What Would Change Under an Obama Supreme Court?

Jim Brown

OneNewsNow

A group that promotes constitutionalist judicial nominees warns that the top priority of a Barack Obama Supreme Court would be to require taxpayers to fund unlimited abortion rights.

 

Curt Levey, executive director of the Committee for Justice, says given Obama's opposition to the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, the nation's highest court under an Obama administration would likely reverse the federal ban on partial-birth abortion. According to Levey, two of the top ten priorities of an Obama Supreme Court would be to find that there is a constitutional right to taxpayer-funded abortions, and to order all 50 states to "bless" homosexual "marriage."
 
"Ten Commandments would be removed all over the place. 'Under God' would be removed from the Pledge of Allegiance. The death penalty would be banned," says Levey. "There'd probably be constitutional rights to all sorts of new things like human cloning and physician-assisted suicide. Racial preferences would proliferate."

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"I Never Knew You"

What you see here will shock you, and that's an amazing, tragic fact alone if you profess to be a Christian. Because not long ago, this message, though it may have shaken a non-Christian, it would not have been shocking to the typical Christian or his church. Here is a message that every Christian and church leader must affirm and proclaim if there is to be any hope that the church of Jesus Christ will ever impact this dark world again. It will take you just under an hour to view, so find an hour to dedicate to it. It will be the best hour you will spend this week. The speaker is teacher/evangelist/missionary Paul Washer (heartcrymissionary.com).

Children and the "Messiah"

Much (fun) has been made about Barack Obama's self-proclamation that he is The One "we" have been waiting for and his followers' clear messianic devotion to him. Incredibly, this is no laughing matter, but a deadly serious religion for many of his devotees. One of the most sickening examples comes from Venice (California, where else?).

View this video and shudder for the coming generation:

Compare:

This distills it all nicely:

Now, if you're not too fainthearted, click over to our friends at rogue wavelength for this one. As Splash puts it, "This isn't funny anymore."

Sarah Palin Biography Video

Meet Sarah Palin, the new leader of American Conservatism:

Elections, Like Ideas, Have Consequences

By Thomas Sowell

Voting is ... a duty to give serious thought to the alternatives on the table and what those alternatives mean for the future of the nation.

A number of friends of mine have commented on an odd phenomenon that they have observed-- conservative Republicans they know who are saying that they are going to vote for Barack Obama. It seemed at first to be an isolated fluke, perhaps signifying only that my friends know some strange conservatives. But apparently columnist Robert Novak has encountered the same phenomenon and has coined the term "Obamacons" to describe the conservatives for Senator Obama.

Now the San Francisco Chronicle has run a feature article, titled "Some Influential Conservatives Spurn GOP and Endorse Obama." In it they quote various conservatives on why they are ready to take a chance on Barack Obama, rather than on John McCain.

What is going on?

Partly what is going on is that, in recent years, the Congressional Republicans in general-- and Senator John McCain in particular-- have so alienated so many conservatives that some of these conservatives are like a drowning man grasping at a straw.

The straw in this case is Obama's recent "refining" of his position on a number of issues, as he edges toward the center, in order to try to pick up more votes in November's general election.

Understandable as the reactions of some conservatives may be, a straw is a very unreliable flotation device.

If all that was involved was Democrats versus Republicans, the Republicans would deserve the condemnation they are getting, after their years of wild spending and their multiple betrayals of the principles and the people who got them elected. Amnesty for illegal aliens was perhaps the worst betrayal.

But, while the media may treat the elections as being about Democrats and Republicans-- the "horse race" approach-- elections were not set up by the Constitution of the United States in order to enable party politicians to get jobs.

Nor were elections set up in order to enable voters to vent their emotions or indulge their fantasies.

Voting is a right but it is also a duty-- a duty not just to show up on election day, but a duty to give serious thought to the alternatives on the table and what those alternatives mean for the future of the nation.

What is becoming ever more painfully apparent is that too many people this year-- whether conservative, liberals or whatever-- are all too willing to judge Barack Obama on the basis of his election-year rhetoric, rather than on the record of what he has advocated and done during the past two decades.

Many are for him for no more serious reasons than his mouth and his complexion. The man has become a Rorschach test for the feelings and hopes, not only of those on the left, but also for some on the right as well.
Here is a man who has consistently aided and abetted people who have openly expressed their contempt for this country, both in words and in such deeds as planting bombs to advance their left-wing agenda.

Despite the spin that judging Obama by what was said or done by such people would be "guilt by association," he has not just associated with such people. He has in some cases donated some serious money of his own and even more of the taxpayers' money, as both a state senator in Illinois and a member of the Senate of the United States.

Barack Obama is on record as favoring the kinds of justices who make policy, not just carry out laws. No matter how he may "refine" his position on this issue, he voted against the confirmation of Chief Justice John Roberts, who was easily confirmed by more than three-quarters of the Senators.

Like people on the far left for literally centuries, Barack Obama plays down the dangers to the nation, and calls talk about such dangers "the politics of fear."

Back in the 18th century, Helvetius said, "When I speak I put on a mask. When I act, I am forced to take it off." Too many voters still have not learned that lesson. They need to look at the track record of Obama's actions.

Back in the days of "The Lone Ranger" program, someone would ask, "Who is that masked man?" People need to start asking that question about Barack Obama.
---
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is http://www.tsowell.com/.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC. Reproduced from GOPUSA.

Know Your Enemy

The new Dutch video, Fitna, by Geerts Wilders, released last week caused international controversy for its shocking exposition of Radical Islam and the Quran. We offer it here in the interest of reminding our readers of the vital importance of remembering the character of our enemy and the nature of our present world warfare. - GJM

Dying Without An Answer to Life's Most Essential Question

Here is a devastating portrayal of the emptiness and cruelty of the post-modern world view. This is a scene in an episode titled "Atonement" from the 14th season of the NBC television hospital drama E.R. -- a man looking for answers does not find what he needs in a post-modern view of religion where there is no absolute truth or objective solutions to our ultimate perplexities. This desperate man intuitively knows that there is an objective truth from a real God who both judges the wicked and offers the hope of release through forgiveness. All he needs is someone to tell him how and where to find that God (Acts of the Apostles 8:31-35). Relativism and the delusions of self-discovery and inner light cannot satisfy.

Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD;
O Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy.
If you, O LORD, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand?
But with you there is forgiveness; therefore you are feared.
I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope.
My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning.
O Israel, put your hope in the LORD, for with the LORD is unfailing love and with him is full redemption.
He himself will redeem Israel from all their sins. (Psalm 130, NIV)

Here's another take on this episode with additional Gospel and Hollywood insights: http://teampyro.blogspot.com/2008/02/ers-atonement-and-absent-gospel.html

Nowhere Man: The Audacity of Barack Obama's World View

By Garry J. Moes

One of the frightening signs of the great and terrible condition of our time is the enduring popularity of John Lennon's song "Imagine." One of the most diabolical artistic expressions of all time, it is yet regarded far and wide as among the greatest of all time. Rolling Stone, in 2004, named it the third greatest song ever. A year earlier, former President Bill Clinton joined 80 children to sing it to Shimon Peres on his 80th birthday. Former President Jimmy Carter once said, "In many countries around the world — my wife and I have visited about 125 countries — you hear John Lennon's song 'Imagine' used almost equally with national anthems."

The song, originally produced by recently accused murderer Phil Spector, was one of the most performed songs of the 20th century. It has been used in countless films and television programs. It was played as a wake-up song on the Space Shuttle Columbia during its ill-fated mission. It has been played just before midnight on New Year's Eve in Times Square in 2006, 2007 and 2008. Hardly a year has gone by without it being featured by one or more contestants in the fabulously popular TV singing contest American Idol — the most recent being this year's spectacularly talented 17-year-old contestant David Archuleta. At least, the young man had the good sense to skip the first and second verses, which call on the world to "imagine" no heaven, hell or religion and everyone "living for today," a world with "no countries," where no one has anything "to kill or die for" and everyone is "living life in peace."

Explaining to suspicious Idol judge Randy Jackson that he skipped those verses because he lacked time for a full-on performance and that the last verse had such a wonderful message, the smiling, breathless young Archuleta had, however, just reminded us musically to . . .

Imagine no possessions;
I wonder if you can;
No need for greed or hunger,
A brotherhood of man.
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world.

You may say that I'm a dreamer,
But I'm not the only one.
I hope someday you'll join us,
And the world will live as one.

There can be no dispute that the entire song, even that last verse, is pure utopianism. In fact, the absence of possessions, greed and hunger was one of the hallmarks of Utopia, Sir Thomas More's fictional 16th-century island nation and prototype of communism. It was a land in which, among other things, all production was readily given over to a common store, and everyone could take freely from it — in a "from each according to his ability to each according to his need" sort of way. Utopians disliked wars and fought them, not by themselves but through mercenaries, only when forced to do so in self-defense. Money, even gold, was evil and useless to Utopians, who believed that as long as money and private property were standards of living, there could be no justice or happiness.

Lennon plainly stated, as noted in a book by Geoffrey Guliano (Lennon in America), that his song was "anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic."

Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono, on April Fools Day 1973, created their own conceptual country and called it Nutopia, a nation (?) with "no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people. Nutopia has no laws other than cosmic." Its national flag is all white — never mind that the white flag is the flag of surrender. Lennon and Ono defended that association, saying that only through surrender and compromise can peace be achieved.

Yes, John Lennon, you were a dopey dreamer. The greater tragedy, though — the tragedy that now threatens our body politic and very existence — is that you were not the only one. Indeed, our nation is being increasingly populated by succeeding generations of dreamers like yourself who continue to sing and love your dangerously stupid song and really believe it to be reasonable. I fear that this growing naïveté may be reaching critical mass in much of the West and in these United States.

All this is written, not primarily to critique a song or review an American Idol performance, but to note with alarm that the "philosophy" of Lennon's song is deeply ingrained in a new political wave sweeping the country this election year. It is the undercurrent of Barack Obama's "audacity of hope" and the surging tide of swooning support he is receiving across the land, particularly among the young but swelling well beyond that demographic. It is particularly audacious because it demagogues a "hope" without a foundation that can truly deliver on its vague but powerfully emotive promises.

Hope without a reasonable basis for its realization is, of course, not true hope. It is wishful thinking. It is sentimentality and romantic longing, nothing more. It is fancy at best and delusion at worst. It is utopianism, pure and simple.

The New Testament of the Christian Bible tells us what true hope is and how hopes may become reality. A hope that is worth holding is one that has a foundation in faith — faith placed objectively in a Source that can deliver with certainty the thing that is hoped for. Faith gives substance to that which is hoped for and evident certainty to things unseen, says the writer of an epistle addressed to first-century Hebrews. The faith spoken of here is a sure reliance on the infinite abilities of a Creator God with a proven record of providence — providence of all things needed for ultimate happiness and prosperity.

But what does Obama's religion of hope promise us, and on what basis does it pledge to deliver on our hopes? Well, this prophet and priest of the new (no, make that, the old recycled) religion of political hope has not yet spelled it out. Instead of a biblical kind of objective hope, he offers us the circular reasoning of faith in hope itself. At least, that's what his fawning audiences seem to be hearing.

If you carefully dissect his more substantive speeches and position papers, though, you will discover that he does offer something that is objective, if not very hopeful, because underlying his soaring rhetoric is an old suggestion, repeatedly proven false in the real historical world, that our unformed hopes can be realized by faith in an all-provident civil government and/or global community. Obama's entire (though brief) political life and civic record reveal that this is where his hope and promises lie; yet he dares not speak it plainly just now, since there is so much suspicion still rife in the land that government will continue to fail us. So rather than saying outright, "Hope in government," he calls us to put our faith in change — change that only he and his movement can bring about. As his campaign motto has it: "Change you can believe in."

"The 'hope' being sold by Mr. Obama and his true believers is misplaced," says columnist Cal Thomas. "Mr. Obama cannot deliver; he cannot save; he cannot improve individual circumstances by redistributing wealth and talking to America's dictatorial enemies. He is selling snake oil."

The name Utopia was coined by Thomas More from a combination of Greek words which together mean "no-place land." In his campaign's call to utopian hope, Obama is thus perhaps better found in another John Lennon song:

He's a real nowhere man,
Sitting in his nowhere land,
Making all his nowhere plans
For nobody.

Doesn't have a point of view,
Knows not where he's going to,
Isn't he a bit like you and me?
Nowhere man, please listen,
You don't know what you're missing,
Nowhere man, the world is at your command.

He's as blind as he can be,
Just sees what he wants to see,
Nowhere man can you see me at all?
Doesn't have a point of view,
Knows not where he's going to,
Isn't he a bit like you and me?

Nowhere man, don't worry,
Take your time, don't hurry,
Leave it all till somebody else
Lend you a hand.

He's a real nowhere man,
Sitting in his nowhere land,
Making all his nowhere plans
For nobody.

Barack Obama is an authentic nowhere man — a citizen of an ancient Utopia, yet with a rhetorical tone of postmodernism (see one analysis below). He has identified the spirit of the age and has become its voice.
"(T)here is a moment in the life of every generation, if it is to make its mark on history, when its spirit has to come through, when it must choose the future over the past, when it must make its own change from the bottom up," he recently told an adoring audience in Virginia.

The spirit of the age channeled by Obama is a sentimental version of utopian socialism. Yet his followers, more religious devotees than electoral supporters, are not so concerned with the content of his world view as with the vibrancy of his essence.

We haven't seen its equal since John and Jackie Kennedy's Camelot, but well grounded citizens must remember that Camelot is almost as mythical as Utopia. We can only hope (pardon the expression) that by November 2008 enough voters will be sufficiently mature to look beyond childish fairy tales and the imaginings of John Lennon dreamers and elect a president who understands the real world with all its practical challenges and jagged terrors.

It is the existence of these challenges and terrors that makes the prospect of an imagination-driven postmodern Obama presidency so frightening.

This issue becomes clear when considering the political implications of this world view. Dr. Mary Klages, associate professor of English at University of Colorado, Boulder, says, in Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum Press, January 2007):

"There are lots of questions to be asked about postmodernism, and one of the most important is about the politics involved — or, more simply, is this movement toward fragmentation, provisionality, performance, and instability something good or something bad?"

Dr. Klages says that one of the consequences of postmodernism seems to be the rise of Muslim fundamentalism, "as a form of resistance to [postmodernism's] questioning of the 'grand narratives' of religious truth."

"This association between the rejection of postmodernism and ... fundamentalism may explain in part why the postmodern avowal of fragmentation and multiplicity tends to attract liberals and radicals. This is why, in part, feminist theorists have found postmodernism so attractive...," she says.

"On another level, however, postmodernism seems to offer some alternatives to joining the global culture of consumption, where commodities and forms of knowledge are offered by forces far beyond any individual's control. These alternatives focus on thinking of any and all action (or social struggle) as necessarily local, limited, and partial — but nonetheless effective. By discarding 'grand narratives' (like the liberation of the entire working class) and focusing on specific local goals (such as improved day care centers for working mothers in your own community), postmodernist politics offers a way to theorize local situations as fluid and unpredictable, though influenced by global trends. Hence the motto for postmodern politics might well be 'think globally, act locally' — and don't worry about any grand scheme or master plan."

Here is why a nation with Obama as president will be in such mortal danger. It is because we currently face determined enemies which have a well-honed grand scheme / master plan and are highly motivated to carry it out. Dreamers imagining us "living for today" in a "brotherhood of man" are no match for enemies such as these, who have no interest whatsoever in brotherhood with those who imagine no heaven, no hell and no religion. (They decapitate and vaporize those who imagine such things, even if only in cartoons.) Lennon- and Obama-inspired dreamers are "blind as they can be" nowhere men, seeing only what they want to see.

* * * * *

Audaciously Hopeful Postscript: Imagine there's no John Lennon; it's easy if you try. He's in hell below us. What a sorry guy!"

Defying Self-interest: GOP Politics in 2008

By Garry J. Moes

There are two perplexing examples in modern life of people acting against what Lord Woodhouselee in 1836 called democracy’s "predominant principle of self-interest." One is why battered women tend to stay with the men that batter them. The other is the voting habits of Republicans.

With the tide of Super Tuesday now receding into the sea, the footprints of anything conservative on American political shores seem all but effaced. The Republican Party can no longer credibly be called a conservative party if its members continue to be so blind to conservative principles or to the blessings which these principles have provided to the nation’s best interests. In the words of the new Pepsi Max advertising slogan: "Wake Up, People!"

Will somebody please tell me what is the attraction of this crabby old curmudgeon John McCain. Clearly, there is no attraction other than that the GOP (Good Old Pals) Establishment continues to do what it always does — reward the next stalwart in line, oblivious to the nation’s needs and the current political climate and careless of the consequences for both the party and the nation. Welcome back, Bob Dole! We sure enjoyed your delightful campaign back in the day when the country was whooping it up with the Good Time Charlie from Arkansas, hoping to go on sinning with impunity like he was. That sure was great how you zinged the Clintons with your wit and war record. And we were sure that, with your Viagra and all, you would put Bill’s stuff back in its place. Maybe your reincarnation McCain can put his wife in her place, which won’t be in the kitchen baking cookies. But then, maybe we shouldn’t expect as much from McCain as we did from you, Bob. As Ann Coulter puts it, "John McCain is Bob Dole minus the charm, conservatism and youth."

If you watch campaign stuff on the TV, you have probably noticed that in just about every appearance of John McCain the Maverick on a stage somewhere, he’s surrounded by some or all of the really hip guys in politics these days — forward-looking, cutting-edge visionaries like John Warner, Lindsey Graham, Jack Kemp, Joe Lieberman, Sam Brownback, Bob Dole, Susan Collins, Olympia Snow, Trent Lott, Gordon Smith, Chuck Hagel and . . . well, just go down the Senate cloakroom list and the roster of the Gang of 14 and the Who’s Who of Washed-up Washington pols and you’ll see what I mean. And look at the conservative stalwarts to whom he has so successfully reached out to accomplish great bipartisan boons for the nation, guys like Russ Feingold and Teddy Kennedy. As one blogger so aptly put it, "It never ceases to amaze me how Republicans can keep recycling the same old warhorses, no matter what kind of . . . universal disapprobation they receive from the outside world." (To be sure, there’s that other Kennedy, Maria Shriver, who doesn’t like McCain so much, having now endorsed Barack Obama. But then there’s her husband, Arnold, the Terminator of all things conservative on the Left Coast, who thinks McCain’s the Man.) As one commentator on The Hotline put it: "McCain thinks he was doomed by a powerful, insular cabal of Republican insiders [in 2000], so he's building a powerful, insular cabal of his own. . . . McCain is running a 2000 strategy in a 2008 world. Once again, he'll likely discover his misfire two years too late."

The Hotline blogger went on to ask, "What happens when the establishment leads in a direction the grassroots won't follow? You have full scale revolts over issues like immigration...." We can only hope! I’m more worried right now about what happens when the grass-lacking-roots just happily follows along with the Big Tent Establishment down the broad primrose path that leadeth to destruction — the destruction of the golden conservative truth and disintegration of the national foundations that will surely follow.

Okay, conservative Republican voters, which of these McCain positions has you so enamored with him:

• Supports expanded prescription drug coverage under Medicare.
  
• Supports stem cell research on embryonic stem cells.
  
• Would relax restrictions barring legal immigrants from using social programs (e.g. public housing, food stamps).
  
• The United States should maintain its financial support of the United Nations and commit troops to United Nations peacekeeping missions.
  
• Does not agree that a nation's human rights record should affect its normal trade relations (most favored nation) status with the United States. Trade agreements should not include provisions to protect workers' rights.
  
• The United States should not grant law enforcement agencies greater discretion to read mail and e-mail, tap phones, and conduct random searches to prevent future terrorist attacks.
  
• The Guantanamo Bay detention camp for terrorists should be closed, and virtually no physical coercion should ever be used to extract information from our bloodthirsty enemies.
  
• Supports increased funding for child care programs.
  
• Supports housing assistance for low-income families.
  
• Supports austere global warming legislation.
  
• Opposes oil independence that could come from extracting America’s own vast, vast oil resources when they lie under a far-flung seldom-seen frozen land crust in the world’s far north.
  
• I could to on....
  

Hillary Clinton, if she is the Democratic nominee, will make mincemeat of old McCain as her husband did of old Dole. If Obama poses the opposition, old vet McCain will become a laughingstock among the young builders of the new Black Camelot into which the White House will be transformed. The Grand OLD Party doesn’t seem to have tumbled onto the fact that there is a motivated new generation of citizens who have been schooled their whole lives in the world-view of their molders from the Fabian Socialist government school system. These are the children of the children of the Sixties, who spit upon those warmongers who traumatized the good people of Vietnam, even including those like McCain who were traumatized right back by the good people of Vietnam. This generation of leftists and their progeny, of course, never need true answers or intelligent thought, logic or ideas. They just know their feelings must lean left or they will lose their balance, and whoever can make their feelings swoon will have their swooning support in return.

Still — may God so grant — there must be enough real Americans out there who can recognize a proven American idea, give it some real weight in the midst of a blathering election campaign and throw their support to someone who is willing to communicate it forthrightly. I think Mitt Romney could still do so if he could stop being distracted by the urge to gut-fight his gut-fight-baiting opposition and if some conscience-stricken evangelicals could get past his Mormonism to see his admirable understanding of religious freedom. ("Conscience is that still, small voice that is sometimes too loud for comfort," one Bert Murray (?) once said.)

Could we start (quickly, please), perhaps, with Newt Gingrich’s "American Solutions for Winning the Future" and identify a solid, winning individual to run with these ideas, even if it means as an independent presidential candidate, or someone bold enough to be willing to say, "I will lead a new Conservative Party for these United States." I am convinced there is no better year for an independent to actually win the White House. In fact, it may take Newt himself to salvage conservatism in the mainstream of American politics. I like what Michael Reagan wrote last month on the subject:

Who is advocating common sense solutions to the most pressing problems America faces?

Newt Gingrich, that's who. He was out of the race for a long time; he toyed with the idea of running until Fred Thompson entered the race; and then he more or less pulled back. Why Newt? Ask yourself why Ronald Reagan won. He won because he was able to excite a group of people in America that the liberal wing of the Republican Party has never excited – the grass roots.

Newt Gingrich is the last Republican to do that — to reach out to the grass roots, to all those conservative Republicans and Reagan Democrats. Remember, it was Newt who engineered the miraculous Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 — something that was deemed impossible two years after Bill Clinton won the White House.

I wouldn't be surprised if he was out there quietly working the phones and hoping for a wide-open convention where the delegates, and not the primaries that selected many of them, decide for themselves who they want to carry the GOP banner in the presidential election in November.

If Newt throws his hat in the ring he knows that in the blink of an eye he's got the grass roots behind him.

Did I see an eye blink? I’m in. Don’t let my winter-browned lawn fool you. My grass still has roots. Does yours?