Catholic Bishops ‘Misrepresented’ by Fox, Talk Radio Attackers

By Jeffrey Lord, Am. Spectator:

Are we verging on the scandalous?

The American Spectator has learned that Denver Archbishop Charles J. Chaput has specifically denied that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops agreed to an attack on talk radio and Fox News personalities. Contrary to an FCC filing and media package released by the interfaith group So We Might See, a “Media Justice” project run by the United Church of Christ and funded in part by left-wing billionaire George Soros. The USCCB Communications office also says specifically to a complaining Catholic “that, although USCCB is one of the groups constituting So We Might See, USCCB did not join the petition of which you complain.”

To another angry Catholic the USCCB said: “Please note also that, although USCCB is one of the groups constituting So We Might See, USCCB did not join the petition of which you complain.”

Get that? The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is denying that it signed onto a formal petition to the FCC naming Rush Limbaugh by name as a purveyor of hate speech. The debate is perhaps best represented by one concerned Catholic’s question to this column: “Who is correct? I don’t see any official statement from the USCCB denying or confirming.”

In point of fact, this response to that question from the USCCB to a Catholic Spectator reader is what seems to come closest to answering the question:

[…]

H/T: Linda at The Great Pumpkin

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67 Year-Old Grandma Interrogated and Threatened by Police over Gay Pride Complaint

LifeSiteNews.com:

The visit and threat of a “hate crime” charge by police to a 67 year-old U.K. pensioner and devout Christian grandmother, has garnered outrage from all corners of Britain, and has even been criticised by the head of Britain’s leading homosexualist lobby group.

Mrs. Pauline Howe was told by two police officers who visited her home that she may have committed a “hate incident” simply for having written a letter to her local council complaining about the local Gay Pride parade.

Mrs. Howe says she is considering suing the police, after enduring what she described as a “frightening and intimidating” interrogation. She is seeking legal advice from the Christian Institute, a leading UK Christian lobby and advocacy group.

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Bookmark and Share Obama Taking Us On Path To Fascism

By HERB DENENBERG, For The Bulletin:

During the last presidential campaign, I said there was a light whiff of fascism coming from the Obama campaign. That was based on its habit of improperly trying to repress criticism of every kind. Example: A Chicago radio station was planning on airing a critic of President Obama, who was publicizing the candidate’s close association with terrorist Bill Ayres. The Obama campaign organized a call-in campaign to flood the station with calls and prevent the critic from being heard. Anther example: The Obama campaign warned that any critics in Missouri would be subjected to prosecution there if they voiced criticism that was not true. There was a “Barack Obama Truth Squad” made up of prosecutors and sheriffs to keep critics in line, promising rebuttals and prosecution in appropriate cases (NewsBusters, September 29, 2008).

Now that whiff has turned into a strong stench of fascism, as the Obama Administration uses the vast resources of the federal government to squelch criticism and silence and intimidate critics. Here are some of the recent examples of that:

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Obama’s Media Control Strategy

By Cliff Kincaid, AIM:

You may not have noticed that the Obama Administration, in addition to trying to seize control of the health care and energy sectors, is implementing a national “broadband plan” to redefine the media and transform America’s system of government. It’s designed, they say, to provide “open government and civic engagement.” But it looks increasingly like an excuse for the federal government to control the Internet and access to information and even tell us what is truth.

Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute recently explained at a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) “National Broadband Plan Workshop” that it is necessary to have “a common space with shared facts.” Armed with $7.2 billion of “stimulus” money, the federal government is going to provide this. It looks like various progressive groups are lining up at the public trough for their share of the loot. They have in mind what the George Soros-funded Free Press calls “an alternative media infrastructure.”

If you think we already have that, with public TV and radio, think again. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which has received $8 billion in federal tax dollars since it was created in 1967, is not considered radical enough by these folks. The Free Press favors an additional $50 billion “Public Media Trust fund” financed by a tax on home electronic devices. It also wants the federally-funded AmeriCorps to finance jobs for journalists.

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Does the EU Export Democracy?

Fred Thompson for Doug Hoffman

Alice in Obamaland

House panel makes ACORN eligible to share regulatory authority

Something really scary for Obama’s Democrats

By Wesley Pruden:

This is one Mr. Deeds who apparently isn’t going to town. The collapse of the Democratic campaign for governor of Virginia speaks volumes – chapters, anyway – about what the body politic is trying to tell Barack Obama’s Democrats.

They’re learning, painfully, that campaigning without George W. Bush is baffling, frustrating and scary. Worse, it offers a preview of what the congressional campaigning will be like next year. One Obama doorbell ringer, working neighborhoods in Northern Virginia for Creigh Deeds, says even the promise of free pizza can’t lure faithful Democrats to a rally.

For weeks, The Washington Post, the house organ of the national Democratic Party, pounded away at Bob McDonnell, the Republican nominee, for having written politically incorrect term papers in graduate school, citing his master’s thesis, which decried abortion, gender-bending and radical feminism, as proof that he doesn’t like women very much.

Only a month ago, Mr. Deeds, the Post’s horse in the race, wouldn’t talk about anything but the McDonnell graduate-school thesis – maybe a boon to master’s and doctoral candidates who can’t get anybody but a professor to read their wit and wisdom, but, as it turns out, a bore to voters in Virginia. The public-opinion polls continue to show Mr. McDonnell ahead, despite all the Post’s ineffective deeds, and with a lengthening lead.

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‘Obama Is Average’

SPIEGEL

SPIEGEL: Mr. Krauthammer, did the Nobel Commitee in Oslo honor or doom the Obama presidency by awarding him the Peace Prize?

Charles Krauthammer: It is so comical. Absurd. Any prize that goes to Kellogg and Briand, Le Duc Tho and Arafat, and Rigoberta Menchú, and ends up with Obama, tells you all you need to know. For Obama it’s not very good because it reaffirms the stereotypes about him as the empty celebrity.

SPIEGEL: Why does it?

Krauthammer: He is a man of perpetual promise. There used to be a cruel joke that said Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be; Obama is the Brazil of today’s politicians. He has obviously achieved nothing. And in the American context, to be the hero of five Norwegian leftists, is not exactly politically positive.

SPIEGEL: It hardly makes sense to blame him for losing the Olympic bid in one week, and then for winning the Nobel Prize the next.

Krauthammer: He should have simply said: “This is very nice, I appreciate the gesture, but I haven’t achieved what I want to achieve.” But he is not the kind of man that does that.

SPIEGEL: Should he have turned down the prize?

Krauthammer: He would never turn that down. The presidency is all about him. Just think about the speech he gave in Berlin. There is something so preposterous about a presidential candidate speaking in Berlin. And it was replete with all these universalist clichés, which is basically what he’s been giving us for nine months.

SPIEGEL: Why do Europeans react so positively to him?

Krauthammer: Because Europe, for very understandable reasons, has been chaffing for 60 years under the protection, but also the subtle or not so subtle domination of America. Europeans like to see the big guy cut down to size, it’s a natural reaction. You know, Europe ran the world for 400 or 500 years until the civilizational suicide of the two World Wars. And then America emerged as the world hegemon, with no competition and unchallenged. The irony is America is the only hegemonic power that never sought hegemony, unlike, for example, Napoleonic France. Americans are not intrinsically imperial, but we ended up dominant by default: Europe disappeared after the Second World War, the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, so here we are. Of course Europeans like to see the hegemon diminished, and Obama is the perfect man to do that.

SPIEGEL: Maybe Europeans want to just see a different America, one they can admire again.

Krauthammer: Admire? Look at Obama’s speech at the UN General Assembly: “No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation.” Take the first half of that sentence: No nation can dominate another. There is no eight year old who would say that — it’s so absurd. And the second half? That is adolescent utopianism. Obama talks in platitudes, but offers a vision to the world of America diminished or constrained, and willing to share leadership in a way that no other presidency and no other great power would. Could you imagine if the Russians were hegemonic, or the Chinese, or the Germans — that they would speak like this?

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Attorney General Eric Holder tries to kill a TV ad supporting D.C. school vouchers

by Sheryl Henderson Blunt:

President Obama isn’t taking kindly to a television ad that criticizes his opposition to a popular scholarship program for poor children, and his administration wants the ad pulled.

Former D.C. Councilmember Kevin Chavous of D.C. Children First said October 16 that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder had recently approached him and told him to kill the ad.

The 30-second ad, which has been airing on FOX News, CNN, MSNBC, and News Channel 8 to viewers in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, urges the president to reauthorize the federally-funded D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program that provides vouchers of up to $7,500 for D.C. students to attend private schools.

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Blairly Hopeful

David Pryce-Jones:

Griffin has only one point to make, namely that immigration is out of control and British people no longer feel that this is their country. He hasn’t the intelligence to make this point very well, but it resonates with the people who find themselves living amidst the immigrants. Nobody seems to have worked out that mass immigration and the welfare state are incompatible. British people see immigrants receiving benefits, housing, and the rest of it on a scale that is neither deserved nor available to them. Post-war governments, whether Conservative or Labour, have created this confusion and taken every measure to pretend either that it is not happening or that it doesn’t matter. In short, these politicians have been effective fascist-spawning agents. The BNP and Griffin are monuments to their incompetence and cowardly dissembling.

As though on cue, a speechwriter for Tony Blair now reveals that the Blair government had a deliberate policy of encouraging mass immigration while ensuring that the electorate was told nothing about it. As the well-known columnist Melanie Phillips has put it, here was “a deliberate and secret policy of national cultural sabotage.” In the next 25 years, moreover, some 7 million more immigrants are expected to be added to the population.

There is of course a genuinely fascist element in the country, consisting of groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir, al-Muhajiroun, al-Ghurabaa, and others who also have only one point — they want a Muslim Britain as part of their projected Muslim caliphate, and they are working for what is ultimately conquest of everyone else. So as might be expected, the Islamo-fascist front and the BNP feed one another.

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CNSNews.com Obama Told House Democrat He Wasn’t Talking about House Health Bill When He Told Congress ‘Our Plan’ Doesn’t Fund Abortion

CNSNews.com:

Rep. Bart Stupak (D.-Mich.) told CNSNews.com that President Barack Obama told him in a telephone conversation that when he said in his Sept. 9 speech to a joint session of Congress that “under our plan no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions” he was not talking about the actual bill drafted in the House but about the president’s own health care plan—which has never been written.

“I don’t know if it is a game of semantics or what,” Stupak said of Obama’s nationally televised declaration to Congress that the health-care plan will not allow federal funding of abortion.

Both the House and Senate versions of the health-care bill permit federal funds to pay for insurance plans that cover abortions.

In his speech to the joint session of Congress, Obama directly rebutted the claim that the plan would fund abortions, calling it a “misunderstanding.” But in his later telephone conversation with Stupak, according to the congressman, Obama said that when he claimed in the speech that the plan would not fund abortions he was not talking about the House plan, he was talking about his own plan.

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In Defense of the Jews

Jamie Glazov, FrontPage:

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is David Solway, the award-winning author of over twenty-five books of poetry, criticism, educational theory, and travel. He is a contributor to magazines as varied as The Atlantic, the Sewanee Review, Books in Canada, and the Partisan Review. His book, The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity, was a Canadian bestseller. A former leftist, he abandoned the political faith after 9/11. He is the author of the new book, Hear, O Israel!

FP: David Solway, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Tell us about this new collection of essays.

Solway: Hear, O Israel! is not so much a collection of essays as a sequence of chapters connected by what I might call subdural links, not always evident to the external eye. The arrangement is intended to build a sort of intuitive momentum. Also, when I use the word “Israel” in the title, I’m referring not exclusively to the country of Israel but the peoplehood of Jews, whether in Israel, Canada, the U.S., or wherever they may be found–in Nunavut or on Mars, if it comes to that.

In other words, I’m asking not the country but the nation to listen to the seismic rumble of antisemitic feeling becoming ever more prominent, and adapting the Shema, the “Hear, O Israel” from the famous invocation in Deuteronomy 6:4 and Mark 12:29, to a different purpose. The Shema is a declaration of God’s unity, but I am trying to direct attention to the world’s increasing unity in marshaling its enmity and resources against the Jewish people.

FP: Why the hatred of the Jew?

Solway: As I write in the book, hatred of the Jew is the perpetual vestige of Western resentment and vexation against its own civilizing imperative. This too was Winston Churchill’s understanding of Jew-hatred, which he described as Western civilization’s revolt against its own central values as manifested in art, science and political and religious institutions. It is no exaggeration to say that the Jew is the test case of a civilization—a test we appear to have failed.

The spectacle we are observing today—the reluctance to deal adequately with terrorism, the political contriving against our own best interests, the serpentine efforts to exculpate the enemy, the relativizing of moral principle, the Left’s betrayal of its own liberal culture, the renewed “treason of the intellectuals,” and especially the mounting acerbity toward Jews in the court of public opinion and the isolation of Israel as a pariah state—is merely the modern instantiation of this long offensive against our very survival.

[…]

The root of antisemitism is actually spiritual.

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Dismantling America

By Thomas Sowell:

Just one year ago, would you have believed that an unelected government official, not even a Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate but simply one of the many “czars” appointed by the President, could arbitrarily cut the pay of executives in private businesses by 50 percent or 90 percent?

Did you think that another “czar” would be talking about restricting talk radio? That there would be plans afloat to subsidize newspapers– that is, to create a situation where some newspapers’ survival would depend on the government liking what they publish?

Did you imagine that anyone would even be talking about having a panel of so-called “experts” deciding who could and could not get life-saving medical treatments?

Scary as that is from a medical standpoint, it is also chilling from the standpoint of freedom. If you have a mother who needs a heart operation or a child with some dire medical condition, how free would you feel to speak out against an administration that has the power to make life and death decisions about your loved ones?

Does any of this sound like America?

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Reporters Without Borders: Bordering on Insanity?

By Michael A. Bennett, AT:

The Eurocentric George Soros-funded Reporters Without Borders recently published its 2009 Press Freedom Index. In yet another classic example of European chutzpah, where propagandists pose as journalists and Saudi petrodollars fuel the anti-Jewish bandwagon, Reporters Without Reporters decided to punish Israel for its defensive operation in Gaza last winter.

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The Race Against Nothing

By Rob Smith, AT:

We have busied ourselves in a race between technology and nothing. Huge amounts of money and effort are being spent to develop an approach to address the hoax that is man-induced global warming, arguably the definition of nothing. While much of the world struggles with even the basics for life, sufficient food, shelter, clean water, and basic disease prevention, the “developed” world tilts at the windmill of nothingness.

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Bigotry unchallenged

Tarek Fatah, NP:

Oh Allah destroy them from within…”

With an air of triumphalism, finger-waving cleric Said Rageah harkened his Toronto flock: “We have to establish Islam [in Canada]. I wanna see Islam in every single corner of the city; I would like to see niqabis, and hijabis [women wearing face masks and head covering] everywhere in the city. I want to see ‘brothers’ [Muslim men] in beards everywhere in the city. Because when they see more of us, they will have more respect for us. They will say, ‘look they are everywhere…we cannot go against them’.”

The Somali-born Saudi-trained cleric was taunting his congregation for what he said was their impotence in face of a call by the Muslim Canadian Congress to disallow any public dealings with any person wearing a facemask.

Urging his congregation to take ‘action’, the imam said: “Please brothers and sisters, please. Do not just sit 30 minutes listening to a khutba [sermon] and not do anything about it. Please take a stand. Take action against this.” He then switched to Arabic to invoke a verse that has been used by Islamists and radical jihadis to intimidate and silence opponents.

“Aamr bi alma ‘ruf wa nahi ‘an almunkar” [enjoin good and forbid evil].

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Canadian arrested in Danish newspaper plot

Stewart Bell, National Post:

The FBI has arrested a Canadian for his role in an alleged terrorist plot against the Danish newspaper that published the controversial Muhamad cartoons.

Tahawwur Hussain Rana, 48, owner of First World Immigration Services, was charged with aiding a conspiracy to attack the Jyllands-Posten in Copenhagen.

In an indictment unsealed this morning, the U.S. Justice Department said Mr. Rana had worked with David Coleman Headley and three Pakistani terrorists to organize the attack.

Mr. Rana, a Canadian citizen born in Pakistan, has been living in Chicago, where he operates an immigration firm and grocery store. He also owns a halal meat business in Kinsman, Ill., that was raided by FBI agents last week.

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Glenn Beck Clips 10-26-09 Seg1- Does Obama Print Money in the Basement of the White House?

Glenn Beck Clips 10-26-09 Seg2- The ‘Me’ Generation Feels Entitled to Jobs and Entitlements

Glenn Beck Clips 10-26-09 Seg3- Art Laffer: Obviously Obama Does NOT Believe in a Free Market!

Glenn Beck Clips 10-26-09 Seg5- NY Independent Doug Hoffman the Conservative in Race

Glenn Beck Clips 10-26-09 Seg6- Now Are 9 Refounders, Congressmen Who ‘Rat’ on Their Party