CIVICS NEWS

Interesting historical commentary on the Bin Laden death

2011-05-03T11:09:00.000-07:00

Images of Bin Laden with a bullet through his head do not ‘put to bed’ any of the following facts.

- The fact that numerous intelligence professionals and heads of state have publicly stated that Obama has been dead for years and that the U.S. government was waiting to announce his death at the most politically opportune time.

- The fact that Osama Bin Laden was armed and funded by the CIA from 1979 onwards as a proxy to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.

- The fact that the CIA supported Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda during the invasion of Yugoslavia and Serbia in 1999.

- The fact that Bin Laden’s right-hand man Anwar Al-Alawki was dining with top brass at the Pentagon months after 9/11.

- The fact that FBI translator Sibel Edmonds testified how Bin Laden worked for the United States all the way up until 9/11.

- The fact that the Bin Laden acolyte and Al-Qaeda member Haroon Rashid Aswat, labeled the mastermind behind the 7/7 bombings in London, was a western intelligence asset.

- The fact that Abu Qatada, the figure labeled ‘Osama bin Laden’s right hand man in Europe’, was a western intelligence asset.

- The fact that the United States is currently arming and funding Al-Qaeda to help conduct regime change in Iran.

- The fact that western intelligence agencies bankrolled a Libyan Al-Qaeda cell controlled directly by Bin Laden to hatch a plot to kill Colonel Gaddafi in 1996.

- The fact that the United States is currently helping Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda conduct regime change in Libya.

- The fact that every shred of evidence clearly indicates that Al-Qaeda is an intelligence front for the US military-industrial complex.

Images released by the White House of Bin Laden with a bullet through his head do not confound any of these facts, so when the inevitable establishment spin ensues about these images ‘putting the conspiracy theories about Bin Laden to bed,’ we’d like to remind people that they actually do nothing whatsoever to address any of the so-called conspiracy theories (ie documented facts) about Bin Laden and the fact that Al-Qaeda is a US intelligence front.

False flag operations aren't real, and only silly conspiracy theorists believe that governments stage events

2011-03-25T07:47:00.000-07:00

Indiana prosecutor told Wisconsin governor to stage ‘false flag’ operation

Eric W. Dolan
Raw Story
March 25, 2011

An Indiana prosecutor and Republican activist has resigned after emails show he suggested Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker stage a fake attack on himself to discredit unions protesting his budget repair bill.

The Republican governor signed a bill on March 11 that eliminates most union rights for public employees.

In an email from February 19, Indiana deputy prosecutor Carlos F. Lam told Walker the situation presented “a good opportunity for what’s called a ‘false flag’ operation.”

The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism discovered the email among tens of thousands released to the public last week following a lawsuit by the Isthmus and the Associated Press.

“If you could employ an associate who pretends to be sympathetic to the unions’ cause to physically attack you (or even use a firearm against you), you could discredit the unions,” Lam said in his email.

Full article here

Anybody still putting their trust in princes?

2011-03-24T06:45:00.000-07:00

There's a much greater Prince worthy of our trust. I hope you're following the new blog, SeeHim AsHeIs.com

Here's Obama and Biden before they had the empire under their power:

Civics News must become less

2010-12-23T06:36:00.000-08:00

This is a big day. A hinge point in my life. For the better part of a decade, I have been a student of history, politics, and economics, and have collected news that paints a terrifying picture of tyranny emerging around us. I have taught about the U.S. Constitution and individual liberty. And I have opposed violations of both. The main purpose behind my political and news activism has been to point people away from confidence in worldly, coercive governments and toward the kingdom of God as taught by Jesus. And, as the sun sets on 2010, I feel that after one book and three years of blogging, that point has been made loudly and clearly. It is time to move on to bigger and better things. Namely, God.

Certainly, defending God’s reputation and advancing his kingdom has always been at the forefront of why this blog has existed. Disassociating Jesus from the evils done in his name by so-called Christianity and a so-called Christian nation has been perhaps the most important task this blog has served. And spreading Jesus’ message of non-violence and love of our enemies has been and will be an enduring purpose of this blog.

However, to continue to regularly post news and commentary on political matters would not be true to the journey in my own heart and mind. Over the past year or two, my interest in pursuing the political-theological mission of this blog has been slowly giving ground to more theological and spiritually practical realities. Recently, I have been consumed by the question, “what is God like?” and less interested in the question, “what are the latest evils that the kingdoms of this world are up to?” Therefore, rather than telling the world what Christ is NOT all about, more emphasis needs to be put on telling the world what Christ IS all about. Perhaps more time should be spent beholding, admiring and participating in the kingdom of God and less time should be spent critiquing and calling Christians out of the kingdoms of this world.

I hope that the 2300+ posts on Civics News will stand as a reminder to Christians to put not their trust in princes, in politicians, in the coercive governments of this world. If I were to do many of these blog posts over again, the emphasis and angle and even tone would certainly change to some degree, yet my convictions about liberty of conscience and God’s displeasure with Christian militarism remain as strong as ever.

But it is time to turn the page in my journey with God. He is now asking me to simply show the world what he is like. And this means doing much less of what I’ve been doing on Civics News for 3 years.

This brings me to the (drumroll please...) launching of the new blog, entitled "See Him As He Is." Expect more activity at that website than at Civics News. Civics News will not disappear. And posts will be made from time to time on pressing matters involving the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world. But I invite your participation in the most important adventure of all--seeking to know God better.

Seeking a knowledge of God can best be done in community with others of the same purpose of mind. So, "See Him As He Is" needs to be a conversational website. Just as “knowledge” of God in the Bible implies an intimate relationship with him, so seeking that knowledge must be done by people in relationship. So please join or start the conversation at the new blog.

Maybe in a way, Civics News has prepared the way for See Him As He Is. And like John the Baptist who prepared the way for Christ, Civics News says “I must become less, he must become greater” (John 3:30). Civics News must become less. See Him As He Is must become greater. And there is nothing greater than knowing God, for it is the very definition of the eternal kind of life (John 17:3).

-Scott

Is Diet Soda/Aspartame causing Glenn Beck's health problems?

2010-10-11T15:01:00.000-07:00

Paul Joseph Watson reports on the dangers of drinking diet soda. If you know any heavy users of Aspartame, send them this article.

"As He Is" is officially launching!

2010-10-03T05:13:00.000-07:00

See more about this series HERE. It should be a total of 17 sessions. This is the invitation card for the first five sessions. Please pray for us.

See Him As He Is

2010-09-29T16:16:00.000-07:00

As you've noticed, the frequency of posting on Civics News has taken a nose dive. A few posts ago, I mentioned that I'd been working on a new project. It's time to finally launch that new project! Beginning October 18, I will begin a lecture series at Grand Valley State University entitled, "As He Is" (a phrase taken from 1 John 3:1-2).

Why the change in my extracurricular efforts? I've come to realize that the fundamental problem in Christianity is how we perceive God. The reason we put our trust in political princes and in coercive government, the reason we believe in war and torture, the reason we believe in using legislative force to compel people to live a certain way economically or morally, the reason we struggle in our faith, and the reason many non-Christians rightly disregard the Christian faith...it all comes down to our picture of God. Do we believe in a coercive God or a God of love? When we say we believe that "God is love" do we REALLY believe that or do we still cherish misconceptions of God even in Christianity?

Because...what we believe God to be like...will determine everything for us. We tend to become like that which we admire and worship. “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us … when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” 1 John 3:1-2

There's so much more to say. One short post announcing this new project can't communicate the realizations that have come in the past year or two, which have been germinating and growing. I'm considering a second book on the subject, namely, a book on the character of God, what we believe he's like, and how this impacts our actions and beliefs (political and otherwise) to expand on these themes.

But, for now, I am excited to respond to the call to preach the good news about the character of God, to tell as many people as I can about what kind of person God is--that he is entirely trustworthy and that he is love with all the radical implications that truth carries with it. Inside and outside the church, we need to hear this good news, this gospel. It has changed my life over the past two years, and I can't wait to start sharing it with others.

So check out the new (very basic) website, and add it to your favorites; I'll be posting stuff there from time to time and hopefully posting audios from the "As He Is" series.

The most urgent need of humanity--inside and outside the church--is that we will finally See Him As He is. That we will finally be introduced to our Creator in his true and scarcely understood character. If the knowledge hits you like it hit me, it's going to change everything for you. Enjoy the journey of seeking the truth about God.

Scott

Temple Cleansing and Book Burning

2010-09-12T03:30:00.000-07:00

I have now heard multiple Christians defend the Koran burning plan as being an acceptable thing for Christians to do, and thought I'd address their argument formally.

Two arguments that I've heard multiple times are as follows:

1. Since Jesus cleansed the Temple, it follow that Christians should burn the religious books of other faiths.

This line of reasoning is easily countered. Jesus was speaking truth to power against those in his own religion. Doing something drastic to send a message to those in your faith community who are misrepresenting God might be needed at times. But toward the lost sheep whom God is seeking to save, we ought to have an attitude of patience, love, servitude, and we should have the singular focus of showing them the gospel. I would consider supporting a Christian pastor who was making a dramatic statement about radical elements within Christianity.

2. Since "A number who had practiced sorcery brought their scrolls together and burned them publicly" (Acts 19:19), this justifies the plan to burn Korans.

There is an obvious and fundamental difference between the Acts incident and the present one. In Acts, people burned their own old religious documents as a token of their conversion. If this pastor was leading converted Muslims in a service where the newly converted Christians burned their old religious books, that would be comparable to the Acts situation, but this passage doesn't support what the pastor had called for in the least.

[I should add an addendum to this brief post. While I find the plan to burn Korans to be abhorrent, I want to make it clear that any human being has the natural right to destroy through fire or whatever method his/her property. A Christian or any person has the political right to purchase religious books and burn them. Though it is hateful, there is no such thing as a "hate" crime. Hating is not a crime. It is a crime in heaven, but please don't let the outrage over the Koran burning controversy lead to support of hate speech legislation.]

Burning Korans

2010-09-07T09:38:00.000-07:00

Which of these just doesn't belong?

"By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." -John 13:35
"Love your enemies" -Matthew 5:44
"The Most High...is kind to the ungrateful and wicked." -Luke 6:35
"Let's do about the most offensive and mean thing possible (short of assaulting or killing them, which we're doing, too) to those Muslims who don't know the love of Christ, and let's burn the book they believe to be holy."

Followers of Christ: Please get the message out to the world that such things are not of Jesus, but of Satan. My goal is not to assess or judge the people at this church where they're planning to burn Korans. But it must be stated clearly for the world to hear that the spirit behind their actions is not of Christ.

[By the way, I do agree that Islam is a false religion and teaches a very dark picture of God. Just like violent so-called Christianity, Islam sadly misses out on the truth about God. But that doesn't mean we should kill them or deliberately offend them by burning Korans. We should love them, serve them, and show them what God is like as revealed in Jesus.]

Ron Paul on the Beck-Neocon-Tea Party Alliance

2010-08-30T17:29:00.000-07:00

A Tea Party Foreign Policy
Why the growing grassroots movement can't fight big government at home while supporting it abroad.
BY RON PAUL AUGUST 27, 2010

As one who is opposed to centralization, I am wary of attempts to turn a grassroots movement against big government like the Tea Party into an adjunct of the Republican Party. I find it even more worrisome when I see those who willingly participated in the most egregious excesses of the most recent Republican Congress push their way into leadership roles of this movement without batting an eye -- or changing their policies!

As many frustrated Americans who have joined the Tea Party realize, we cannot stand against big government at home while supporting it abroad. We cannot talk about fiscal responsibility while spending trillions on occupying and bullying the rest of the world. We cannot talk about the budget deficit and spiraling domestic spending without looking at the costs of maintaining an American empire of more than 700 military bases in more than 120 foreign countries. We cannot pat ourselves on the back for cutting a few thousand dollars from a nature preserve or an inner-city swimming pool at home while turning a blind eye to a Pentagon budget that nearly equals those of the rest of the world combined.

Our foreign policy is based on an illusion: that we are actually paying for it. What we are doing is borrowing and printing money to maintain our presence overseas. Americans are seeing the cost of this irresponsible approach as their own communities crumble and our economic decline continues.

I see tremendous opportunities for movements like the Tea Party to prosper by capitalizing on the Democrats' broken promises to overturn the George W. Bush administration's civil liberties abuses and end the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A return to the traditional U.S. foreign policy of active private engagement but government noninterventionism is the only alternative that can restore our moral and fiscal health. I am optimistic, and our numbers are increasing!

Who is Glenn Beck's God?

2010-08-30T16:18:00.001-07:00

This past weekend, Glenn Beck led a rally at the Lincoln Memorial where he declared before a crowd of nearly a hundred thousand (or as much as 300,000) followers, "America today begins to turn back to God."

This is a significant moment in the history of Christianity. And it's extremely disturbing. Far from merely "restoring honor" this rally marks a key juncture in the movement that is marrying the Tea Party right with apocalyptic neo-conservatism, leading to what I believe is the right wing's contribution to an authoritarian power the likes of which we have never seen.

For several years, Glenn Beck has been using his extraordinary talent and showmanship to gain a following until he is now arguably the single most potent force in politics in America. Whenever a political figure takes the name of God, I cringe. But even more-so when a person as powerful as Beck does so. And Beck's neo-conservative ideology makes this scenario downright chilling.

When Beck says that America is turning back to God, what does he mean, or more importantly, who is God according to Glenn Beck?

Is his God Jesus, who taught non-violence and taught his followers to avoid political power? Is Beck's God the God who is kind to the wicked and who loves his enemies? Or is his God the false God of the founding fathers and the civic God of the American political religion?

It gets worse, actually. Allying with Beck and Palin at this rally was arguably the greatest advocate of militant Christianity in America today, John Hagee, who has called for military strikes on Iran, which would bring about the so-called "rapture" of Christians from the earth.

Furthermore, it's quite telling that Beck and Sarah Palin held this rally at the Lincoln Memorial. Not to critique everything that has happened in front of that memorial, but it is indeed fitting that neo-conservatives who believe more in a god of warfare than in Jesus Christ, the suffering servant, would hold their religio-political service there. After all, the Lincoln Memorial, itself is styled after a Greek temple with Father Abraham as the honored god-saint. The Memorial's inscription above Abraham Lincoln’s statue reads: “In this temple, as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.” A temple where a statue of Abraham Lincoln resides? Interesting. A temple. Enshrined on our hearts? Hmm… According to biblical Christianity, the law of God and the glory of God, dwelt in the Tabernacle-Temple. And in the New Testament, that law is now written on the hearts and the Holy Spirit dwells within us. So God and His law are seen dwelling 1) in the Temple, and then 2) in our hearts, and also our deified Leaders are enshrined 1) in a temple, and reside 2) in our hearts.

Beck stated that this was a religious rally, not a political one. I'm afraid to say that he was partially right: it was definitely a religious rally. That's the scariest part of it all. It's a false religion, and Christians should stay as far away from the Glenn Beck movement as possible. I do agree with a lot of what Beck says; I agree that Christians should run from a Christianity that advocates the further empowerment of the government under the guise of "social justice." But I also believe Christians should run from Beck, who is the leader of a new movement of a false civic religion that will deceive Christians into advocating a right-wing version of war and further government power to counter that of the left.

The left and the right are merely two ideologies of the kingdoms of this world, and Christians should avoid both. They both compromise the church because in both cases, Christians join hands with the violent political power of the state. I believe that it will ultimately and perhaps primarily be so-called Christians on the right and the left who empower the most brutal police state in history following a series of crises that are coming in the last days upon the earth. Now is the time for Christians to divorce themselves from the false god of the state and the false religion of temporal political power.

Glenn Beck might be sincere and his conscience might be clear before God. I am not the judge of Glenn Beck. I may enjoy eternity in Heaven with him, and I love him as a child of God. But Christians should have nothing to do with his version of "returning to God," if that phrase means returning to another political god. Unfortunately, the political ideology of Beck, Palin, Hagee and others is associating Christianity with just another violent ideology of the kingdoms of this world. My advice is to stay away, speak lovingly but strongly against it, and live and preach the Kingdom of God.

Obama and family CIA ties

2010-08-26T04:56:00.000-07:00

Obama is a product of the intelligence establishment. If you enjoy connecting all of the dots of history, see Wayne Madsen's research revealing the Obama family's network of ties to the intelligence community.

More deaths under Obama than Bush

2010-08-26T04:44:00.000-07:00

The death toll of American soldiers under the Peace Prize winner's war of occupation in Afghanistan now exceeds that of Bush. And this in under two years.

I'm still here

2010-08-18T17:50:00.001-07:00

As you've noticed, the frequencey with which I have posted here has diminished, and for a number of days, I have posted nothing at all.

The reason for this is because I am working on a different project right now that I am extremely excited to share with you all.

Stay tuned!

For now, enjoy this archive of my absolute favorite category.

Also, if you haven't read it yet, check out these free excerpts of The Way, the Truth and the Sword.

Jesus or Caesar? Christianity in the 1st century Roman Empire

2010-08-09T17:34:00.000-07:00

Whose way do you find more compelling? Jesus' or Caesar's?

"Jesus is Lord."

"There is no name under heaven by which people can be saved except Jesus."

The gospel. Evangelism. The church.

What do all these phrases and terms have in common? They were the politically charged language of a movement of Christians on the margins of society who were seeking to show the world that there was a better way to live than the way of the Empire. You might know their leaders as Paul, Peter, James, and John.

[Disclaimer: I don't endorse everything Rob Bell says; I'm not thrilled about his statement "you are the gospel" at the end of clip two, since the gospel is the good news about God, not about me; but, I do agree that our lives should give people hope in Jesus.]

If Christianity were founded today, maybe our churches would have been five-sided buildings called Pentagons from which we renounce violent warfare and practice spiritual warfare.

Maybe our sermons about the love of God and our messages about how we should not put our trust in princes would have been called "State of the Movement Addresses."

Maybe our communion services would be called celebrations of "the ultimate sacrifice for freedom."

Maybe our tithes would be called "taxes" and our deacons who collect truly voluntary contributions would be called IRS agents.

Perhaps, as we served the poor with money we did not steal from taxpayers, we would call our generosity, "public welfare."

Maybe our evangelistic efforts would be called "the war on terror."

But even without being deliberate about it, as Christians in the first century apparently were, by living out the Christian life of love and servitude, by preaching love of enemies, we are engaged in an inherently political act, as the kingdoms of this world stand in such stark contrast to the Kingdom of God lived out in our lives.

"Why should a poison be in drinking water?" Good question.

2010-08-08T12:08:00.000-07:00

They're forcibly mass-medicating the population with toxic waste from the production of fertilizer...because they care about our teeth.

Also see, "Sodium Fluoride: Poison In The Tap Water."

No right to buy and sell. No right to contract. Must get permission from rulers.

2010-08-08T10:31:00.000-07:00

Once Again*, the State Turns Lemonade Into Lemons
Lew Rockwell.com Blog - David Kramer - August 6, 2010 09:27 AM

Seven-year old Julie Murphy had a run-in with the law in the state of Oregon. It seems this hardened criminal had the unmitigated gall to open a lemonade stand without obtaining a temporary restaurant license from the State. [...]

The face of a hardened criminal:

A few comments on the overturn of Prop 8

2010-08-06T06:52:00.000-07:00

A federal judge has overturned California's constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman, which was instituted in 2008 through a ballot initiative called Proposition 8.

My first and most important message to my fellow Christians is: please remain calm! This is a great opportunity to show the love of Christ. We are known for being hateful, we are known for our political crusades. Evangelical Christians are known for defining "success" by legislative victories, rather than evangelism. But this is a chance for us to avoid the temptation to get up in arms about the court decision and to avoid acting in an unloving way. This is a chance to show the world that the church exists to spread the gospel, not enforce Christian morality through the laws. My fellow Christians, please realize that this court decision does not change the character of God and it does not change the power of the gospel to transform lives. Proceed with your regularly scheduled program of the Great Commission as if this court decision never occurred, because it doesn't make a difference! By winning the gay marriage debate (as many of you see winning), you are not making our evangelism any more powerful. In fact the opposite is true, as we gain a bad reputation and defame the name of Jesus by waging a culture war against those we should be loving and serving into the Kingdom. Please read the Introduction, Chapter 4, and Chapter 8 of The Way, the Truth and the Sword.

So again, my first plea is for Christians to just keep their eyes on Christ and don't worry about this court decision. It doesn't matter. It doesn't change anything in the Kingdom of God.

My second comment, which is far less important, has to do with the legal issues present in this case. I think it is appropriate for Christians to be interested in helping to preserve liberty and constitutional government, and to that end, I have to critique this court decision. My criticism of the decision rests on a simple question of jurisdiction. Why does the federal government think that it can change state constitutions by judicial fiat? To me, that's the big story that comes out of this ordeal. I'm not even that interested in the subject of gay marriage. My question is, What happened to federalism? It was bad enough when the federal courts were throwing out state laws they didn't like, as if they have such jurisdiction; but, Prop 8 was part of the California State Constitution. Why is it just assumed that Prop 8 supporters have to win a legal argument in the federal courts to demonstrate a compelling state interest to the federal government? Every time a state amends its constitution, it has to run it by the federal judges? I'm not in favor of simple majority amendments like Prop 8, as I think it represents mob rule, but the federal constitution and its courts don't govern the state constitutions or the state constitutional amendment process. Further empowering the federal government to supposedly defend liberty was a deal with the devil, and is going to come back to bite us. In the long run, the federal government is far more dangerous to liberty than state and local governments.

I've pasted below the Concluding chapter in The Way, the Truth and the Sword, which is a message to Christians to put down the sword of legislative power.

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In a culture so angrily divided, what if Christians proposed a truce to the legislative power-struggle that we call the “culture war”? What if we invited all human beings to stand together on the moral common ground of natural rights? What if we all put aside our red-state blue-state divisions and, together, restored a consistent Americanism and fidelity to the Constitution.

What if the battle of ideas became merely a peaceful philosophical struggle in the realm of academics and culture, rather than always being a literal battle in the civic realm? After all, a political fight is a fight to gain control of the violent force that is government. The winner of a political fight then gets the power to fine or imprison or otherwise punish the loser for violating the winner’s values.

What if we could make the case for the Christian Way without striking a sword-wielding legislative pose?

In other words, what if we got back to making the case for the Christian Way in a…Christian…way? A Christ-like way.

Can Christians rediscover that love and servitude really do work as the proper and exclusive methods for transforming the world and winning hearts for Christ?

Can Christians realize that using the violence of government to compel our fellow man does not work and is morally wrong and biblically impermissible?

Can we come to realize that the civic realm is not for making disciples or making people act like disciples, but that government exists only to punish aggressors?

If we were to display a new civics to the world, if we were to apologize for our power-grabbing, our war-mongering and our hate, imagine the bridges that could be re-built. Imagine how much more effective our evangelism would be.

And imagine how much more politically free we would all be if all Americans could unite once again around the principles of our country’s founding.

All of this can be achieved by simply rediscovering a better Christian civics, figuring out what a relatively good government ought to look like.

You see, the principles of freedom unite all of humanity. Freedom is something we can all agree upon. We all want the oppressive burden of government off our backs. We all want the freedom to make our own economic and lifestyle choices. Why can’t we all grant that same prerogative to others? Why continue reaching for the sword when we can all be better off by calling a truce?

Because as it stands, authoritarianism marches forward against all of humanity. Countless different philosophic, religious, and cultural viewpoints become political agendas. Different interests look to the state to enforce their viewpoint by force. And thus government becomes a magnet of power to be exercised on behalf of every interest in society.

Everyone loses out when freedom recedes and tyranny gains ground.

In our current context, everybody is sinking in the quick-sand of tyranny, flailing about as we fight each other, which only causes us to sink faster. Everybody wants their own liberties preserved, yet so many fail to grant to others what they so jealously guard for themselves.

As a liberty-minded presidential candidate once said, “freedom unites us.” Indeed it does. Because adherence to the Constitution and its political philosophy rooted in natural rights will permit no agenda, no class, no special interest, no race, no individual to have any privileged power in society. No wealth will be redistributed nor will power be exercised by one group over another. Every individual’s natural rights are preserved and government remains limited. Tyranny does not arise to threaten life and property, but government remains just and lawful.

Everybody can agree with that, can’t they?

But in order to truly agree with that, we all must go through the difficult process of changing our minds about some things. We all have our pet issues where we think we know what is best for somebody else or for “society” or for another country. The social engineer, the imperialist, the great tyrant lives within all of us. We want our government to micromanage some facet of society in some way. We say, “I have better ideas about how to spend your money and live your life than you do.” And indeed, usually such advocacy is well-intentioned. And it is certainly encouraged by the political establishment, which gains power in the process. But such attempts to manage other peoples’ lives or property or even other nations are all extraordinarily misguided attempts at controlling people. They are un-Christian, they are ineffective, and they lead to human misery.

A peace-making approach should not make Christians uncomfortable, as if it means that we are to be permissive or relativistic. The political approach suggested above does not require Christians to budge one inch on our convictions and our adherence to the truth. Rather, we become all the more faithful to biblical teaching by laying down the sword and becoming peacemakers, by becoming more Christ-like.

This approach should not make Christians insecure about the state of society or the continued acceptance of absolute truth in American culture. We know that we carry a Gospel of eternal value and of perfect truth. Do we doubt that the methods that Jesus gave us for bringing salt and light to the world are sufficient? Is our faith in the validity of the Great Commission and the work of the Holy Spirit really so weak that we feel the need to resort to government force in order to advance the way of God in the world?

In reality, any attempt to use power to enforce our Christian worldview betrays an insecurity on our part. An insecurity that our view cannot stand on its own two feet, and that it needs the force of arms to back it up. Or an insecurity that the proper means that we are called to use (love, service, discipleship) are insufficient.

But once we come to fully trust in the veracity of the Gospel truths and really believe in the Kingdom Way through which we are supposed to spread them, we Christians can lead the way in advocating true tolerance (the absence of violent aggression toward others), while at the same time holding firmly to the absolute truths of Scripture, as we aggressively, yet peacefully, spread God’s truth to the whole world.

We need not believe the lie that the mere mention of a truth-claim inevitably carries with it the threat of violence to impose that truth-claim by force. Believing a truth, and insisting on the absoluteness of it, does not imply that you will use the force of law to impose that truth on your detractors. Why have we all (Christians and non-Christians) felt the need to carry the sword into the intellectual-philosophical-cultural discourse? Why does every issue in human society have to become a political issue with legislative spoils going the side that can amass the most votes?

We must continually re-emphasize that a truth claim does not carry a sword. It does not imply the threatened use of force for those who disagree. If Christians fail to consistently lead with that reassurance, then our dialogue with non-Christians will never even get off the ground. It will be a fight, rather than a discussion. But if we do remind those who disagree with us that we mean no harm and that we do not seek to aggress against them, then they will be much more willing to hear what we have to say. If we remind them that our Savior calls us to lay down the sword, and to not “lord it over” our fellow man, but instead to serve our fellow man, then our success in winning people over for Christ will no doubt rise. People don’t want to hear your opinion when you’re threatening them with punishment if they disagree. When you’re serving them…that’s when they’re open to hearing what you have to say.

If we are to be Christ-like, Christians must take the lead in the process of peacemaking. We ought to be known for this sort of thing. At present we are known for the opposite.

I can imagine the protests from some of my fellow Christians right now: “but it’s those secular-humanists and the gay agenda that started this fight; they’re attacking American culture, and so we must fight back! You don’t want to live in a pluralistic society where anything goes do you?”

If indeed they started the war, what is the Christ-like response to the aggression of enemies? Fighting back or loving them, serving them, and turning the other cheek?

I might also ask this: who did Jesus consider to be the greatest threat to the mission of God in the world? It wasn’t the pagan world, segments of which no doubt had a cultural agenda of their own. It was the religious leaders who misrepresented God that Jesus took issue with the most. Those were the people that Jesus waged a “war” against. Jesus was not interested in a culture war against non-believers. He taught that the way to bring truth and light into the world, the way to defeat Satan’s advances in this world is simply by inviting people into relationship with their Creator, by serving and loving those around us, and by teaching the way of Jesus as we are making disciples. Not pointing the finger at the outsider.

Likewise, in our day, the greatest threat to the continued advancement of the Kingdom of God is not secular humanists or pagans. It’s not gays. It’s not Darwinists. It is religious leaders who misrepresent God. And they are doing more damage in the civic realm than any other. It is religious people that we need to confront with courage and strong words, not the irreligious.

If we get our Christianity correct, and if we fight against the spiritual powers of darkness with the Gospel, then the culture will be won over. But more importantly, if our Christianity is biblically supported and if we stop calling the church and its converts into a legislative culture war, then we will once again be faithful to the life that Jesus demands of us.

I want to live in a moral society as much as any Christian. But even more so, I want to remain faithful to the methods that Jesus requires us to use in extending the Christian way. Social engineering through government force is absent from the entirety of the New Testament. It is not permitted. It is un-Christian and un-biblical. Our calling is to keep the Kingdom holy by not prostituting it to the ways of the world.

As it stands, the religious right has engaged in their crusade for the entirety of my life-time. The church-as-voting-block has not made anybody know Christ any better. It has not even made people more moral, since even the possibility of a moral choice is removed when the force of law compels a certain behavior.

Instead, the religious right has only confused people about what Christ is really all about. The religious right will continue to fail until Christians realize that our job is not to be the moral police of the broader society. You cannot legislate righteousness. We never should have started trying.

The good news is that the world will give us the benefit of the doubt if we adopt a humble posture of reconciliation. They will recognize that Jesus is not as he has been represented by Christians in the past. The stature of the Christian community will rise in the eyes of the world, and our influence will grow as a result.

We are hated and despised not because we have been faithful to the Gospel. We haven’t been faithful. We have sought power. And that is precisely why we are hated and despised. We are known for being hateful because we have been hateful. We are known for being un-Christian because we have been un-Christian. It is time to stop making excuses and to put down the sword.

No doubt, a radical Christian lifestyle will bring on its share of persecution and ire, but that will be the kind of persecution that we can be proud of. Insisting on the absolute truth of the Scriptures, speaking truth to power, pointing out lawlessness in government, civil disobedience, and advocating constitutionally limited government will not please everybody. But in pursuing these paths, we will be faithful to the teachings of Jesus and the cause of humanity. And so any persecution that comes our way will place us into the good company of the prophets and apostles who were killed for their dissent.

The majority of Christian young people are embarrassed by the Christian reputation and posture in the civic realm. This is shown in the Barna study referenced in previous chapters, as well as in my own experience as a teacher at a Christian high school.

We recoil at politicians who pander to religious voters with inauthentic religious rhetoric. As followers of the Prince of Peace, we are frankly disgusted by talk of violent aggression and crusades laced with religious appeal, however well-intentioned. We want to reach out to people who disagree with us, but we find obstacles in our way because of the civic sins of our fathers.

Perhaps the suggestions and the political philosophy presented in this book will provide a framework for a new Christian civics…for a new generation.

Our primary job as Christians is to love God and to love our neighbor.

We love God by representing him faithfully in the world; through radical obedience, we can restore the reputation of the name Christian. We repent of our civic sins and our perpetual use of the sword. Perhaps we can once again be known for being peacemakers who simply serve and love.

We love our neighbor by constantly re-affirming the humanity of every person; this is not an inherently political act, but this is a priority that drives what we do in the political realm. It drives our natural rights philosophy and it drives our speaking truth to power when need be.
To the world: the Christian Church wants to make peace with you. We want to co-exist with you and find common ground. We won’t agree on everything, and we Christians will continue to insist on the perfect beauty of Jesus as the only Lord and Savior—the Way, the Truth, and the Life. But, we want to dialogue with you without grasping the sword. Will you do the same? We want to join with you in the defense of human liberty against the oppressive and often evil burden of the state, which only delights in perpetuating our continual discord and power-struggle. We apologize for supporting torture and wars of aggression and empire. We apologize for seeking the dominion of the sword domestically. We apologize for misrepresenting Jesus and disobeying his commands. We ask for a second chance to show you what Christ is like.

We ask Christians and non-Christians alike to join us. Lay down the sword, walk hand in hand in our common humanity, and forge a new path…a new civics of liberty, a new civics of humanity.

Congressman: Virtually no limits on federal government power

2010-08-04T10:25:00.000-07:00

The state is god. The Constitution is a dead letter.

Iran has nukes and is about to fire them at us!

2010-08-04T10:12:00.000-07:00

Murder him

2010-08-04T08:30:00.000-07:00

Regarding the Wikileaks information that was recently released, this Congressman complains of "a culture of disclosure." How dare the people have information!

What is the opposite of a culture of disclosure? A culture of secrecy. It is scary that the state would defend the culture of secrecy that has enshrouded so many of its nefarious acts in darkness (see John 3:19-20).

He argues, "We know for a fact that people will likely be killed because of this information being disclosed." It is a "fact" that people will "likely" be killed. He doesn't explain how he knows this fact.

In reality, what is causing people to be killed in Afghanistan? What is causing this to be the longest war in American history? What is causing countless innocent civilians to die in that country, as well as Pakistan and Iraq? What is causing American troops to be put in harm's way?

It's definitely not a "culture of disclosure."

It's called the American empire. That's what is causing the killing.

And now the empire wants to execute the man who sought to leak information about the folly of this war.

Listen to them call for a treason conviction, which carries with it the death penalty.

Side note: they say that this is a "time of war." Question: when did the Congress declare war? This is called an occupation and it's called nation-building. It's not war.

Ron Paul comments on unconstitutional, immoral wars

2010-08-03T06:15:00.000-07:00

The Trouble With Unconstitutional Wars
Ron Paul - Campaign For Liberty - Aug 3, 2010

Our foreign policy was in the spotlight last week, which is exactly where it should be. Almost two years ago many voters elected someone they thought would lead us to a more peaceful, rational co-existence with other countries. However, while attention has been focused on the administration’s disastrous economic policies, its equally disastrous foreign policies have exacerbated our problems overseas. Especially in times of economic crisis, we cannot afford to ignore costly foreign policy mistakes. That’s why it is important that U.S. foreign policy receive some much needed attention in the media, as it did last week with the leaked documents scandal.

Many are saying that the Wikileaks documents tell us nothing new. In some ways this is true. Most Americans knew that we have been fighting losing battles. These documents show just how bad it really is. The revelation that Pakistani intelligence is assisting the people we are bombing in Afghanistan shows the quality of friends we are making with our foreign policy. This kind of thing supports points that Rep. Dennis Kucinich and I tried to make on the House floor last week with a privileged resolution that would have directed the administration to remove troops from Pakistan pursuant to the War Powers Resolution.

We are not at war with Pakistan. Congress has made no declaration of war. (Actually, we made no declaration of war on Iraq or Afghanistan either, but that is another matter.) Yet we have troops in Pakistan engaging in hostile activities, conducting drone attacks and killing people. We sometimes manage to kill someone who has been identified as an enemy, yet we also kill about 10 civilians for every 1 of those. Pakistani civilians are angered by this, yet their leadership is mollified by our billions in bribe money. We just passed an appropriations bill that will send another $7.5 billion to Pakistan. One wonders how much of this money will end up helping the Taliban. This whole operation is clearly counterproductive, inappropriate, immoral and every American who values the rule of law should be outraged. Yet these activities are being done so quietly that most Americans, as well as most members of the House, don’t even know about them.

We should follow constitutional protocol when going to war. It is there for a reason. If we are legitimately attacked, it is the job of Congress to declare war. We then fight the war, win it and come home. War should be efficient, decisive and rare. However, when Congress shirks its duty and just gives the administration whatever it wants with no real oversight or meaningful debate, wars are never-ending, wasteful, and political. Our so-called wars have become a perpetual drain on our economy and liberty.

The founders knew that heads of state are far too eager to engage in military conflicts. That is why they entrusted the power to go to war with the deliberative body closest to the people — the Congress. Decisions to go to war need to be supported by the people. War should not be covert or casual. We absolutely should not be paying off leaders of a country while killing their civilians without expecting to create a lot of new problems. This is not what America is supposed to be about.

Good thing they're keeping us safe from these people

2010-07-29T14:59:00.000-07:00

National Security Demands Afghanistan Roadblocks and Checkpoints
Lew Rockwell.com Blog - Michael S. Rozeff July 28, 2010 06:31 AM

The Afghanistan Papers will take time to read and process. I took 5 minutes to scan a tiny sample in one category involving checkpoints. The picture I got is of U.S. forces attempting to discover an enemy and/or prevent infiltration by occupying the country via checkpoints and reconnaissance flights. In incident after incident, Afghanis fail to stop at checkpoints or attempt to speed through them (these reports say). This leads the U.S. soldiers to open fire. After killing or wounding Afghanis, the soldiers find no arms, no bombs, no suicide attacks, and no improvised explosive devices (IED). On one recon flight, two men were seen doing something near a road. This led to a pursuit in which the pilot destroyed their motorcycle. Afterwards, no IED was found near the road. [...]

Fallujah fallout worse than Hiroshima

2010-07-27T11:00:00.000-07:00

Toxic legacy of US assault on Fallujah 'worse than Hiroshima'
The shocking rates of infant mortality and cancer in Iraqi city raise new questions about battle

Patrick Cockburn - The London Independent - July 24, 2010

Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, according to a new study.

Iraqi doctors in Fallujah have complained since 2005 of being overwhelmed by the number of babies with serious birth defects, ranging from a girl born with two heads to paralysis of the lower limbs. They said they were also seeing far more cancers than they did before the battle for Fallujah between US troops and insurgents.

Their claims have been supported by a survey showing a four-fold increase in all cancers and a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in under-14s. Infant mortality in the city is more than four times higher than in neighbouring Jordan and eight times higher than in Kuwait.

Dr Chris Busby, a visiting professor at the University of Ulster and one of the authors of the survey of 4,800 individuals in Fallujah, said it is difficult to pin down the exact cause of the cancers and birth defects. He added that "to produce an effect like this, some very major mutagenic exposure must have occurred in 2004 when the attacks happened".

US Marines first besieged and bombarded Fallujah, 30 miles west of Baghdad, in April 2004 after four employees of the American security company Blackwater were killed and their bodies burned. After an eight-month stand-off, the Marines stormed the city in November using artillery and aerial bombing against rebel positions. US forces later admitted that they had employed white phosphorus as well as other munitions.

In the assault US commanders largely treated Fallujah as a free-fire zone to try to reduce casualties among their own troops. British officers were appalled by the lack of concern for civilian casualties. "During preparatory operations in the November 2004 Fallujah clearance operation, on one night over 40 155mm artillery rounds were fired into a small sector of the city," recalled Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, a British commander serving with the American forces in Baghdad.

He added that the US commander who ordered this devastating use of firepower did not consider it significant enough to mention it in his daily report to the US general in command. Dr Busby says that while he cannot identify the type of armaments used by the Marines, the extent of genetic damage suffered by inhabitants suggests the use of uranium in some form. He said: "My guess is that they used a new weapon against buildings to break through walls and kill those inside."

The survey was carried out by a team of 11 researchers in January and February this year who visited 711 houses in Fallujah. A questionnaire was filled in by householders giving details of cancers, birth outcomes and infant mortality. Hitherto the Iraqi government has been loath to respond to complaints from civilians about damage to their health during military operations.

Researchers were initially regarded with some suspicion by locals, particularly after a Baghdad television station broadcast a report saying a survey was being carried out by terrorists and anybody conducting it or answering questions would be arrested. Those organising the survey subsequently arranged to be accompanied by a person of standing in the community to allay suspicions.

The study, entitled "Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005-2009", is by Dr Busby, Malak Hamdan and Entesar Ariabi, and concludes that anecdotal evidence of a sharp rise in cancer and congenital birth defects is correct. Infant mortality was found to be 80 per 1,000 births compared to 19 in Egypt, 17 in Jordan and 9.7 in Kuwait. The report says that the types of cancer are "similar to that in the Hiroshima survivors who were exposed to ionising radiation from the bomb and uranium in the fallout".

Researchers found a 38-fold increase in leukaemia, a ten-fold increase in female breast cancer and significant increases in lymphoma and brain tumours in adults. At Hiroshima survivors showed a 17-fold increase in leukaemia, but in Fallujah Dr Busby says what is striking is not only the greater prevalence of cancer but the speed with which it was affecting people.

Of particular significance was the finding that the sex ratio between newborn boys and girls had changed. In a normal population this is 1,050 boys born to 1,000 girls, but for those born from 2005 there was an 18 per cent drop in male births, so the ratio was 850 males to 1,000 females. The sex-ratio is an indicator of genetic damage that affects boys more than girls. A similar change in the sex-ratio was discovered after Hiroshima.

The US cut back on its use of firepower in Iraq from 2007 because of the anger it provoked among civilians. But at the same time there has been a decline in healthcare and sanitary conditions in Iraq since 2003. The impact of war on civilians was more severe in Fallujah than anywhere else in Iraq because the city continued to be blockaded and cut off from the rest of the country long after 2004. War damage was only slowly repaired and people from the city were frightened to go to hospitals in Baghdad because of military checkpoints on the road into the capital.

Related Civics News Posts:
Film: BEYOND TREASON...what are they doing to our troops? (...and to us!?)
Israel Using Depleted Uranium Against Gaza Victims
Israel using White Phosphorus on Palestinians

Good News: More repentance from war

2010-07-23T10:50:00.000-07:00

Joseph Farah, founder of the conservative political news website, WorldNetDaily.com has repented of his warmongering. Regarding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he states, “I admit I was a supporter of both of these campaigns. I was obviously wrong.” While I don't endorse everything he says in his article, I want to affirm his humble change of mind.

See Will Grigg's comments on Farah's statement.

Related posts:
The Bravest of Soldiers Repent: "I realized I was the terrorist"
Inspiring Repentance: 2 soldiers apologize for wikileaks incident and Iraq war
Soldiers ordered to slaughter civilians
Support these brave soldiers who are repenting and speaking out against evil
More former Bush people repenting--Ridge: We were wrong to torture

Actually...you don't have freedom from religious political power after all

2010-07-23T04:15:00.001-07:00

What would happen if Christianity gained total power again? No doubt, there have been great efforts by an alliance of Protestants and Catholics during my lifetime (since 1980) to do just that.

Perhaps a short history lesson would be helpful. As I wrote about in, The Way, the Truth and the Sword, during the early centuries of Christianity, followers of Christ followed Christ into martyrdom, as they were killed for a faith and a lifestyle that was hated by the state and Satan's kingdom. Beginning in the 300s, A.D., though, something changed. Christianity gained power and became the state...except one thing...by doing so, ceased to be Christianity. Satan was still in charge of the sword, and all he did was put on sheep's skin, claiming to be Christian.

So, for the entirety of the Middle Ages, Christianity ruled the world with violent coercive force. Liberty of conscience was not permitted. Those who disagreed with the church were tortured and burned to death by this lamb in sheep's clothing. Sadly, during these centuries in Christian history Christians sent the wrong message about God to the world. Where Jesus shows love, kindness, servitude, and self-sacrifice, the Christian power dominated with power, coercion, violence, and intolerance.

This next statement is not meant to criticize individuals who belong to a certain church, but the church that ruled during these centuries was the great Roman power. The Roman Catholic Church exercised the political power over greater Europe, displacing the Roman Empire. For many centuries, then, Christianity ruled the world and did not permit freedom of religion.

When America was founded, however, the First Amendment to the Constitution stated that the state should not support one religion over another. The Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment states that we may exercise our religious freedom as we see fit, and the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prevents the merging of church and state. The founding fathers deliberately sought to prevent in America the tragedies that attended the history of Europe where freedom of religion was not permitted.

The essence of the First Amendment is that free people not only have the freedom to exercise their religion as they see fit, but they also have the freedom to not have religion forced upon them by the state or a church-state power. In other words, free people not only have freedom of religion, but also freedom from religion. By "freedom from religion" we mean freedom from the coercive power of a religious institution.

Many say that Rome has changed. Many say that if only the religious right (a political alliance between Protestants and Catholics) could take power, then they would enforce a moral and religious order that would improve society. They would not be enforcing religion, the argument goes, they would only be enforcing morals.

All of the above commentary is meant to lead up to this YouTube clip, which I stumbled upon this morning. Notice that, as far as Rome is concerned, liberty of conscience is STILL illegitimate. They state explicitly that we do NOT have freedom from religion in the libertarian sense. You do NOT have freedom from a religio-political power enforcing its will upon you.

I've heard from many Protestants that "Rome has changed," and that it's safe to enter into a political alliance with them to take back the power of the sword. Be forewarned: if Christianity were to again gain power, don't expect it to be any prettier than it was last time in the Middle Ages.

Sadly, most Protestants in the political world would make this exact same argument as you will see in this clip, sacrificing liberty of conscience and a Christ-like presence in the world on the altar of power.

Prayers for Glenn Beck

2010-07-19T18:14:00.001-07:00

While Beck and I have our differences, I want to affirm his humanity and recognize that he is a child of God whom I am privileged to respect and love simply because he is a human being. I pray today that he will not go blind, as his doctor has told him might be the case. I pray also that he will have improved spiritual eyesight, so that he can see how loving his Creator is, and that by beholding a God of love with clear sight, he will want to love his Muslim neighbors as himself. I pray the same for my imperfect spiritual eyesight, that I will more clearly focus on and grasp the love of God, and that by beholding his gloriously kind character, I might be transformed into a more loving person.

I encourage my readers to pray for Glenn Beck and the many people suffering from eye diseases physically and spiritually today.

Beck caught lying about his Lincoln research

2010-07-19T09:03:00.000-07:00

Glenn Beck is admired by many American conservatives and even libertarians. Countless Christians turn on his program each evening to hear political commentary that they think they can trust. Beck is a professional actor, a true showman who can capture an audience with ease. He has eclipsed Rush Limbaugh as the most influential figure on the right.

I agree with and support most of what he talks about while Democrats are in power. Beck was a pure neo-con during the Bush Administration (I listened to his radio show for years), and since then, is singing the tune of a libertarian constitutionalist Ron Paul Republican, even discussing issues once considered conspiracy theory and relegated to midnight talk radio.

However, I have warned readers again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again to keep Beck at arms length! He is a neo-con in libertarian dress.

Tom DiLorenzo explains the latest reason to take what Glenn Beck says with a grain of salt. First, he has been caught being deliberately dishonest. Secondly, in his admiration of arguably the worst president in U.S. History, Beck has once again revealed his neo-con colors. Read the whole article by DiLorenzo, but this part especially reveals Beck's dishonesty:

Despite his admirable performances discussing the founding fathers, socialism, progressivism, and other topics, Glenn Beck has been absolutely awful and sometimes untruthful when discussing Lincoln and his legacy. During one show he claimed to have read the actual original copy of The Confederate Constitution. I assume he made this assertion to show that he must really be quite the expert on the document. I didn’t believe him when he said this, and his next sentence proved to me that he did not read the document. The next sentence was the statement that the formal title of the document was "The Slaveholders’ Constitution . . ." Anyone can look the document up at Yale University’s online Avalon Project, which warehouses all the American founding documents, commentaries, and more, to see for yourself that Beck was wrong about this.

Beck’s next false statement was that "I read it" (the Confederate Constitution) and "it wasn’t about states’ rights, it was all about slavery." Read it yourself online. It is a virtual carbon copy of the U.S. Constitution, with a few exceptions: The Confederate president had a line-item veto; served for one six-year term; protectionist tariffs are outlawed; government subsidies for corporations are outlawed; and the "General Welfare Clause" of the U.S. Constitution was deleted.

The act of secession was the very essence of states’ rights, contrary to Beck’s proclamation, for the basic assumption was that the states were sovereign. They delegated certain defined powers to the central government for their own mutual benefit, but all other powers remained in the hands of the people and the states, as stated in the Tenth Amendment. As sovereigns, they had a right to secede for whatever reason. If a state needed the permission of others to secede, as Lincoln argued, then it was not really sovereign.

The U.S. Constitution adopted a federal, not a national system of government. That is another way of saying a states’ rights system of government. The Confederate Constitution was nearly identical.

To Christians and people of good conscience, I beg of you: put not your trust in Beck. We are not to look to a political talking head to discover historical and political truth. What we behold and admire, we will become. Be careful who you are admiring.

12-year-old girl forcibly given a virtual total strip-search

2010-07-19T08:34:00.000-07:00

Where are Focus on the Family, Pat Robertson, and the other avowed defenders of Christian virtue and family values when you need them!?

The St. Petersburg Times reports on a 12-year-old girl who was forced to stand in front of a naked body scanner without her parents' permission:

There's been lots of talk lately about body scanners — the new airport security tool that allows screeners to see through clothes. People are concerned about privacy, delayed flights, health effects.

Now there's another concern. What about kids? Do they have to go through this, too? And what are parents' rights?

What is fascinating about this article is that it assumes that it's fine and dandy for adults to bare all in front of a creepy TSA agent. But beyond that, the intrusion of the state has reached a new level. This is intolerable. And to my knowledge, the Christian right is silent on this; perhaps they wedded themselves to police state power under Bush, and now are inextricably tied to "security" in the name of "anit-terrorism." After all, if we need to show our kids naked to get the terrorists, then I guess that's just the price we have to pay. (Please correct me if a conservative family group has spoken out against this; I want to be wrong!)

Instead of focusing on the family, the religious right (through their silence on this matter) is allowing the state to focus on our families in intimate and inappropriate detail. It is not an exaggeration to say that these scanners reveal a nude image--there's a reason why I won't post the images along with my comments on the scanners.

Previous Reports on the naked body scanners:

--Give to Caesar your naked body?
--More naked body scanners that would not have stopped underwear bomber
--Your naked body
--Remember that obscene scene from Airplane where the security guys see naked in their X-ray screen?
--Your naked body is the business of the state
--Imagine if they made us all stand naked at the air port! ...Oh

60 percent of Americans put not their trust in princes

2010-07-14T05:45:00.000-07:00

The mission of Civics News is to encourage Christians and people of conscience to not put their trust in the state, but rather, to look to Jesus. To look away from the kingdoms of this world, seeking instead the Kingdom of God.

Having said that, the following headline comes as great news! "Majority of Americans Lack Faith in Obama: Poll." Nearly 60 percent of Americans do not have faith in Obama. That is good news.

Now it is the job of Christians to show people what the real Good News is--that God is trustworthy, and that he is not the kind of God that Christians have made him out to be.

Ron Paul, Glenn Beck on the New World Order

2010-07-12T08:01:00.000-07:00

Doesn't Ron Paul know that the New World Order (global government) doesn't exist and that only paranoid conspiracy theorists believe that powerful people seek to advance their interests by consolidating financial and political power globally?

Charles Burris explains here the humorous fact that academia has been teaching its pupils for decades that conspiracies don't exist while simultaneously indoctrinating them into the new world order philosophy. It's amazing that it doesn't dawn on more students that the very world order whose existence is denied by academia is being pushed by academia!

Republican leaders defend Obama's, Pelosi's war

2010-07-07T04:39:00.000-07:00

Except Ron Paul, of course.

Worshipping God, not the Government on the 4th of July

2010-07-06T09:40:00.000-07:00

CIVICS NEWS Comment: I am grateful to be a part of a church that spurns idolatry of the nation as a part of worship services. I was blessed to be able to make a couple comments from the front of church this past Sabbath, complimenting church leaders for avoiding the militaristic/nationalistic/idolatrous pitfalls so common to churches in America.

Fourth of July Sunday
Lew Rockwell.com Blog - Bill Anderson - July 4, 2010 04:27 PM

We usually are at my wife’s parents’ place around July 4, and that means that when we go to church in that town, we generally are going to get a dose of “religious patriotism.” However, the service where we went today pretty much confirmed my worst fears.

No, there was not a color guard, nor Air Force jets flying over a cross, but nonetheless it was bad. We sang the usual “patriotic” hymns, and the prelude was “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and you have to remember that the area where the church is located was devastated during the War Between the States by Sherman’s army.

However, the “sermon” was positively the worst sermon I ever had heard, as it celebrated the “liberation of Iraq” and other American wars, as well as blaming the “left” for all of our problems. The pastor received a standing ovation when it was over. Thank goodness, my children and my wife also were thoroughly disgusted by this display of idolatry.

Thomas Woods on state nullification of federal tyranny

2010-07-01T12:53:00.000-07:00

Typical mainstream media zombie (in the sense that they're not allowed to think for themselves) interviews Thomas Woods. Woods' latest book, Nullification, advances the Jeffersonian concept of states' rights. Members of the establishment, though, are conditioned to believe that anybody who supports returning 10th Amendment powers to the states and the people where they rightly belong is a Confederate slave-owning racist. Woods explains the truth:

Here is what I wrote on February 14th regarding Chris Matthews' use of the arguments similar to the zombie in the clip above:

Regarding Chris Matthews' critique of the grassroots states' rights movement that Medina is a part of, Matthews and his guests need a bit of a history lesson. They first equate states' rights, nullification and interposition with racism, segregation, Jim Crow, and slavery. It is true that segregationists and slave-owners claimed states' rights to continue their outrages, but that doesn't make state sovereignty guilty by association. Northern states also "nullified" laws, namely, the federal fugitive slave act, using states' rights for their cause. New England states even considered secession during the War of 1812 out of protest against what they viewed as an unnecessary war. States' rights are a tool that different regions, different ideologies, and different partisan interests have tapped into throughout history. To say that "state sovereignty = racism" makes as much sense as saying "state soveriegnty = anti-war protest," since New England utilized this method for their cause. If somebody throws a brick through a black man's window, you don't say the brick was racist; just down the road bricks are being used for something positive--the construction of a hospital. States' rights is a constitutional principle that should be used for good.

Also, Matthews and his guests, in opposing Medina's views, state that it's "un-American" to believe in state nullification of federal laws. Do these men know who first articulated the view of nullification? It was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was the champion of state sovereignty and a strict interpretation of the Constitution against the Hamiltonian nationalists who twisted, stretched and bended the Constitution to fit their desired policy ends. It was during the Hamiltonian Adams administration in 1798 that some of the worst federal laws ever were passed: the Alien and Sedition Acts. They outlawed free speech in America. An outrage. The Supreme Court sat idly by. What is a state to do when faced with federal intrusion on the liberties of the people? Well, Jefferson (along with another "anti-American", James Madison) penned the famous Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, which was an example state of nullification of federal laws that were unconstitutional.

It's not just Chris Matthews, either. CNN is now labeling Jeffersonian Americans as fringe radical "tenthers" (because they believe in the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, which reserves to the states all powers not specifically granted to the federal government). The "tenther" term is meant to be a word association with "truthers" (i.e. 9/11-truther) who are painted in the mainstream media as being crazy kooks.

For Christians or anybody who is interested in the subject of liberty, state sovereignty is an important concept, as state governments can stand in the gap and oppose federal tyranny and oppression. It's not un-American and it's not racist to believe in freedom.

Also, see this: New Hampshire Warns Obama: “Establish Martial Law and We’ll Secede”

Dozens of Americans currently targeted for assassination by president Bush

2010-06-29T11:27:00.000-07:00

Oh, I mean president Obama. Sorry, I get the two confused. The only difference is Obama* is a bigger killer. And he has a Nobel Peace Prize.

Well anyway, as it turns out, Obama's assassination list may include "dozens" of American citizens.

Glenn Greenwald asks a good question:

“I’ve written at length about the reasons why targeting American citizens for assassination who are far away from a ‘battlefield’ is so odious and tyrannical, and I won’t repeat those arguments here,” Greenwald wrote. “Suffice to say — and I’m asking this literally — if you’re someone who believes, or are at least willing to acquiesce to the claim, that the U.S. President has the power to target your fellow citizens for assassination without a whiff of due process, what unchecked presidential powers wouldn’t you support or acquiesce to?”

*To clarify, when I say "Obama" and "Bush" I don't mean to judge the character of either man. It is the spiritual powers behind the actions of these men that need to be warned against, so that God's children don't fall prey to Satan's lies. Who knows, I might one day share a street in the New Jerusalem with Obama or Bush; this isn't about these two men. But what is clear is that Christians should have no business identifying with or supporting people who head the biggest imperial machine in history. We should call the kingdoms of this world what they are--satanic. And we should turn our eyes to Jesus and enjoy full citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven. So again, the point is not to critique men, but to oppose the satanic philosophy of a "power over" kingdom. "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms" (Eph 6:12). Also, I should note that if Christians didn't have a tendency to associate with Satan's kingdom thereby giving Christ a reputation for being like Satan, then I wouldn't be running this website. The mission here is to call Christians to put not their trust in princes, but instead to look to Jesus; to shun the sword and cling to the cross.

Pat Tillman was probably murdered by U.S. Military

2010-06-29T11:23:00.000-07:00

Read Prison Planet's analysis of the Tillman incident and watch the trailer for the forthcoming documentary exposing the government cover-up.

If your enemy strikes you on the right cheek, grab him by the throat

2010-06-28T17:10:00.000-07:00

Calling all Christians! Since fidelity to the teachings of Jesus is a scarce resource within the church today, great efforts are required in order to counter the toxic Christian militarist doctrine that so fundamentally reverses and destroys the identity of Christianity. The Way, the Truth and the Sword is my small contribution, especially chapters three, four, five, six and seven.

What will you do to counter the latest satanic rhetoric masquerading as Christianity? Perhaps this article will have an effect in restoring the name of Jesus in the world.

This latest outrage comes from the pen of Cal Thomas, who is a child of God for whom I have infinite love. What he has written, though, comes from the mind of Satan. Anything that does not love its neighbor and even its enemy is not of Christ. Cal Thomas states,

To win in Afghanistan, and make such things possible, our “rules of engagement” must change. American casualties have increased because of self-imposed restraints when encountering Taliban who hide behind civilians.

You can’t win a war by hesitating when the enemy is at a disadvantage. To paraphrase a familiar admonition: Grab them by their throats and their hearts and minds will follow.

Where to begin with this. First, since he is a prominent and openly Christian writer, and he is using the pronoun "our," it is assumed that he is speaking on behalf of Christ and Christians. He refers to "our rules of engagement."

The rules of engagement for the Christian are taught clearly and unmistakably by Jesus and the apostles. "If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him something to drink" (Romans 12:20). "Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your father in heaven" (Matthew 5:44-45). "If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also" (Matthew 5:39).

Mr. Thomas, those are the rules of engagement for the Christian. Those are "our" rules of engagement.

Unfortunately, Cal Thomas wants the American empire to "win" in Afghanistan. He believes that if only the military were a tad more like Satan and even further from the ideal of Christ, if only we were willing to indiscriminately kill more innocent children, then Afghanistan will finally have a government just like America's! (What a scary thought that is.)

Also notice that Thomas is primarily concerned about American casualties over the lives of innocent Afghanis. This thinking betrays a nationalistic worldview that is part of the kingdoms of this world rather than the Kingdom of God. Where in Christian teaching is a Christian instructed to value the life of an American soldier over the life of an Afghani child? If anything, our sympathies would be greater tied with the innocents in a country that has been invaded and occupied by the largest military empire in history. After all, Christianity is a religion that was founded and oppressed in occupied territory under the boot of the most powerful empire in the ancient world. Certainly, we can empathize with victims of aggression.

I do not mean to judge Mr. Thomas' heart or evaluate his standing with God. But the teaching that he advances here is not of God.

Where Jesus said to love our enemies, apostate Christianity says to kill them.

Where Jesus loved his enemies and died for them, apostate Christianity seeks to kill its enemies.

Where Jesus taught and modeled "turn the other cheek," apostate, militarist Christianity says "grab him by the throat."

Could the distinction be clearer?

The purpose of exposing this false Christianity is not to raise controversy or claim to have all the answers. We're all on a journey of discovery of God's character and biblical truth. The purpose is to draw for the world a clear distinction between that which carries the name "Christian" but advances the worldview of Satan versus the true faith of Jesus rooted in the ultimate truth that God is love.

If we want to be "sons of our father in heaven", in other words, if we want to be like our father in heaven, then we must love our enemies. To the extent that Christians continue to support militarism, victory for the U.S. Government will mean defeat of the reputation of Christ in the world.

Andrew Napolitano on the oil spill

2010-06-27T12:59:00.000-07:00

Fluoride

2010-06-23T16:28:00.000-07:00

It's so good and nutritious for you. Governments have decided to mass medicate the population by putting fluoride in the water because they care about you and your children having healthy teeth. Drink lots of water from the tap, and in fact, take fluoride tablets to give yourself a healthy, white sparkling smile.

OK, enough silliness. Now learn the truth about fluoride.

Obama, "it's ok for you to kind of act like a dictator."

2010-06-23T07:16:00.000-07:00

Ed Shulz wants Obama to act like a dictator in response to the BP situation. He stated on MSNBC the following words: "It's OK to kind of act like a dictator."

Add this to the amazing statements from MSNBC, such as "Obama is sort of God," and "when the president speaks" to Congress, it is a "religious experience."

These people are dead serious. They're not being sarcastic at all. At least when our previous dictator was president, it was obvious that his "dictator" comment he made was a joke (though it must have reflected his true feelings to a certain degree). Stated King George Bush: "If this were a dictatorship, this would be a heck of a lot easier. Just so long as I'm the dictator."

To many servants of the state in the circles of mainstream media power (particularly at MSNBC), we have a latent or actual god-emperor in America--or a god-dictator, if you will. (And ditto that for Fox Propaganda--I mean Fox News--during the Bush years.)

Lieberman: The Communists are doing it, so we should too!

2010-06-22T12:53:00.000-07:00

Senator Joe Lieberman: “Right now China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in case of war and we need to have that here too.”

Communist China's Internet censorship is not used "in case of war," but is used on a daily basis to deflect dissent.

Great idea! Entrust the emperor of America with power to shut down the Internet.

Read Prison Planet's analysis of Lieberman's amazing suggestion.

Ron Paul comments on trust in government to solve oil leak

2010-06-22T12:48:00.000-07:00

Why are taxpayers expected to shield giant corporations from liability?

Soldiers ordered to slaughter civilians

2010-06-21T15:38:00.000-07:00

Reports OpEd News: Wikileaks Soldier Reveals Orders for "360 Rotational Fire" Against Civilians in Iraq. This is not an article you want to miss. Warning: strong obscenity by leaders in America's Christian military. The Wikileaks story is even worse than you thought. But, really, the article holds good news, as another soldier is repenting, as these did.

(I say "Christian" military, because that's the message that churches send to the world during this season. On Memorial Day, a church by my house put on its sign "Remembering Our Heroes." That's where the church is at today, apparently. I've left those churches and I'm happy that at my church we don't celebrate the military as our form of worship. Yes, it's unfortunate that the height of heroism in the church today is joining the military. And it's very sad that the military is perceived as "Christian" by association.)

Drug decriminalization in Portugal

2010-06-21T15:23:00.000-07:00

You've heard that the Christian position on drug laws is to favor the war on drugs. We are supposed to favor "tough" drug laws and wage the drug war with "strength." The Christian position, it has been said, is to favor "moral values" legislation, such as the efforts by the federal government to stamp out drug use. However, the question must be asked, what would Jesus do? Would Jesus have his followers advocate the violent use of the political power of the kingdoms of this world in order to make society more moral? Should we really be supporting the use of militarized SWAT teams to invade peoples' houses and break up families because people are using drugs? What business is it of ours that non-Christians are using drugs other than alcohol and nicotine? Shouldn't we be trying to win them to Christ, rather than violently seize them and their property and lock them up in cages? Just asking.

But if Christians didn't support the war on drugs, and if the hippies took over and legalized drugs, this would lead to social chaos, right? Watch...

Bush: War is good for the economy

2010-06-09T18:17:00.000-07:00

Bush adhered to an old authoritarian economic fallacy. See Hazlitt chapters 2 and 3 for a brief debunking of this wicked idea.

Yes, Bilderberg does set global policy

2010-06-09T18:06:00.000-07:00

A Bilderberg attendee has admitted it. See Paul Watson's article on the subject here.

Beck and Savage jumping on the bandwagon

2010-06-09T17:33:00.000-07:00

When I first awakened to the realities of global politics about eight years ago, discussion of the new world order including the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Skull and Bones Society and the Bohemian Grove was discussed only in "conspiracy" circles on the edges of the media (the New American Magazine, Alex Jones, etc.). Even spell-check, as I write this, does not acknowledge the existence of such a word as "Bilderberg." Anyway, during the entirety of the Bush years nearly all of the air time on the Glenn Beck and Michael Savage shows was spent on neo-con propaganda--and I listened to a lot of these two in particular.

During the Obama administration, though, Glenn Beck has become--at least on the surface--a neo-con-turned-libertarian. He talks about the new world order on his show now. It's definitely good for ratings. "Conspiracy" is now en vogue. Beck is pretty much taking Alex Jones' and the John Birch Society's information and presenting it to a mainstream audience.

Likewise, Michael Savage is now finding it to be worthwhile to expose the Bilderberg Group, the secret societies, and the Rockefellers. This is an eye-opening segment from his radio show:

Gulf Oil leak raises questions

2010-06-09T17:27:00.001-07:00

Is it possible that the oil spill is a staged event? I wouldn't put it past them. Prison Planet reports:

As we highlighted yesterday, on page 37 of British Petroleum’s own investigative report into the oil spill, it is stated that the Hydraulic Control System on equipment designed to automatically seal the well in an emergency was modified without BP’s knowledge sometime before the explosion.
Highly suspicious stock and share trades by people connected to BP before the explosion indicate some extent of foreknowledge.
Goldman Sachs dumped 44% of its shares in BP Oil during the first quarter of 2010 – shares that subsequently lost 36 percent of their value, equating to $96 million. The current chairman of Goldman Sachs is Bilderberg luminary Peter Sutherland, who is also the former chairman of British Petroleum.
Furthermore, as reported by the London Telegraph on June 5th, Tony Hayward, the current BP CEO sold £1.4 million of his shares in the fuel giant weeks before the spill.
On April 12th, just over one week before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, Halliburton, the world’s second largest oilfield services corporation, surprised some by acquiring Boots & Coots, a relatively small but vastly experienced oil well control company.
Halliburton is named in the majority of some two dozen lawsuits filed since the explosion by Gulf Coast people and businesses who claim that the company is to blame for the disaster.
Halliburton was forced to admit in testimony at a congressional hearing last month that it carried out a cementing operation 20 hours before the Gulf of Mexico rig went up in flames. The lawsuits claim that four Halliburton workers stationed on the rig improperly capped the well.

More here: http://www.prisonplanet.com/evidence-points-to-bp-oil-spill-false-flag.html

Glenn Beck on Hayek (starring the great Tom Woods)

2010-06-09T16:56:00.000-07:00

Enjoy the back-to-back clips from this great Glenn Beck episode. Obligatory disclaimer about Beck: I don't trust this guy at all. But what he says in this episode is solid in my opinion.

Ron Paul predicted Obama Iraq withdraw lie

2010-06-06T13:58:00.001-07:00

Coverage of the elite once-secret Bilderberg Meeting 2010

2010-06-06T12:26:00.000-07:00

Rather than posting extensively on the subject, I'll simply link to Prison Planet's page on the subject of Bilderberg 2010 (see below). However, this article is particularly important and worth mentioning, as it highlights the failure of the elites, the increased exposure of the secret Bilderberg meetings, and most significantly, their plans for an attack on Iran.

Bilderberg 2010 - Prisonplanet.com Master Page

Obama's Global Secret Murders Expand

2010-06-06T12:14:00.000-07:00

Two of the three most hated nations in the world have both been indicted in the news as of late. As the hated government of Israel has been under criticism lately, now the U.S. regime also has been exposed for (no surprise here) running a global murder machine. Of course, the mainstream media don't talk about the innocents that are being killed, and they whitewash the American empire with an "expose" about how they're secretly killing "terrorists" in 75 countries. In the American tradition, however, an individual cannot be executed unless they are proven to be guilty.

Israel-Gaza

2010-06-06T12:04:00.000-07:00

This first clip is a good debate over the issue of Israel and Gaza. (Also listen to this great discussion on Israel and Gaza with good background.) I might add that it is tragic that what is widely known as the Christian church is largely responsible for the evils of the government of Israel.

Ron Paul reminds us that Israel FOUNDED Hamas. The U.S. and Israel have both engaged in deliberately radicalizing Muslims. The U.S. created al Qaeda and Israel created Hamas. A good, radical enemy goes a long way.

Last of all, Ron Paul reminds us of the wisdom of non-intervention and the folly of U.S. support of Israel.

A true war hero

2010-06-06T12:01:00.000-07:00

Israel and the humanitarian aid flotilla

2010-06-06T11:54:00.000-07:00

How Israeli propaganda shaped U.S. media coverage of the flotilla attack

BY GLENN GREENWALD

YouTube screen shot

It was clear from the moment news of the flotilla attack emerged that Israel was taking extreme steps to suppress all evidence about what happened other than its own official version. They detained the flotilla passengers and barred the media from speaking with them, thus, as The NYT put it, "refusing to permit journalists access to witnesses who might contradict Israel's version of events." They detained the journalists who were on the ship for days and seized their film, video and cameras. And worst of all, the IDF -- while still refusing to disclose the full, unedited, raw footage of the incident -- quickly released an extremely edited video of their commandos landing on the ship, which failed even to address, let alone refute, the claim of the passengers: that the Israelis were shooting at the ship before the commandos were on board.

This campaign of suppression and propaganda worked to shape American media coverage (as state propaganda campaigns virtually always work on the gullible, authority-revering American media). The edited IDF video was shown over and over on American television without question or challenge. Israeli officials and Israel-devoted commentators appeared all over television -- almost always unaccompanied by any Turkish, Palestinian or Muslim critics of the raid -- to spout the Israeli version without opposition. Israel-centric pundits in America claimed, based on the edited IDF video, that anyone was lying who even reported on the statements of the passengers that Israeli fired first. In sum, that the Israelis used force only after the passengers attacked the commandos became Unquestioned Truth in American discourse.

But now that the passengers and journalists have been released from Israeli detention and are speaking out, a much different story is emerging. As I noted yesterday, numerous witnesses and journalists are describing Israeli acts of aggression, including the shooting of live ammunition, before the commandos landed. The New York Timesblogger Robert Mackey today commendably compiles that evidence -- I recommend it highly -- and he writes: "now that the accounts of activists and journalists who were detained by Israel after the raid are starting to be heard, it is clear that their stories and that of the Israeli military do not match in many ways." As Juan Cole says: "Many passengers have now confirmed that they were fired on even before the commandos had boots on the deck. Presumably it is this suppressive fire that killed or wounded some passengers and which provoked an angry reaction and an attack on the commandos."

Whether the Israelis fired at the passengers before or after landing on the ship matters little to the crux of what happened here. The initial act of aggression was the Israeli seizing of a ship in international waters which was doing nothing hostile; that action was taken to enforce a horrific, inhumane blockade and, more generally, a brutal, decades-long occupation; and whatever else is true, at least nine civilians were killed by the Israeli Navy, only the latest example of Israel (and the U.S.) using massive military force against civilians. [...]

Read the rest here.

Former CIA officials admit to making fake Bin Laden video

2010-05-25T12:36:00.000-07:00

Former CIA Officials Admit To Faking Bin Laden Video
Military psy-ops took over operation after intelligence project failed to take off

Steve Watson - Prisonplanet.com - Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

Two former CIA officials have admitted to creating a fake video in which intelligence officers dressed up as Osama Bin Laden and his cronies in an effort to defame the terrorist leader throughout the middle east.

The details are outlined in a Washington Post article by investigative reporter and former Army Intelligence case officer Jeff Stein.

Stein’s sources told him that during planning for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group considered creating a fake video of Saddam Hussein engaged in sexual acts with a teenage boy, then flooding Iraq with copies of the tape.

That idea, along with faking Iraqi news bulletins, never came to fruition according to the former CIA officials, because agreement on the projects could not be reached between the Iraq Group and CIA’s Office of Technical Services.

However, the two sources reveal that the agency did previously concoct at least one fake Bin Laden video:

The agency actually did make a video purporting to show Osama bin Laden and his cronies sitting around a campfire swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys, one of the former CIA officers recalled, chuckling at the memory. The actors were drawn from “some of us darker-skinned employees,” he said.

The former officials told Stein that the project was taken over by the military after it ground to a halt:

The reality, the former officials said, was that the agency really didn’t have enough money and expertise to carry out the projects.

“The military took them over,” said one. “They had assets in psy-war down at Ft. Bragg,” at the army’s special warfare center.

This latest revelation bolsters evidence that the intelligence agencies, and perhaps more significantly, the military have been engaged in creating fake Bin Laden videos in the past.
As we have exhaustively documented, Intelcenter, the U.S. monitoring group that routinely releases Bin Laden video and audio, much of which have been proven to be either rehashed old footage or outright fakes, is an offshoot of IDEFENSE, a web security company that monitors intelligence from the middle east.

IDEFENSE is heavily populated by long serving ex military intelligence officials, such as senior military psy-op intelligence officer Jim Melnick, who served 16 years in the US army and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in psychological operations. Melnick has also worked directly for former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Intelcenter notoriously released the “laughing hijackers” tape and claimed it was an Al-Qaeda video, despite the fact that the footage was obtained by a “security agency” at a 2000 Bin Laden speech.

IntelCenter was also caught adding its logo to a tape at the same time as Al-Qaeda’s so-called media arm As-Sahab added its logo, proving the two organizations were one and the same.

Could the CIA group of “dark skinned actors” have been behind the infamous December 2001 “Fat nosed” Bin Laden video, that was magically found in a house in Jalalabad after anti-Taliban forces moved in?

The tape featured a fat Osama laughing and joking about how he’d carried out 9/11. The video was also mistranslated in order to manipulate viewer opinion and featured “Bin Laden” praising two of the hijackers, only he got their names wrong. This Osama also used the wrong hand to write with and wore gold rings, a practice totally in opposition to the Muslim faith.

Despite the fact that the man in the video looks nothing like Bin Laden, the CIA stood by it and declared it to be the official “9/11 confession video”.

The latest revelations also shed light on another past Bin Laden release – a tape in which he ludicrously declared himself in league with Saddam Hussein in the weeks before the invasion of Iraq.

The notion that the CIA project was taken over and drastically improved by the Pentagon at some point after 2003 jives with the improvement in quality of Bin Laden videos in later years. Most notably the video that was released immediately ahead of the 2004 election, and it’s digitally manipulated duplicate from 2007, in which Bin Laden appeared to have a dyed beard.

For a run down of some of the most notoriously dubious Bin Laden videos see the following article: New Bin Laden “Confession” Tape: Fake Like The Rest?

Americans not putting their trust in Prince Obama

2010-05-25T12:34:00.000-07:00

Obama Approval Falls to New Low: 42%
Rasmussen - May 25, 2010

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Tuesday shows that 24% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president. Forty-four percent (44%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -20 (see trends).

Overall, 42% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the president’s performance. That is the lowest level of approval yet measured for this president. Fifty-six percent (56%) now disapprove of his performance. [...]

Government agents hired to push propaganda online

2010-05-25T12:28:00.000-07:00

Via Prison Planet.com:

The next time you struggle to comprehend how someone could spend their time trolling the Internet in order to defend and downplay whatever government cover-up or abuse is in the news this week, consider the fact that they may be on a government payroll.

The Canadian government has been caught paying a media group to monitor online political discussion and respond to “misinformation,” in order words to spread state-sanctioned propaganda, in the latest scandal to hit the Harper administration.

“Under the pilot program the Harper government paid a media company $75,000 to monitor and respond to online postings about the east coast seal hunt,” reports News1130.

Obama said he'd be out of Iraq by now

2010-05-23T05:29:00.000-07:00

It has been 16 months. Can we now admit that we were conned into believing in this slick politician who promised change? Put not your trust in princes. The state is morally (and financially) bankrupt. Look to a better kingdom, my friends.

The "War is Making You Poor" Act

2010-05-23T05:25:00.000-07:00

When the government steals from Americans in order to kill people in other countries, it makes families poorer.

Republicans, do you really believe in small government and reducing the deficit? This is a test case to assess the sincerity of conservatives, Republicans and tea party advocates.

British matriarchal state takes the next step into your home

2010-05-19T05:13:00.000-07:00

Reports the UK Daily Mail:

Parents of children under five are to get home checks to ensure they are keeping their youngsters safe.

Inspectors will check whether families have installed smoke alarms, stair gates, locks on medicine cupboards, windows and ovens, and fitted temperature controls to stop bath water getting too hot.
Guidelines for inspections have been drawn up on the instructions of the Department of Health in a bid to prevent injuries among under-15s in the home.

Rand Paul wins KY primary and speaks out against "green" economy

2010-05-19T05:01:00.000-07:00

Rand Paul Savages Obama’s Catastrophic “Green Economy”
Victorious Senate candidate demands Obama stop attending climate summits as new leaked report details shocking economic impact of Spain’s “green economy”

Paul Joseph Watson - Prison Planet.com - Wednesday, May 19, 2010

After trouncing his neo-con opponent comprehensively in the Kentucky Senate primary, Rand Paul savaged the man-made global warming scam for what it truly represents – an attack on the middle class and the industrialized world, as he warned President Obama and his sycophants, “we’ve come to take our government back”.

“I have a message, a message from the Tea Party – a message that is loud and clear and does not mince words – we’ve come to take our government back,” stated Paul to rapturous applause, adding that he would take on the special interests in Washington who treat the federal government as their own personal ATM.

“What you have done and what we can do can transform America,” said Paul, candidly warning that America’s greatness hinges on saving the country.

Paul added that America could be saved from its debt crisis “that is devouring our country and I think could lead to chaos.”

The victorious candidate then savaged President Obama for apologizing to Robert Mugabe, Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales for the industrial revolution.

Watch the clip below.

“These petty dictators say that to stop climate change it’s about ending capitalism, they are explicit, and the President by attending Copenhagen gives credibility and credence to these folks and he should not go,” said Paul.

After Paul had started attacking Obama’s “green” agenda, CNN quickly cut away from his victory speech and began to talk over him. Perhaps that’s because Paul is perhaps the first person to address the fundamental threat that the global warming scam poses to the free world during such a major victory speech. This marks a new watershed in how much the credibility of climate change alarmism has collapsed in the last six months alone.

Paul is right in citing Mugabe, Morales and Chavez as acolytes to the climate cause, but similar sentiments have been expressed far closer to home.

The agenda to use global warming fear mongering as a pretext to lower living standards in the west has openly been declared by top globalists over and over again – people like EU Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso, who has called for a “post-industrial revolution” in which CO2 emissions are capped.

At the 2005 Bilderberg meeting sources inside the group told reporters Daniel Estulin and Jim Tucker, who have built up a credible reputation for accurately forecasting future events based on leaks from Bilderberg conferences, that the elite wanted to consolidate by bringing down the standard of living in the US and Europe, fearing that the middle class is out of control and has been granted too much credit which must be offset by a phase of consolidation.

Two years later we witnessed the beginning of the “credit crunch” which led to the massive economic turmoil of 2008 and 2009 which is now threatening to get even worse in 2010.

The move towards a “green economy” is integral to this agenda of a “post-industrial revolution” in which living standards in the west are drastically cut. Its impact is already being severely felt in Spain, where the unemployment rate is around 18 per cent as a result of 2.2 jobs being lost for every “green” job created.

A newly leaked internal document from Spain’s Zapatero administration outlines how Spain’s “green economy initiatives” have been a financial disaster. The report suggests that the real rate of job losses as a result of “green” policies is in actual fact worse than 2.2 jobs lost for every one gained.

“Today’s leaked document reveals that even the socialist Spanish government now acknowledges the ruinous effects of green economic policy,” reports Christopher Horner.

“Despite the soft-pedaling, the document reveals exactly why electricity rates “necessarily skyrocketed” in Spain, as did the public debt needed to underwrite the disaster. This internal assessment preceded the Zapatero administration’s recent acknowledgement that the “green economy” stunt must be abandoned, lest the experiment risk Spain becoming Greece.”

President Obama has made it a foundation of his economic and environmental policy that America moves towards a similar “green economy,” which would spell disaster for the fragile U.S. economy and potentially trigger a new great depression. The fact that Rand Paul has rightly highlighted this issue as a major concern, allied with the leaked Spanish report, should act as a crushing blow to efforts on behalf of internationalists to impose such tyranny on every western nation in the form of a carbon tax on the very substance humans exhale.

Hersh: U.S. troops executing Afghan prisoners

2010-05-13T09:40:00.000-07:00

US troops executing prisoners in Afghanistan, journalist says
David Edwards - Raw Story - May 12, 2010

The journalist who helped break the story that detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were being tortured by their US jailers told an audience at a journalism conference last month that American soldiers are now executing prisoners in Afghanistan.

New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh also revealed that the Bush Administration had developed advanced plans for a military strike on Iran.

At the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Geneva, Hersh criticized President Barack Obama, and alleged that US forces are engaged in “battlefield executions.”

“I’ll tell you right now, one of the great tragedies of my country is that Mr. Obama is looking the other way, because equally horrible things are happening to prisoners, to those we capture in Afghanistan,” Hersh said. “They’re being executed on the battlefield. It’s unbelievable stuff going on there that doesn’t necessarily get reported. Things don’t change."

“What they’ve done in the field now is, they tell the troops, you have to make a determination within a day or two or so whether or not the prisoners you have, the detainees, are Taliban,” Hersh added. “You must extract whatever tactical intelligence you can get, as opposed to strategic, long-range intelligence, immediately. And if you cannot conclude they’re Taliban, you must turn them free.

“What it means is, and I’ve been told this anecdotally by five or six different people, battlefield executions are taking place,” he continued. “Well, if they can’t prove they’re Taliban, bam. If we don’t do it ourselves, we turn them over to the nearby Afghan troops and by the time we walk three feet the bullets are flying. And that’s going on now.”

The video of Hersh was uploaded to Michael Moore’s YouTube account Tuesday.

Hersh has a long history as an investigative journalist and worked for many years at The New York Times. In 1969, he broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.

This video is from YouTube, broadcast May 11, 2010.

Kagan: Suspects should be subjected to battlefiled law

2010-05-12T07:34:00.000-07:00

The selection of Kagan for the Supreme Court proves yet another example of how Obama's war on terror operates by the same outrageous rules as did Bush's. In February of 2009 in an article entitled, "Obama’s War on Terror May Resemble Bush’s in Some Areas," the NYT reported,

During her confirmation hearing last week, Elena Kagan, the nominee for solicitor general, said that someone suspected of helping finance Al Qaeda should be subject to battlefield law — indefinite detention without a trial — even if he were captured in a place like the Philippines rather than in a physical battle zone.

"Suspected of helping finance Al Qaeda."

I'd love for Ms. Kagan to clarify her remarks, but for now, we can't help but assume that this could include Americans who give to a charity that turns out had connections with Al Qaeda. Such Americans would be detained indefinitely without a trial.

Kagan on freedom of speech

2010-05-12T07:26:00.000-07:00

Paul Watson reports,

In a 1993 University of Chicago Law review article, Kagan wrote, “I take it as a given that we live in a society marred by racial and gender inequality, that certain forms of speech perpetuate and promote this inequality, and that the uncoerced disappearance of such speech would be cause for great elation.”

“In a 1996 paper, “Private Speech, Public Purpose: The Role of Governmental Motive in First Amendment Doctrine,” Kagan argued it may be proper to suppress speech because it is offensive to society or to the government,” reports World Net Daily.

Kagan also argued as recently as September that corporations shouldn’t be allowed to engage in free speech, and that the government can censor things like newspaper editorials, as well as the political opinions of radio talk show hosts or television reporters.
Chief Justice John Roberts blasted Kagan’s argument at the time, reports Newsmax.

“The government urges us in this case to uphold a direct prohibition on political speech. It asks us to embrace a theory of the First Amendment that would allow censorship not only of television and radio broadcasts, but of pamphlets, posters, the Internet, and virtually any other medium that corporations and unions might find useful in expressing their views on matters of public concern,” he wrote. [...]

If Kagan is approved she is going to find an eager ally in White House information czar Cass Sunstein, who in a January 2008 white paper entitled “Conspiracy Theories,” called for the government to tax and outright censor political viewpoints it deemed
unsavory.

Obama's Supreme Court pick not a defender of free speech

2010-05-12T07:06:00.000-07:00

Comrade Kagan
Lew Rockwell.com Blog - Lew Rockwell - May 11, 2010 03:00 PM

I actually heard Elena Kagan described as a “first amendment absolutist” on state radio. Well, here is the absolutist she: “Whether a given category of speech enjoys First Amendment protection depends upon a categorical balancing of the value of the speech against its societal costs.” That is, free speech is fine, unless the regime doesn’t think so.

Military suicides reveal the reality of Satan's worldview

2010-05-09T15:49:00.000-07:00

Not Meant to Fight

Brad Cole - God's Character.com - April 18, 2010

This week's Time Magazine lead article, "Is the U.S. Army Losing Its War on Suicide?" revealed a suprisingly high incidence of suicide in the US military.

"From the invasion of Afghanistan until last summer, the U.S. military had lost 761 soldiers in combat there. But a higher number in the service - 817 - had taken their own lives over the same period. The surge in suicides, which have risen five years in a row, has become a vexing problem for which the Army's highest levels of command have yet to find a solution despite depolying hundreds of mental-health experts and investing millions of dollars. And the elephant in the room in much of the formal discussion of the problem is the burden of repeated tours of combat duty on a soldier's battered psyche."

We usually associate things that are harmful to our bodies with ingested or inhaled substances. "Don't drink too much caffeine or you might get headaches." "Don't eat too much greasy food or you might get heart disease." "Don't smoke or you might get lung cancer."

Unfortunately, harmful things "ingested" with our minds are usually considered bad primarily because God doesn't like them. "Don't lust after other women because Jesus said that's bad." "Don't gossip because the Bible says so." "Don't desire your neighbor's house because that's one of the 10 commandments." And since we don't want to offend God (or perhaps since we want to get to heaven or avoid punishment), we avoid certain unhealthy activities. Rarely do we hear people say, "Don't lust, that will warp your character." "Don't gossip, that will destroy you from the inside." "Don't desire your neighbor's house, that will change you into a greedy person."

The very high suicide rate among soldiers in Afganistan highlights the fact that a warrior's mindset to fight and kill is intrinsically harmful. We were not designed by God for a life of combat. According to a leading army psychiatrist, "The suicide rate among soldiers who have deployed to [war zones] is higher than for soldiers who have never deployed." God's universe operates on the principle of love and service to others. Anything that is opposed to this principle of other-centered love is harmful, not because God must impose a penalty but because it is intrinsically destructive to our mind and spirit.

There are multiple complex factors that surround these suicides. The article states that soldiers who have been deployed multiple times are more likely to have "fractured relationships," "mental-health problems and marital problems" and that nearly 1 in 5 soldiers develop symptoms of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). Researchers estimate that it takes three years to recover from the stress of one year of combat deployment.

What is it like to be trained for combat duty? "Shari Hall said of her husband Jeff that [his eyes revealed] "a very lost person" who "wasn't my husband anymore." "I don't know what that mission was, other than riding around and getting blown up and shot at."

According to an Air Force psychologist, "We train our warriors to use controlled violence and aggression, to suppress strong emotional reactions in the face of adversity, to tolerate physical and emotional pain and to overcome the fear of injury and death...these qualities are also associated with increased risk for suicide...Service members are, simply put, more capable of killing themselves by sheer consequence of their professional training."

In Jesus' kingdom, there is no military fighting or killing. “My Kingdom is not an earthly kingdom. If it were, my followers would fight to keep me from being handed over to the Jewish leaders. But my Kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:38). Jesus encourages us to love our enemies and to pray for them. “You have heard that it was said, 'Love your friends, hate your enemies.' But now I tell you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may become the children of your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:43-44). What about national enemies? The national enemy in Jesus' day were the Romans and it must have been quite offensive to many Jews to hear Jesus say, "If one of the occupation troops forces you to carry his pack one mile, carry it two miles" (Matthew 5:41).

This obviously opens up a number of questions about "just war theory" and pacifism, but we would encourage you to watch the video on the front page of the website for an excellent discussion. The point is that Jesus did not come merely to pay a price for our salvation. He came to show us a new way, one that is healing for our mind and spirit. Anything contrary to this is destructive.

Collapse of modern day "democratic" socialism on-going

2010-05-07T14:10:00.001-07:00

Media double standard on Tea Parties vs. Immigration Rioters

2010-05-06T11:50:00.000-07:00

Paul Watson makes a good point about the media's hatred for the Tea Parties:

Imagine the uproar if 200 Tea Party members had gone on a rampage through a downtown city, smashing windows, starting fires, and spraying graffiti everywhere, the corporate media would be all over it, and yet gangs of pro-illegal immigration demonstrators do this and much worse on a regular basis, with no national news coverage whatsoever.

“A large group of protesters demonstrating at a May Day rally for worker’s and immigrant rights downtown broke off into a riot vandalizing about a dozen businesses around 10:30 p.m. Saturday, police said,” reports The Santa Cruz Sentinel.

An Associated Press report states that eighteen businesses were damaged as pro-immigrants rights activists engaged in violent riots, spraying graffiti, smashing windows, setting fire to shop fronts, and causing damage to a cost of up to $100,000 dollars.

“The damage that was caused was without purpose,” Capt. Steve Clark said. “It was senseless violence that victimized a community who cannot afford to be victimized in this manner. This did nothing to add credit to whatever they believed their cause was.” [...]

If Tea Partiers so much as dare to carry a vaguely inflammatory sign or shout at a lawmaker, they are nationally demonized by the corporate media as dangerous racist extremists and even domestic terrorists. And yet anarchists and pro-illegal immigrant demonstrators can run riot, engage in violence and cause monumental damage to private property and it barely even makes the news.

McCain: American citizen shouldn't have his legal rights

2010-05-06T11:36:00.000-07:00

McCain: ‘Serious mistake’ if car bombing suspect was Mirandized
Michael O’Brien - The Hill - Tuesday, May 4, 2010

It would have been a serious mistake to have read the suspect in the attempted Times Square car bombing his Miranda rights, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Tuesday.

McCain, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a longtime leading Republican on national security issues, said he expected the suspect in the case could face charges that might warrant a death sentence if convicted.

“Obviously that would be a serious mistake…at least until we find out as much information we have,” McCain said during an appearance on “Imus in the Morning” when asked whether the suspect, 30-year-old Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized American citizen from Pakistan.

“Don’t give this guy his Miranda rights until we find out what it’s all about,” McCain added.

Obama jokes about use of predator drones

2010-05-06T11:07:00.000-07:00

The U.S. Presidency: One Monster Follows Another
Lew Rockwell.com Blog - David Kramer - May 4, 2010 08:23 PM

Do you remember when Dumbya made a joke about the Weapons of Mass Destruction—you know, the ones that were never in Iraq to begin with, but which he started a war over anyway that has killed thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians—at the 2004 White House Correspondents Dinner?

Now his successor to the office of Bankster Puppet-in-Chief, Obamanable, makes a joke about using predator drones—you know, like the ones he ordered to attack Pakistan which have murdered innocent, unarmed Pakistani civilians—to attack the Jonas Brothers if they “come on” to his daughters at the most recent White House Correspondents Dinner.

Republicans stole hundreds of millions of dollars from Americans to fund Planned Parenthood/abortions

2010-05-02T08:04:00.001-07:00

The Republican Party and Planned Parenthood
Laurence Vance - Lew Rockwell.com Blog - April 28, 2010 06:28 PM

I have seen it reported in several places that Planned Parenthood, one of the world’s leading abortion providers, received government grants and contracts of $350 million for fiscal year 2007-2008 and $337 million for fiscal year 2006-2007. I verified this information for myself on the Planned Parenthood website. I also discovered that Planned Parenthood’s fiscal year ends on June 30. This means that Bush the Republican was the president during this time. But after doing a little digging, I also found out that Planned Parenthood received government grants and contracts of $305 million (34%) during fiscal year 2005-2006. During this time we not only had Bush the Republican president but also a Republican majority in Congress. Yet, Planned Parenthood was still funded. And we are supposed to take Republicans seriously when they complain that Obama isn’t likely to appoint an anti-abortion judge to the Supreme Court? Why wasn’t the Republican Party that concerned about abortion when clinics affiliated with Planned Parenthood performed 264,943 abortions in 2005?

This is “The Republican Party Is Not the Lesser of Two Evils, Example No. 5,396.” For example No. 5,395, see here.

Laurence Vance comments on prayer and the Pentagon

2010-05-02T08:00:00.000-07:00

Christians Upset That They Can’t Pray at Criminal Murder Syndicate
Laurence Vance - Lew Rockwell.com Blog - April 28, 2010 08:38 PM

The one called the Pentagon.

From a Presidential Prayer Team Prayer Alert:

Associated Press reported earlier today that evangelist Franklin Graham’s invitation to speak at a Pentagon prayer service on the National Day of Prayer May 6 has been rescinded by the U.S. Army because of comments he made years ago about Islam. Graham, the son of evangelist Billy Graham, in 2001 described Islam as “evil.” More recently, he has said he finds Islam offensive and wants Muslims to know that Jesus Christ died for their sins. The Associated Press report quoted Army spokesman Col. Tom Collins as saying Graham’s remarks were “not appropriate.”

First of all, Christians (and I am one) should be praying in their homes and churches for the Pentagon to focus only on defense and cease its offensive wars instead of wanting someone to pray at the Pentagon for anything. Christians should avoid the Pentagon like they avoid a brothel, an abortion clinic, or a strip club.

Second, if Christians want Muslims to know about Jesus then they should send missionaries to the Middle East instead of soldiers.

Obama: "Government is us"

2010-05-02T07:22:00.000-07:00

Obama has responded to the libertarian claims about the nature of government:

President Barack Obama took aim Saturday at the angry rhetoric of those who denigrate government as “inherently bad” and said their off-base line of attack
ignores the fact that in a democracy, “government is us.”

Obama used his commencement speech at the University of Michigan to respond to foes who portray government as oppressive and tyrannical.

Government is inherently bad. At best it's a necessary evil. It operates only through the use of violence, forcibly taking money from the productive and calling it taxation. Forcibly taking somebody's property is inherently bad.

"Government is us." Huh? So you and I and all our friends and family are killing thousands of innocents abroad? We all are constructing an oppressive police state? We are all the IRS? Get real. Those doing these things are an elite who run the show. The elite manufacture our consent by marginalizing dissent and distracting us with endless entertainment. Even if you don't accept the fact that government is inherently bad, it is clear that THIS particular government is bad and does not represent us.

In an ideal republic, yes, "we the people" are sovereign. But in America today popular sovereignty is just a theory. The republic has fallen. Let's realize the reality and stop pretending things are ok. Put not your trust in Prince Obama. Look not to a political solution, but to a better kingdom--the kingdom of God.

Creepy surveillance state advertisement

2010-05-02T07:09:00.000-07:00

The all-seeing all-knowing institution known as the state has targeted you for theft and if you don't pay, they're coming for you.

Increased gov't theft now "on the table" despite Obama promises

2010-04-28T05:51:00.000-07:00

CIVICS NEWS Comment: The devil "comes to steal and kill and destroy." Well, so does the government. As one of Satan's favorite playgrounds, the state represents institutionalized theft and murder. Also, as Satan is the father of lies, so do presidential candidates speak lies as their native language. Obama said no new taxes (i.e. stealing), but now it's "on the table" to reduce the deficit. Here's an idea, Mr. President. Instead of breaking your word (i.e. lying) by stealing more money from people so that your military can keep killing people overseas, why don't you just end the murderous empire abroad and in doing so, 1) reduce the amount of money that your IRS agents need to steal from people to fund that military machine, 2) cease killing people, and 3) keep your campaign promises rather than lying. Maybe I shouldn't even make the recommendation. Is the government even capable of not stealing, killing, and lying? Either way, Christians and people of good conscience must realize what they're dealing with when it comes to politics. It's not a saintly institution and never will be. Put not your trust in princes.

Obama Debt Czar Says Tax Hikes “On The Table”
President’s promise that families who earned less than $250,000 a year would not be hit set to be shattered

Paul Joseph Watson - Prison Planet.com - Monday, April 26, 2010

The Democratic co-chairman of President Obama’s debt commission, Erskine Bowles, told Fox News Sunday that tax hikes for Americans are “on the table,” despite Obama’s election campaign promise that no individual earning under $200,000 dollars a year would be hit with any tax increases.

Asked if he felt bound by the President’s pledge, Bowles responded, “Everything is on the table, we’re going to look at every single way to right this fiscal ship….raising revenue, we have to have everything on the table.”

Bowles also said that a European-style VAT tax, which would increase living costs by as much as 25 per cent, was also under consideration.

“I think that there are many good arguments that you could make for a value-added tax or a consumption tax as oppose to a tax on wages but I think it’s just one of the things that ought to be on the table that we ought to discuss.”

Bowles’ suggestion that a VAT tax would supplant or be offset by a reduction in income tax is likely a ruse. People in Europe pay the highest levels of income tax in the world but they are also forced to pay VAT on most goods at a level between 15-25 per cent in addition to costly income tax rates.

VAT taxes are typically introduced at low rates in order to dampen opposition, but then gradually raised over the course of decades. For example, Denmark’s VAT tax started at 9 per cent in 1962, but today has bloated to a whopping 25 per cent.

The 18 members of the debt commission will unveil their plan by December 1.

The prospect of income tax hikes contradicts Obama’s pre-election promise that he would not raise taxes for American families earning under a quarter of a million dollars a year.

During a speech on the campaign trail, Obama guaranteed, “No family making under $250,000 dollars a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”

“You will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime,” Obama repeatedly vowed.

As we have highlighted, even aside from any income tax hikes, Americans already face a myriad of tax increases under Obamacare, a potential VAT tax, not to mention a future consumption tax based on CO2 emissions.

As the Associated Press reported On April 1, the largest ever increase in tobacco tax, and one that would disproportionately affect the poor, was passed by Obama despite his pledge to protect lower earners.

Last week, Obama himself said that a value-added tax, which would hit Americans across the income bracket but particularly the poor and struggling middle class, was “still on the table” just days after White House aides had assured otherwise.

Inspiring Repentance: 2 soldiers apologize for wikileaks incident and Iraq war

2010-04-28T05:14:00.000-07:00

AN OPEN LETTER OF RECONCILIATION & RESPONSIBILITY TO THE IRAQI PEOPLE

From Current and Former Members of the U.S. Military

Peace be with you.

To all of those who were injured or lost loved ones during the July 2007 Baghdad shootings depicted in the “Collateral Murder” Wikileaks video:

We write to you, your family, and your community with awareness that our words and actions can never restore your losses.

We are both soldiers who occupied your neighborhood for 14 months. Ethan McCord pulled your daughter and son from the van, and when doing so, saw the faces of his own children back home. Josh Stieber was in the same company but was not there that day, though he contributed to the your pain, and the pain of your community on many other occasions.

There is no bringing back all that was lost. What we seek is to learn from our mistakes and do everything we can to tell others of our experiences and how the people of the United States need to realize we have done and are doing to you and the people of your country. We humbly ask you what we can do to begin to repair the damage we caused.

We have been speaking to whoever will listen, telling them that what was shown in the Wikileaks video only begins to depict the suffering we have created. From our own experiences, and the experiences of other veterans we have talked to, we know that the acts depicted in this video are everyday occurrences of this war: this is the nature of how U.S.-led wars are carried out in this region.

We acknowledge our part in the deaths and injuries of your loved ones as we tell Americans what we were trained to do and what we carried out in the name of “god and country”. The soldier in the video said that your husband shouldn’t have brought your children to battle, but we are acknowledging our responsibility for bringing the battle to your neighborhood, and to your family. We did unto you what we would not want done to us.

More and more Americans are taking responsibility for what was done in our name. Though we have acted with cold hearts far too many times, we have not forgotten our actions towards you. Our heavy hearts still hold hope that we can restore inside our country the acknowledgment of your humanity, that we were taught to deny.

Our government may ignore you, concerned more with its public image. It has also ignored many veterans who have returned physically injured or mentally troubled by what they saw and did in your country. But the time is long overdue that we say that the value of our nation’s leaders no longer represent us. Our secretary of defense may say the U.S. won’t lose its reputation over this, but we stand and say that our reputation’s importance pales in comparison to our common humanity.

We have asked our fellow veterans and service-members, as well as civilians both in the United States and abroad, to sign in support of this letter, and to offer their names as a testimony to our common humanity, to distance ourselves from the destructive policies of our nation’s leaders, and to extend our hands to you.

With such pain, friendship might be too much to ask. Please accept our apology, our sorrow, our care, and our dedication to change from the inside out. We are doing what we can to speak out against the wars and military policies responsible for what happened to you and your loved ones. Our hearts are open to hearing how we can take any steps to support you through the pain that we have caused.

Solemnly and Sincerely,

Josh Stieber, former specialist, U.S. Army
Ethan McCord, former specialist, U.S. Army

Ron Paul opposes Iranian sanctions

2010-04-26T12:22:00.000-07:00

MSNBC airs expose of the Fed and bankster "con men"

2010-04-14T15:22:00.000-07:00

It's amazing that this was actually on TV.

Gotta love this headline

2010-04-11T07:25:00.000-07:00

From Washington's Blog:

Bernanke: We Must Raise Taxes and Cut Services
Sane People: No, We Need to Stop Endless Bail Outs, Imperial Adventures and Fraudulent Schemes

Cheney administration knew Gitmo prisoners were innocent

2010-04-11T07:23:00.001-07:00

George W. Bush ‘knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent’
Tim Reid - London Times - April 9, 2010

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.

The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.

Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”. [...]

How about a libertarian on the Supreme Court?

2010-04-11T06:56:00.000-07:00

Ron Paul vs. GOP Establishment

2010-04-11T06:53:00.000-07:00

Ron Paul chastises at GOP conference: Conservatives ‘like the empire’
Andrew McLemore - Raw Story - April 11, 2010

Texas Rep. Ron Paul proved once again Saturday that his politics continue to divide the Republican Party.

He was met with both disapproval and applause during the Southern Republican Leadership Conference for describing conservatives as hypocritical when they call for a return to Constitutional values while supporting foreign wars.

The conservatives and the liberals, they both like to spend. Conservatives spend money on different things. They like embassies, and they like occupation. They like the empire. They like to be in 135 countries and 700 bases.

Don’t you think it’s rather conservative to say, ‘Oh it’s good to follow the Constitution. Oh, except for war. Let the President go to war anytime they want.’ We can do better with peace than with war.

While most of the other speakers at the event used plenty of rhetoric for “easy applause,” as Washington Post reporter David Weigel put it, Paul stuck to the outrage over American foreign policy that has defined his platform.

Whenever the boos grew loud enough, Paul returned to his “humble” foreign policy stance.
“It’s been 60 years since we went to war in Korea,” said Paul. “Why do we have to have troops there?”

Enough of Paul’s supporters showed up for the conference that many of his fellow speakers were met with boos on issues of government spending. In a straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, Paul walked away with the most support for a 2012 presidential bid: 31 percent.

Eying another bid for president after a run in 2008, Paul is telling Republican activists that “the American people have awoken” because Washington won’t address the nation’s fiscal crisis.

“The reason why the American people have awoken … is because the country is broke and the people in Washington won’t admit it.”

Paul added, however, that President Obama is not the “socialist” he has been labeled by Tea Party activists.

Most political commentators believe Paul is vying with Mitt Romney for the top slot of the straw poll of this weekend’s conference.

In a question-and-answer after his speech, a blogger asked Paul why his supporters seemed so disinterested in the Republican Party.

“The question you should be asking,” said Paul, “is, why isn’t the Republican Party interested in them? We can get huge crowds with this message.”

Romney buys votes to beat Ron Paul only by 1

2010-04-11T06:19:00.000-07:00

"Evangelicals for Mitt" helped to hand Mitt Romney a one-vote victory over Ron Paul at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference.

The irony of this is tremendous.

First, long before "Obamacare," the liberal governor of the liberal state of Massachusetts enacted a health care system for his state which is largely mirrored by the Obama plan, and which was praised by Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy. That Massachusetts governor was none other than Mitt Romney. Once a liberal governor of the most liberal state in the country who was enacting Obamacare by another name. Now the winner of a Republican straw poll. Weird.

Second, it is strange that "evangelicals" who claim to follow Jesus' teachings would endorse a candidate who wants to continue and expand the American empire abroad, perpetuating violence, war, aggression and torture. Wouldn't a Christian naturally cast their vote for Ron Paul, the only peace candidate at the SRLC? (Or perhaps a Christian would cast no vote, but that's a whole different issue.)

All of this comes into clearer focus when we realize the fact that Romney is very wealthy and he bought tickets for people with the proviso that they would vote for him. The only way Romney could beat Paul is if he bought votes!

Napoleon, MLK Jr., and Jesus' Resurrection

2010-04-08T07:45:00.000-07:00

Remember this? "I know men and I tell you that Jesus Christ is no mere man. Between him and every other person in the world there is no possible term of comparison. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded his empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for him."

--Napoleon Bonaparte

This quotation came to mind as I read the conclusion to a Martin Luther King Jr. sermon given on an Easter Sunday, which speaks of the difference between Jesus and the kings of this world. Take a look for yourself; it's a powerful message in the purest kingdom-of-God sense of the word, "power!"

Nanny state destroys Native American cultures

2010-04-08T07:15:00.000-07:00

Support these brave soldiers who are repenting and speaking out against evil

2010-04-08T07:03:00.000-07:00

Iraq War Vet: "We Were Told to Just Shoot People, and the Officers Would Take Care of Us"
Wednesday 07 April 2010 Dahr Jamail, t r u t h o u t Report

On Monday, April 5, Wikileaks.org posted video footage from Iraq, taken from a US military Apache helicopter in July 2007 as soldiers aboard it killed 12 people and wounded two children. The dead included two employees of the Reuters news agency: photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and driver Saeed Chmagh.

The US military confirmed the authenticity of the video.

The footage clearly shows an unprovoked slaughter, and is shocking to watch whilst listening to the casual conversation of the soldiers in the background.

As disturbing as the video is, this type of behavior by US soldiers in Iraq is not uncommon.

Truthout has spoken with several soldiers who shared equally horrific stories of the slaughtering of innocent Iraqis by US occupation forces.

"I remember one woman walking by," said Jason Washburn, a corporal in the US Marines who served three tours in Iraq. He told the audience at the Winter Soldier hearings that took place March 13-16, 2008, in Silver Spring, Maryland, "She was carrying a huge bag, and she looked like she was heading toward us, so we lit her up with the Mark 19, which is an automatic grenade launcher, and when the dust settled, we realized that the bag was full of groceries. She had been trying to bring us food and we blew her to pieces."

The hearings provided a platform for veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan to share the reality of their occupation experiences with the media in the US.

Washburn testified on a panel that discussed the rules of engagement (ROE) in Iraq, and how lax they were, to the point of being virtually nonexistent.

"During the course of my three tours, the rules of engagement changed a lot," Washburn's testimony continued, "The higher the threat the more viciously we were permitted and expected to respond. Something else we were encouraged to do, almost with a wink and nudge, was to carry 'drop weapons', or by my third tour, 'drop shovels'. We would carry these weapons or shovels with us because if we accidentally shot a civilian, we could just toss the weapon on the body, and make them look like an insurgent."

Hart Viges, a member of the 82nd Airborne Division of the Army who served one year in Iraq, told of taking orders over the radio.

"One time they said to ﬁre on all taxicabs because the enemy was using them for transportation.... One of the snipers replied back, 'Excuse me? Did I hear that right? Fire on all taxicabs?' The lieutenant colonel responded, 'You heard me, trooper, ﬁre on all taxicabs.' After that, the town lit up, with all the units ﬁring on cars. This was my ﬁrst experience with war, and that kind of set the tone for the rest of the deployment."

Vincent Emanuele, a Marine rifleman who spent a year in the al-Qaim area of Iraq near the Syrian border, told of emptying magazines of bullets into the city without identifying targets, running over corpses with Humvees and stopping to take "trophy" photos of bodies.

"An act that took place quite often in Iraq was taking pot shots at cars that drove by," he said, "This was not an isolated incident, and it took place for most of our eight-month deployment."

Kelly Dougherty - then executive director of Iraq Veterans Against the War - blamed the behavior of soldiers in Iraq on policies of the US government.

"The abuses committed in the occupations, far from being the result of a 'few bad apples' misbehaving, are the result of our government's Middle East policy, which is crafted in the highest spheres of US power," she said.

Michael Leduc, a corporal in the Marines who was part of the US attack on Fallujah in November 2004, said orders he received from his battalion JAG officer before entering the city were as follows: "You see an individual with a white ﬂag and he does anything but approach you slowly and obey commands, assume it's a trick and kill him."

Brian Casler, a corporal in the Marines, spoke of witnessing the prevalent dehumanizing outlook soldiers took toward Iraqis during the invasion of Iraq.

"... on these convoys, I saw Marines defecate into MRE bags or urinate in bottles and throw them at children on the side of the road," he stated.

Scott Ewing, who served in Iraq from 2005-2006, admitted on one panel that units intentionally gave candy to Iraqi children for reasons other than "winning hearts and minds.

"There was also another motive," Ewing said. "If the kids were around our vehicles, the bad guys wouldn't attack. We used the kids as human shields."

In response to the WikiLeaks video, the Pentagon, while not officially commenting on the video, announced that two Pentagon investigations cleared the air crew of any wrongdoing.

A statement from the two probes said the air crew had acted appropriately and followed the ROE.

Adam Kokesh served in Fallujah beginning in February 2004 for roughly one year.

Speaking on a panel at the aforementioned hearings about the ROE, he held up the ROE card soldiers are issued in Iraq and said, "This card says, 'Nothing on this card prevents you from using deadly force to defend yourself'."

Kokesh pointed out that "reasonable certainty" was the condition for using deadly force under the ROE, and this led to rampant civilian deaths. He discussed taking part in the April 2004 siege of Fallujah. During that attack, doctors at Fallujah General Hospital told Truthout there were 736 deaths, over 60 percent of which were civilians.

"We changed the ROE more often than we changed our underwear," Kokesh said, "At one point, we imposed a curfew on the city, and were told to fire at anything that moved in the dark."

Kokesh also testified that during two cease-fires in the midst of the siege, the military decided to let out as many women and children from the embattled city as possible, but this did not include most men.

"For males, they had to be under 14 years of age," he said, "So I had to go over there and turn men back, who had just been separated from their women and children. We thought we were being gracious."

Steve Casey served in Iraq for over a year starting in mid-2003.

"We were scheduled to go home in April 2004, but due to rising violence we stayed in with Operation Blackjack," Casey said, "I watched soldiers firing into the radiators and windows of oncoming vehicles. Those who didn't turn around were unfortunately neutralized one way or another - well over 20 times I personally witnessed this. There was a lot of collateral damage."

Jason Hurd served in central Baghdad from November 2004 until November 2005. He told of how, after his unit took "stray rounds" from a nearby firefight, a machine gunner responded by firing over 200 rounds into a nearby building.

"We fired indiscriminately at this building," he said. "Things like that happened every day in Iraq. We reacted out of fear for our lives, and we reacted with total destruction."

Hurd said the situation deteriorated rapidly while he was in Iraq. "Over time, as the absurdity of war set in, individuals from my unit indiscriminately opened fire at vehicles driving down the wrong side of the road. People in my unit would later brag about it. I remember thinking how appalled I was that we were laughing at this, but that was the reality."

Other soldiers Truthout has interviewed have often laughed when asked about their ROE in Iraq.

Garret Reppenhagen served in Iraq from February 2004-2005 in the city of Baquba, 40 kilometers (about 25 miles) northeast of Baghdad. He said his first experience in Iraq was being on a patrol that killed two Iraqi farmers as they worked in their field at night.

"I was told they were out in the fields farming because their pumps only operated with electricity, which meant they had to go out in the dark when there was electricity," he explained, "I asked the sergeant, if he knew this, why did he fire on the men. He told me because the men were out after curfew. I was never given another ROE during my time in Iraq."

Emmanuel added: "We took fire while trying to blow up a bridge. Many of the attackers were part of the general population. This led to our squad shooting at everything and anything in order to push through the town. I remember myself emptying magazines into the town, never identifying a target."

Emmanuel spoke of abusing prisoners he knew were innocent, adding, "We took it upon ourselves to harass them, and took them to the desert to throw them out of our Humvees, while kicking and punching them when we threw them out."

Jason Wayne Lemue is a Marine who served three tours in Iraq.

"My commander told me, 'Kill those who need to be killed, and save those who need to be saved'; that was our mission on our first tour," he said of his first deployment during the invasion.

"After that the ROE changed, and carrying a shovel, or standing on a rooftop talking on a cell phone, or being out after curfew [meant those people] were to be killed. I can't tell you how many people died because of this. By my third tour, we were told to just shoot people, and the officers would take care of us."

When this Truthout reporter was in Baghdad in November 2004, my Iraqi interpreter was in the Abu Hanifa mosque that was raided by US and Iraqi soldiers during Friday prayers.
"Everyone was there for Friday prayers, when five Humvees and several trucks carrying [US soldiers and] Iraqi National Guards entered," Abu Talat told Truthout on the phone from within the mosque while the raid was in progress. "Everyone starting yelling 'Allahu Akbar' (God is the greatest) because they were frightened. Then the soldiers started shooting the people praying!"

"They have just shot and killed at least four of the people praying," he said in a panicked voice, "At least 10 other people are wounded now. We are on our bellies and in a very bad situation."

Iraqi Red Crescent later confirmed to Truthout that at least four people were killed, and nine wounded. Truthout later witnessed pieces of brain splattered on one of the walls inside the mosque while large blood stains covered carpets at several places.

This type of indiscriminate killing has been typical from the initial invasion of Iraq.

Truthout spoke with Iraq war veteran and former National Guard and Army Reserve member Jason Moon, who was there for the invasion.

"While on our initial convoy into Iraq in early June 2003, we were given a direct order that if any children or civilians got in front of the vehicles in our convoy, we were not to stop, we were not to slow down, we were to keep driving. In the event an insurgent attacked us from behind human shields, we were supposed to count. If there were thirty or less civilians we were allowed to fire into the area. If there were over thirty, we were supposed to take fire and send it up the chain of command. These were the rules of engagement. I don't know about you, but if you are getting shot at from a crowd of people, how fast are you going to count, and how accurately?"

Moon brought back a video that shows his sergeant declaring, "The difference between an insurgent and an Iraqi civilian is whether they are dead or alive."

Moon explains the thinking: "If you kill a civilian he becomes an insurgent because you retroactively make that person a threat."

According to the Pentagon probes of the killings shown in the WikiLeaks video, the air crew had "reason to believe" the people seen in the video were fighters before opening fire.

Article 48 of the Geneva Conventions speaks to the "basic rule" regarding the protection of civilians:

"In order to ensure respect for and protection of the civilian population and civilian objects, the Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives."

What is happening in Iraq seems to reflect what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton calls "atrocity-producing situations." He used this term first in his book "The Nazi Doctors." In 2004, he wrote an article for The Nation, applying his insights to the Iraq War and occupation.

"Atrocity-producing situations," Lifton wrote, occur when a power structure sets up an environment where "ordinary people, men or women no better or worse than you or I, can regularly commit atrocities.... This kind of atrocity-producing situation ... surely occurs to some degrees in all wars, including World War II, our last 'good war.' But a counterinsurgency war in a hostile setting, especially when driven by profound ideological distortions, is particularly prone to sustained atrocity - all the more so when it becomes an occupation."

Cliff Hicks served in Iraq from October 2003 to August 2004.

"There was a tall apartment complex, the only spot from where people could see over our perimeter," Hicks told Truthout, "There would be laundry hanging off the balconies, and people hanging out on the roof for fresh air. The place was full of kids and families. On rare occasions, a fighter would get atop the building and shoot at our passing vehicles. They never really hit anybody. We just knew to be careful when we were over by that part of the wall, and nobody did shit about it until one day a lieutenant colonel was driving down and they shot at his vehicle and he got scared. So he jumped through a bunch of hoops and cut through some red tape and got a C-130 to come out the next night and all but leveled the place. Earlier that evening when I was returning from a patrol the apartment had been packed full of people."

Satanic military murders unarmed reporters and attacks rescue van with children

2010-04-06T07:42:00.000-07:00

Warning: this is extremely unpleasant and disturbing footage. And I've seen even worse. I've watched soldiers bragging about Iraqi girls they've raped. I've read the Taguba report and the Seymour Hersh description of sodomizing boys. I've listened to the teeth-gritting growls of the demonic hate of soldiers as they beat young protesters who were merely throwing stones. I will never forget these scenes. It is not fun to gaze upon the evil of the satanic kingdoms of this world.

Disclaimer: I don't endorse everything Alex Jones says. I understand his righteous anger; this war and this footage should make us all angry. However, I view those who support institutionalized murder as children of God whom I love and who are victim captives to the prince of this world and the kingdoms of this world.

Why would I post this latest video, then? It is important to understand the contrast between the way of Jesus and the way of the adversary, Satan. My wish is that Christ-followers would speak out against the wars of aggression and the murderous acts of the government that claims to represent them. The U.S. Empire being perceived as "Christian" is perhaps the greatest tragedy in modern times. I hope that those who take the name "Christ" would not do so in vain, but would instead represent his principles of enemy-love and self-sacrifice, rather than violence, self-exaltation, and self-preservation. I want all Christians to watch this and to realize what the church has supported. Without the aid of the Christian churches, these wars would not have taken place. It is time to repent of our marriage with the violent satanic kingdoms of this world, and to marry ourselves once again to Christ alone.

Dwelling on "our interests" and using coercion on Good Friday

2010-04-02T12:24:00.000-07:00

On a day when Christians are remembering the greatest demonstration of love in all of history, it is tragic to see that politicians who claim to be Christians are finding in Good Friday an occasion to speak of aggression toward others.

Sarah Palin wrote this week,

“In a week when events in the Holy Land thousands of years ago are on the minds of millions, we would all do well to include Israel’s security in our prayers as we encourage our government to do all it can to ensure there is never a nuclear Iran able to threaten our interests or our allies.”

To the Christian, this is a confusing and perplexing statement.

The “events in the Holy Land thousands of years ago” refer to those of Jesus during what many people call the “passion week.” Perhaps it is helpful to review what these events were.

2000 years ago, God himself who created the world, shed his divine glory to become one of his own creatures. What an incredibly humble move that was. Rather than coerce or use violence toward his rebellious children, the Son came to earth to show us what God is like. In the life he lived, he healed, served, cared for the needy, and preached an alternative way to the religious emptiness or the political power of the authorities of his day. He showed his utter degrading humility when, the night he was betrayed, he got down on his knees and washed the feet of his students including (or perhaps especially) the one who was about to betray him. The Bible says that in this and in the events that followed, Jesus “showed the full extent of his love.” After the “last supper,” Jesus went and suffered immensely, as he was given over to Satanic oppression, culminating in his murder by Roman authorities, which was also a spiritual death at the hands of Satan. As Jesus was dying on the cross he asked one of his students to take care of his mother in his absence and he even forgave those who were crucifying him (and they hadn't even asked for forgiveness). In his life and in a death that exceeded in greatness that of the most honorable martyr, Jesus preached and lived non-violence, selfless sacrificial love, and kindness toward his enemies--even his betrayer and those who crucified him.

Those were the “events in the Holy Land thousands of years ago” to which Mrs. Palin refers. Contrast those events with her comments. Strangely, given the context of Jesus' life and death, her first thought is upon “our interests” and “Israel's security.” I find it to be ironic that the most unselfish series of events in all history would cause one to focus on “our interests.”

With regards to “Israel's security”, she then goes on to talk about how dangerous “Iran” is (I think she means their government) and how “Iran” (all image-bearers of God in Iran) needs to pay for their bad government. She doesn't mention how the Israeli government is a threat to Palestinians or other children of God in the Middle East; only Iran is a “nuclear threat,” despite the fact that Israel, not Iran has a nuclear armed aggressive government. She then praises the policy of imposing “crippling sanctions” on the Iranian people. These would cripple the economic livelihood of the people who happen to live under the rule of the Iranian government.

I find it very sad that one of the most prominent Christians in the world, Sarah Palin, would be moved by the events of 2000 years ago to focus on “our interests” and call for murderous sanctions against innocent people.

Jesus died on the cross to show his enemies what God is like. Unfortunately, Mrs. Palin, by taking the name “Christian” is painting a distorted picture of Christ. So, allow me to revise her remarks to correspond to a Christ perspective:

"In a week when events in the Holy Land thousands of years ago are on the minds of millions, we would all do well to model our own lives, words, and political advocacy (or lack thereof) after that of the Jesus whom we are celebrating."

What ought we to dwell on during this season? As we consider how humble our God is, as we behold the character of a loving God in the face of Jesus, and as we embrace a God who is forgiveness personified, may we be changed into the same kind of person as our God is.

The religious fanaticism of a few rural crazies versus that of the Empire

2010-03-31T06:56:00.001-07:00

The Left and the Politics of Rapture
Lew Rockwell.com Blog - Anthony Gregory - March 30, 2010 02:27 PM

Rachel Maddow had a whole segment last night on the religious views of this “Christian militia,” and the startling affinity that anti-government rightwing militias have had toward the Biblical end times. Her guest said that the last time he’d really seen this was the 1990s.

I suppose the fear is that armed Americans with an active interest in bringing on the rapture through violence will commit domestic acts of terrorism. But wait a second. What about U.S. foreign policy? As Maddow’s guest notes, millions of Americans subscribe to somewhat similar views on eschatology. But whereas a small sample of them, allegedly, are inclined toward violence directed against the U.S. government that they hate, many more are inclined toward the U.S. government committing its own violence, on a massive scale, in the Middle East — also with the goal of bringing on the rapture. The main difference is the latter group is much larger, more influential in mainstream politics, and has the satisfaction of believing their goal is being implemented, right now, thanks to the wars started by Bush, whom they loved, and continued now by Obama.

Hundreds of thousands of innocents have been killed in these wars, and millions of Americans defend them for religious reasons. But strangely, this is not considered worthy of discussion at MSNBC, at least not these days when this crazed foreign policy is being carried out by a left-liberal, for secular reasons, rather than a Republican with ties to the Christian right like Bush.
Many millions of Americans have odd views about their role in bringing on the rapture. But the left would rather focus on a handful who allegedly, one day, might have committed violence against the government, and so were preemptively arrested — ignoring the millions who got to vote for rapture in 2004 and whose violent foreign policy ambitions are right now killing thousands.

The left often seems to fear the out-of-power right more than the right in power. Is this because they’re in so much love with the state that even when those they most fear are in command they can’t help but be in awe?

Comments on Militias

2010-03-31T06:00:00.000-07:00

In the wake of the arrest of the members of Hutaree, a Michigan-based group of deluded, sad individuals, it's appropriate for me to give my perspective.

I should mention at the outset that, as a Christ-follower, I am against violence, especially the organized, mechanized, institutionalized violence of a powerful government. I am also against regular folks adopting government methods of force in order to oppose government. Instead, I believe in meeting force with love. So I am not interested in supporting or taking part in a militia. I find it absurd that Hutaree claimed to be a "Christian militia," which is an oxymoron.

The American way, though, is to have all able-bodied adult males own guns and comprise a militia. While I personally choose to be a conscientious objector, I can also see that the American concept of the militia is the best form of defense. Militias are far superior to standing armies and empires. The concept of a militia is properly defensive, whereas the American empire is offensive (even though it's falsely called the "Department of Defense"). I would be pleased to see the empire end and to see Americans own guns as a measure of national self defense, since this is a far less evil form of force, begin defensive rather than offensive. Again, the traditional American way of the militia is not the Kingdom of God, so I don't consider myself a part of it, but it is far better than the status quo of imperial domination.

Now, on the matter of the Hutaree group, some clarification is necessary. First of all, they were a group of ignorant, perhaps mentally ill individuals. This was not a true militia. Other legitimate militia groups had always kept their distance from these, well, weirdos. It would be painting with an unfairly broad brush to wrap other militia groups in with Hutaree. However, the media has really enjoyed doing this to demonize patriotic Americans who believe in owning self-defense weapons.

A second point about Hutaree is the recent revelation that an FBI informant was present in their midst. Based on historical examples, it is likely that the FBI provocateured or radicalized and encouraged violent plans in the group. This is also known as a sting operation. Perhaps the FBI did this for the purpose of demonizing the militias and the patriot movement.

Why would they do such a thing? Consider the fact that the growing libertarian movement in America is the most intellectually consistent, persuasive and attractive alternative to Obamaism and the establishment status quo of the Republicrat one-party system. Also, recall the DHS report and the MIAC report, which labeled libertarians, Ron Paul supporters, and others as potential violent extremists. (This is crazy, because libertarianism is based upon the non-aggression axiom.) Is it a coincidence that there has been a growing number of incidents that paint libertarians and patriots as violent right-wing extremists, just in time to demonize the government's most effective political opponents? Consider the fact that the FBI and CIA infiltrated the civil rights movement to demonize it. Consider the fact that the government infiltrates protests to paint peaceful protesters as violent. I smell a rat here. And I think there's more to come. It is likely that there will be more manufactured violent incidents to be blamed on the government's opponents.

Environmentalist: "Put Democracy on Hold"

2010-03-31T05:43:00.000-07:00

If you haven't read the articles in this archive, you are missing a big piece of what drives the radical wing of the environmental movement. In case the articles in that archive aren't indicative enough, a prominent environmentalist has now called for a reduction in freedom and democracy to bring in world authoritarianism. Via Prison Planet.com:

A renowned environmentalist, known for his advocacy of population reduction as a means of offsetting climate change, has called for “a more authoritative world” where freedom comes second to tackling what he sees as the devastating effects of global warming.

Futurist James Lovelock, tells the London Guardian that he believes “It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while,” in order to save humanity.

“We need a more authoritative world.” Lovelock states.

“We’ve become a sort of cheeky, egalitarian world where everyone can have their say. It’s all very well, but there are certain circumstances – a war is a typical example – where you can’t do that.” the 90 year old proponent of the Gaia
hypothesis adds.

“You’ve got to have a few people with authority who you trust who are running it. And they should be very accountable too, of course.”

“But it can’t happen in a modern democracy. This is one of the problems. What’s the alternative to democracy? There isn’t one. But even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.” Lovelock concludes.

Ron Paul on the health care bill

2010-03-29T07:29:00.001-07:00

Health Care and Special Interests

2010-03-29T07:22:00.000-07:00

Obama gives sugar plums to the special interests
Timothy P. Carney - Washington Examiner - Wednesday, March 24, 2010

“Tonight,” President Obama intoned near midnight Sunday, after the House had passed two health care bills, “we pushed back on the undue influence of special interests. … We proved that this government — a government of the people and by the people — still works for the people.”

But even before the president spoke, the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America — whose $26.1 million lobbying effort in 2009 was the most expensive by any industry lobby in history — hailed the health package as “important and historic.”

The second-biggest industry lobby in America, the American Medical Association, also cheered, as did the American Hospital Association, the No. 5 industry lobby. Throw in the goliath senior lobby AARP and Beltway powerhouse General Electric, and you realize Obama’s underdog tale is all bark and no bite.

The health care bill Obama signed into law Tuesday is a triumph for the special interests. It will benefit the biggest businesses, and by injecting more government into the economy, it will permanently stimulate K Street. [...]

Health Care reform aims to "control the people"

2010-03-29T07:19:00.000-07:00

“It takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps, to put the legislation together to control the people.”

Under God or Under Delusion?

2010-03-28T10:57:00.000-07:00

Recently the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied the claim that the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and the words "In God We Trust" on the U.S. currency violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Most Christians are breathing a sigh of relief following the Appellate Court decision. However, a closer look at the Court's reasoning is necessary.

My good friend, Michael Peabody, at Religious Liberty.TV, points out the fact that the court upheld the phrases on the grounds that the words "under God" and "In God We Trust" have no religious meaning, and that the words instead possess merely a historic or symbolic meaning. Given this fact, why are Christians excited that the phrases remain, if they remain only as a hollow shell with no religious meaning at all? Peabody asks the question,

So, correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t keeping God’s name in the Pledge and on money under the condition that it is permissible only as long as it is meaningless implicate the 3rd Commandment which specifically states, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord your God in vain...” (Exodus 20:7)?

He's right. Making void references to God as a mere historic concept should not exactly get Christians excited. It is simple vain repetition and offensive to God. To the extent, then, that Christians applaud the decision by the 9th Circuit Court to uphold the phrases, Christians are inadvertently applauding the violation of the Third Commandment. Good point, Michael.

But there are even worse implications for Christians than that.

First of all, Christians should not be excited about a pledge to a human kingdom or a human government at all. Our message should not be "keep 'under God' in the Pledge," but rather, our message should be, "we have something a whole lot more lovely to which we pledge our allegiance." I have personally decided not only to cease saying the Pledge of Allegiance in Christian school chapels, but also to cease saying it altogether. My allegiance is not to a kingdom of this world. As C.S. Lewis stated, "He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself..."

Secondly, sheer historical ignorance is wrapped tightly around the subject of the Pledge of Allegiance. Most Christians do not know that the Pledge was written by an atheistic socialist, and it was penned after the Civil War as a statement against the Jeffersonian, constitutional principle of state sovereignty ("One Nation, indivisible"). And it was only in the 1950s that the phrase "under God" was added to the Pledge. Given the historical context, saying the Pledge, with or without "under God" in it, is a slap in the face against the Jeffersonian and truly American principles of 1798.

Thirdly, Christians who advocate keeping references to "God" in the public sphere should ask themselves what kind of God is being praised in such a setting. When "God" is referred to by the government is it the God of the founding fathers? Because that was certainly not the Triune God of the Bible whom Christians worship.

Is it the God of war who was invoked during the Civil War when "in God we Trust" was first placed on American coins as Christian Soldiers were "administering God's vengeance" on innocent Southern civilians?

Or is it the God of empire that was again invoked in the 1950s when "under God" was placed in the Pledge to baptise the new American Imperium?

But for the sake of argument, let's re-write all of the above history. Let's say the founders were all evangelical Christians. Let's say that it was a Christian pastor during the early republic who wrote the Pledge. Let's say the Pledge included "under God" in it from the start. And let's say the coins had "in God we trust" from day one of the American republic. The question still remains for Christians: would Jesus have us advance worship of Him through the public sector?

I suggest strongly that He would not. His kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36). His kingdom has different principles--whereas the rulers of this world use coercion to impose their way, we are to use love and servitude to persuade (Matt. 20:25-28). Satan's way is the way of coercion and forced worship (Rev. 13). Jesus' way is the way of invitation, non-violence and servant-like love of our enemies. When we try to force everybody in the country to honor God by uttering the words "under God," we're sounding more like the roar of the Beast than the voice of the Lamb who was slain.

Andrew Napolitano on the constitutionality of the health care bill

2010-03-28T10:45:00.000-07:00

Obama signs bill before promised 5 days to review it

2010-03-23T12:35:00.000-07:00

Remember this promise? (See video below.) Is anybody surprised that it has been broken? Does anybody still trust these people? Today, Obama signed the health care bill without waiting the 5 days he promised on the campaign trail.

If you're disillusioned with politicians, if you're tired of politicians lying, stealing and murdering, then you're starting to get it. Satan comes to steal, to kill and to destroy. He is the father of lies. The kingdoms of this world are his. But the kingdom of God is about life, truth and peace. I have found that putting my trust in the princes of this world leads to disappointment but putting my trust in the Prince of Peace leads to, well, true peace.

For those who don't like the totalitarian state...

2010-03-23T06:29:00.000-07:00

Obamacare To Cost American Families $15,200 A Year

2010-03-23T06:27:00.000-07:00

Obamacare To Cost American Families $15,200 A Year
Terence P. Jeffrey - CNSNews.com - March 22, 2010

The U.S. House of Representatives voted 219-212 on Sunday night to socialize health care in the United States, making the government the paymaster of, and giving it sweeping regulatory authority over, the U.S. health care industry which represents one-sixth of the U.S. economy. The legislation also enacts a dramatic and unprecedented diminution in the individual liberty of citizens. It does so by mandating that all Americans buy a government-approved health care plan while redistributing wealth on a massive scale by promising annual federal insurance subsidies to all Americans who earn less than 400 percent of the poverty level, which is currently $88,200 for a family of four.

[...]

Five self-professedly “pro-life” Democratic congressmen joined Stupak at a Sunday press conference to say that they would vote for the health care plan after President Obama promised he would sign this Executive Order dealing with the accounting mechanisms that will be used by abortion-providing, federally subsidized health insurance plans. These congressmen were Rep. Marcy Kaptur (Ohio), Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper (Pa.), Rep. Steve Driehaus (Ohio), Rep. Alan Mollohan (W.V.), Rep. Nick Rahal (W.V.)

According to the CBO, by 2016, the cheapest family health care plan that Americans will be required to buy under the law will cost $12,000 per year. The average family plan will cost $15,200. A family of four making $88,201 per year—or more than 400 percent of the poverty level—will not receive any federal subsidy to purchase such a plan. They will pay taxes, however, to subsidize the health care purchases of people earning less than 400 percent of poverty.

According to the Treasury Department the Medicare system faced about $37 trillion in unfunded liabilities before Sunday’s bill was passed.

Full article here