years. Islam, as twisted a religion as it is when practiced by its extreme elements, believes in moral absolutes. Muslims have a [...]