The poll getting all the attention this morning is on what Americans believe about President Barack Obama’s religious faith. From the AFP:
Nearly two years after Barack Obama’s election as US president, a growing number of Americans misidentify his faith as Muslim, according to a new poll released Thursday. [Read more →]
Ann Coulter makes some excellent points, in her inimitable way, in her column on the Michael Steele brouhaha, titled “Bill Kristol Must Resign.”
I think that she’s correct that for many Democrats, and in particular Barack Obama, the safe bet is that they have little interest pursuing a successful war in Afghanistan, but have been trapped into a half-hearted support of such a war by their own rhetoric. [Read more →]
Former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, addressing a gathering of Bible-based Christians in her home town of Wasilla, Alaska, said the following:
“They ask me all the time, ‘What is your favorite this? What is your favorite that? What is your favorite that?’ And one time, ‘What is your favorite word?’ And I said, ‘My favorite word? That is really easy. My favorite word is the Word, is the Word. And that is everything. It says it all for us. And you know the biblical reference, you know the Gospel reference of the Word.”
“And that Word,” Palin said, “is, we have to give voice to what that means in terms of public policy that would be in keeping with the values of the Word. The Word. Isn’t it a beautiful word when you think of it? It just covers everything. The Word.
“Fill it in with anything you want. But, of course, we know it means: ‘The Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us.’ And that’s the great mystery of our faith. He will come again. He will come again. So, we have to make sure we’re prepared to answer in this life, or otherwise, as to how we have measured up.”
Get it? “Public policy that would be in keeping with the value of the Word.” What incredible theocratic narrow-mindedness. This is what Sarah Palin would impose on the entire nation, in the name of her own personal and absurd religious beliefs?
Well, it would be, except it wasn’t the Wasilla Republican Sarah Palin who said any of the above. It was the San Fransisco Democrat and Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.
(Has she really been asked, by the way, as she claims, “What is your favorite word?” In some ways, that particular piece of insanity is the most disturbing part of all this. How important does she really believe she is?)
There are those, certainly not me, who are very qualified to handicap the voting scheduled for this Sunday on the health care bill, like John McCormack at this link. All I know is that they don’t have the votes now in the House of Representatives, and that it’s not passed until and unless it actually is passed. There is still a mountain to climb and the real hope, from my point of view, that some rocks will fall down on those clambering their way up. [Read more →]
Interesting poll via CNN, the results of which put a finger on much of what is misunderstood about the electorate in the United States of America. The headline is: Majority says government a threat to citizens’ rights.
A majority of Americans think the federal government poses a threat to rights of Americans, according to a new national poll.
Fifty-six percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday say they think the federal government’s become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. Forty-four percent of those polled disagree. [Read more →]
Now, I know that Randy Newman is some kind of darned liberal, and (based on media reports I’ve seen) was quite recently in possession of a very fine case of Bush Derangement Syndrome. I don’t like him for his politics, but I do genuinely enjoy his artful and ironic way with a song. And all I know is that his song Mr. President
Whaddya know? President Obama is talking up the economy. Based on a drop in the official unemployment rate to just below 10% (9.7%, to be exact), the president said today that “we are climbing out of the huge hole that we found ourselves in.” Of-course, one can’t miss the knock at the previous administration even in such a short statement, and even one designed to be cheering. Still, while his optimism is dubious, to say the least (on a day when total job losses during this recession were corrected up to 8.4 million from 7.2, and when his own budget anticipates a rate of 9.8% even by the end of this year) it is not unusual in historical terms to hear a president talking up the economy. That’s part of what they have the bully pulpit for; to buck up the morale of the average consumer and investor and business owner, so that all confidence is not lost in tough times.
The problem is that Obama is coming very late to this task. [Read more →]
I’ve been a pretty light Twitter user, all in all, but last night I decided to try “live tweeting” President Obama’s State of the Union speech, for the fun of it. And I figured I may as well recycle all of those stunning bon mots for this little piece on the subject today.
Twitter is of-course a cross-platform communication and social networking application which limits users to no more than 140 characters per “tweet.”
Before the speech began, I took note of someone I observed in the audience: [Read more →]
At First Things, Meghan Duke recounts and reflects upon her remarkable experience while visiting the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. last week. [Read more →]
Various representatives of the Barack Obama administration were out on the Sunday talk shows in the U.S. today, trying to spin the election of Senator Scott Brown (R -MA) [and how often do you see that abbreviation?] as being an endorsement of the Obama agenda, particularly with regard to health care.
I witnessed the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, on “Fox News Sunday,” attemping to do this very thing. Gibbs was making the very same kinds of arguments to host Chris Wallace that Howard Dean tried making a few days ago to MSNBC‘s Chris Matthews. Wallace was a lot more tolerant of Gibbs’ incoherent position than Matthews was of Dean’s. This is rather ironic, of-course, since Chris Matthews is well known for being a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, while Wallace works for the hated “conservative” media entity, Fox.
If you haven’t already viewed the encounter between Chris Matthews and Howard Dean the other day, I highly recommend [Read more →]
