Sunday, February 23, 2014

Bill Maher, first admitting he’s a fan of MSNBC, challenged Rachel Maddow on “Real Time” Friday night over what he sees as her network’s “over the top” coverage of Bridgegate,

Maher told Maddow, an MSNBC host, that the network has been leading many of its shows night after night over the last two months with Bridgegate and shouldn’t be a “top story” at this point.
“I am totally obsessed with the Christie story, unapologetically,” Maddow responded, which soon drew cheers and claps from the audience.
Maher questioned if the scandal had involved a Democrat governor in a state farther from media-obsessed New York City, would it be covered the same way? “It’s not Watergate,” Maher noted. “He’s not the president.”
“When there are gonzo political corruption stories, you cover them,” Maddow said.
Maher said he jokingly referred to Bridgegate as MSNBC’s “Benghazi,” then clarified that Bridgegate is a real scandal while Benghazi is not; Maddow noted that a big reason Bridgegate deserves coverage is because no one yet knows what happened.
Another guest, National Review writer Charles C.W. Cooke, wondered if MSNBC is drilling down hard on Bridgegate as a way to hurt Christie’s presidential chances, to which Maddow scoffed.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/02/22/bill-maher-gets-on-rachel-maddows-case-over-scandal-shes-totally-obsessed-with/
(H/T: Mediaite)

Friday, February 21, 2014

Liberal Students Have a Funny Definition of 'Diversity

Cancel the philosophy courses, people. Oh, and we're going to be shuttering the political science, religion and pre-law departments too. We'll keep some of the English and history folks on for a while longer, but they should probably keep their resumes handy.
Because, you see, they are of no use anymore. We have the answers to the big questions, so why keep pretending there's anything left to discuss?
At least that's where Erin Ching, a student at Swarthmore College, seems to be coming down. Her school invited a famous left-wing Princeton professor, Cornel West, and a famous right-wing Princeton professor, Robert George, to have a debate. The two men are friends, and by all accounts they had an utterly civil exchange of ideas. But that only made the whole thing even more outrageous.
"What really bothered me is, the whole idea is that at a liberal arts college, we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion," Ching told the Daily Gazette, the school's newspaper. "I don't think we should be tolerating [George's] conservative views because that dominant culture embeds these deep inequalities in our society."
Swarthmore must be so proud.
Over at Harvard, another young lady has similar views. Harvard Crimson editorial writer Sandra Y.L. Korn recently called for getting rid of academic freedom in favor of something called "academic justice."
"If our university community opposes racism, sexism and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of 'academic freedom'?" Korn asks.
Helpfully, she answers her own question: "When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue."
One could easily dismiss these students as part of that long and glorious American tradition of smart young people saying stupid things. As Oscar Wilde remarked, "In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience."
But we all know that this nonsense didn't spring ex nihilo from their imaginations. As Allan Bloom showed a quarter century ago in "The Closing of the American Mind," these ideas are taught.
Indeed, we are now up to our knees in this Orwellian bilge. Diversity means conformity.
Let me invoke personal privilege by citing a slightly dated example. When the Los Angeles Times picked me up as a columnist in 2005, Barbra Streisand publicly canceled her subscription in protest (I'm proud to say). You see, Streisand's friend, iconic left-wing columnist Robert Scheer, had been let go. And I was one of the new columnists brought on board. This was an outrage.
http://townhall.com/columnists/jonahgoldberg/2014/02/21/liberal-students-have-a-funny-definition-of-diversity-n1798157?utm_source=thdailypm&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Failing Liberals Turn To Oppression To Hold On To Power

If you’re a conservative, you don't need to silence the opposition.
In fact, we conservatives want liberals to talk, to make buffoons of themselves, to prove their folly. We want liberals to expound upon their ridiculous ideas, to show the world exactly what they're about. Nancy Pelosi? Give that tiresome woman a microphone. Chatty liberals are the best advertisement for conservatism.
But liberals just can’t have conservatives speaking. We’ll tell the truth, and that’s why liberals need to shut us up.
Their traditional intimidation tactics are wearing out. Calling someone a “racist” used to be a devastating moral indictment. Liberals’ promiscuous employment of the word first turned it into a cliché and then into an ironic punchline.
I know, saying that out loud is racist. And sexist. And cisgender heteronormative, whatever the hell that means.
So now liberals have stepped up to formal governmental repression. Take the IRS scandal – or ex-scandal, in the eyes of the mainstream media. The Obama administration, at the urging of red state Democrat senators who are about to lose their seats because of their track records of failure, are doing everything they can to turn the taxman loose on the organizations that are pointing out their track records of failure.
Sure, the liberals come up with excuses, with justifications, with rationales for thisprima facie oppression. But understand that the left was never against political repression. The left is only against being repressed itself.
It’s open season on everyone else. Don't dare bow down to god whose name isn’t spelled "G – O – V – E – R – N – M – E – N – T." Today’s heretic hunters work for Kathleen Sebelius, ready to burn you at the stake for expecting grown men and women to come up with the dough for their own contraceptives. No one expects the HHS Inquisition!
The Federal Communications Commission just floated a trial balloon about going out to radio and television stations to evaluate reporters on how they cover the news. There was a time when journalists' response to a government inquiry into how they did their job would be "Go to hell, you goose-stepping bureaucratic flunky."
Not anymore. Now, their response is slavish submission to their progressive governmental dominatrix. When supposedly independent, iconoclastic liberal journalists let themselves to be dominated by the feds, their safeword is “Hillary.”
Liberalism has to muzzle the truth because it operates on lies. It is built on lies, fueled by lies, and creates an empire of lies.
Look at the Obamacare scam. Liberals don't even blink at the fact that its foundational premise that if you liked your health care, you could keep it, was a lie. They’re not even offended by the lie. They’re offended that we point out that it was a lie.
Now the same people who got us into this mess are telling us we should go along and trust them to fix the same damn problem that they created in the first place. Liberals are the Lucys of American politics, holding the football and promising that this time it’ll be different. We need to stop being the Charlie Browns.
In the Senate, liberals toss traditions like the filibuster out the window for political expediency. The president creates his own laws or changes ones that are already in place on a whim. There are no norms, there are no standards. Everything is a short-term political gambit, and little things like the Constitution are just obstacles to progress.
How does all this end well? It doesn't. It can't. That is, unless the American people come to their senses and demand that the Constitution, as it is written, be respected. That change come through the political process, through persuasion rather than diktat.
But if that doesn't happen, what then? What becomes of our system? How do we act when we take power again? Should we also ignore those same principles that we seek to reaffirm in order to reaffirm them?
Does the next Republican president simply announce that he's repealing Obamacare by executive order? Does he simply refuse to implement other laws we dislike? Does he refuse to collect foolish taxes? Does he use his prosecutorial discretion to decide to refuse to prosecute his allies? Is that what we want?
No, it is not what we want, but it may be what we get. We are not ones for unilateral disarmament. Our constitutional system is not a suicide pact, as many have observed. The liberals aren't going to like it when we apply the same ruthlessness to them.
If the rules of the game are now that there are no rules, then the only political currency is raw power. But we know what happens when there are no rules, where pure power is the sole measure of right and wrong. I served in countries like that. They are full of mass graves
The American system’s strength is not that everyone always wins. It is that the system cultivates our ability to lose gracefully, to understand that you were heard, that you had your say, that there was a process, and that you lost fair and square. It sustains itself by reinforcing its own legitimacy.
But if your losses aren’t fair, if you haven't been heard, if the rules have been bent or broken or ignored, that crucial legitimacy is gone. And then there are no rules to respect.
What keeps this grand experiment in freedom going is that we honored, at least until now, our Constitution’s boundaries. Sure, we pushed at the edges, nudged the envelope, sometimes fudged the line, but what is happening now is different. What's happening now is that the line is being erased.
http://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2014/02/17/failing-liberals-turn-to-oppression-to-hold-on-to-power-n1795089/page/full

Sunday, February 16, 2014

5 Ways Liberals Make War on Women

Having liberals claim that someone else is waging a "war on women" is like Anteaters claiming Ladybugs are making war on ants. Not only is the Left much more unfriendly to women than the Right, liberals are actually leaving a body count behind.
1) The Party of Infanticide: The liberals’ whole "safe, legal and rare" abortion shtick has gone by the wayside and they've moved on to "Any reason's a good reason." Just this week, Iowa Democratic State Representative Beth Wessel-Kroeschell advocated aborting children to avoid "sleepless nights" and avoid "disciplinary challenges."Even the Aztecs weren't as zealous about sacrificing children as the modern Left has become and the carnage it’s left in its wake is comparable to any of history's greatest monsters. More than 28 million female babies have been snuffed out since Roe v. Wade. That's 28 million women who will never get to pretend to be a princess, ask their mother for advice or fall in love and get married. All of those poor girls were slaughtered like cattle and disposed of like garbage because of the same people who claim Republicans are waging a "war on women."
2) Excusing Horrible Liberal Behavior Toward Women: Ted Kennedy left a woman to slowly die in a tidal pool while he went home to sober up and plan to get away with his crime. Liberals loved him. As we speak, Massachusetts Rep. Carlos Henrique is in jail for beating his girlfriend and the New England Area Conference of the NAACP is fighting to keep him from being expelled from the state legislature. Bill Clinton has not only cheated on his wife over and over, he was credibly accused of rape by Juanita Broaddrick. That has not given a single liberal pause. Roman Polanski is a liberal filmmaker who was convicted of raping a 13 year old girl and yet liberals defend him. What was it Whoopi Goldbergsaid? "I know it wasn’t rape-rape. I think it was something else, but I don’t believe it was rape-rape." The reason it wasn't "rape-rape" in her mind is because a prominent liberal man was involved. If everyone from MSNBC to the NAACP to NOW are willing to side with men who leave women to die, men who beat their girlfriends, and rapists over the women they victimize, what does that really tell you about liberals?
3) Demeaning Stay-At-Home Moms: Liberals insult, demean and degrade stay-at-home moms on a regular basis. How dare they treat women with contempt simply because they CHOOSE to stay home and take care of their children? For example, Democrat Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema has said, "These women who act like staying at home, leeching off their husbands or boyfriends, and just cashing the checks is some sort of feminism because they’re choosing to live that life. That’s bull****. I mean, what the f*** are we really talking about here?"Recently, liberal blogger Amy Glass at Thought Catalog wrote a whole article mocking stay-at-home moms called, "I look down on young women with husbands and kids and I’m not sorry." Even in the last election, when Democrats were pushing the "war on women" meme, Democrat strategist Hillary Rosen slammed Ann Romney for being a stay-at-home mom while Barack Obama himself has said staying at home to raise children isn't real "work." Conservatives support women, whether they want to work or stay at home. Liberals don't -- and their utter contempt for stay-at-home moms is just as disgusting as it is revealing.
4) Savage Attacks On Conservative Women: If only liberals hated Al-Qaeda with the same burning passion "that they feel towards well known conservative women," the world would be a better place. Just listen to the comments they make about strong, conservative women like Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. They've attacked Sarah Palin's children and Bachmann's husband, called Coulter a transvestite and used racial slurs against Malkin. They've done hate **** lists, demeaning articles on who Christine O'Donnell may have made out with at a Halloween partyMalkin had to move because she had so many threatswell known liberal writers spent YEARS claiming Sarah Palin faked her pregnancy with her son Trig -- it's just a bottomless well of outright hatred and misogyny. The worst day Hillary Clinton or Sandra Fluke has ever had is like an average Tuesday for one of these women.
5) Helping criminals By Disarming Women: At least a 200 pound man has a puncher's chance against a criminal who wants to hurt him, but a 120 pound woman is nothing but a victim in the same situation. For a woman, having a gun may be the difference between staying in control or being at a thug's mercy, between getting a good scare and getting raped, between seeing her child again and being left dead in a ditch. Yet, liberals believe that a woman trapped in a dark alley by some Ted Bundy wannabe carrying a scalpel, handcuffs, and a noose should be stripped of her ability to defend herself. Colorado Democrat Rep. Joe Salazar actually suggested that women can't be trusted with guns "because you just don’t know who you’re gonna be shooting at. And you don’t know if you feel like you’re gonna be raped, or if you feel like someone’s been following you around or if you feel like you’re in trouble when you may actually not be, that you pop out that gun and you pop … pop around at somebody." The University of Colorado even went so far as to suggest to women that "vomiting or urinating may also convince the attacker to leave you alone." The best friends the stalker, violent ex-boyfriend, and rapist have are pro-gun-control liberals who are hell-bent on making sure women can't defend themselves.

http://townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2014/02/15/5-ways-liberals-make-war-on-women-n1795352/page/full

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Ed Schultz Morphs Abraham Lincoln Into Barack Obama

Liberal MSNBC anchor Ed Schultz on Monday compared Barack Obama to Abraham Lincoln. In the opening of The Ed Show, an on-screen graphic morphed a picture of the historic Republican president into the modern day Democrat. In the background, an American flag can be seen. [MP3 audio here.]
Schultz's show opens are often extremely over-the-top, featuring rock music and movie clips. The cable anchor began by trashing Republicans for not trusting the President on securing the border. After clips of John Boehner and Paul Ryan appeared, the Obama/Lincoln morph appeared. No comparison is too absurd for Schultz. Recently, he linked the President to Superman, George Washington and touted approval by God.
On December 5, 2013, answering a viewer question on the health care law, Schultz trumpeted, "I’ll tell you what I think God thinks of the Affordable Care Act: it’s a big amen."
On January 29, the host used photoshopped pictures to turn Obama into Superman, George Washington and Uncle Sam.
Lincoln? God? Superman? MSNBC is becoming increasingly difficult to parody.
A partial transcript of the February 10 segment, which aired at 5pm ET, follows: 
5:01
ED SCHULTZ: Now they're stuck on trust. It's a word we hear a lot about here on the Ed Show because I know you can't trust Republicans. Republicans are now trying to use this word when this word against the President of the United States. They're on this media push, trying to convince Americans that you can't trust the President. Republicans claim the president can't be trusted to enforce the law on immigration once reform is passed. Here's what failed vice president presidential candidate Paul Ryan said last week.
PAUL RYAN: Here's the issue that all Republicans agree on. We don't trust the president to enfoce the law. We don't think that we can allow this border to continue to be overrun and if we can get security first, no amnesty, before anything happens, then we think that's a good approach. This is not a trust but verify. This is a verify then trust approach.
SCHULTZ: Oh, verify then trust? Well, let's verify the fact that we have more agents on the border. We have more resources on the border. We have more overtime hours on the border. We have more fences. We have more sensor technology. We have four-fold security on the border. So what part are they talking about when they talk about they don't trust the President enforcing something.

http://www.mrc.org/biasalerts/ed-schultz-morphs-abraham-lincoln-barack-obama

Monday, February 10, 2014

Answers for Atheists and Agnostics

Introduction

Common Criticisms

God's Character

Evil and Suffering

Religion is stupid

Bad Christians

Bible and Science

Bible Contradictions

Objections to Christianity

Common atheist's myths

No Evidence of the Supernatural?

More Resources

 

Mark explores the universe!
Those who look at the universe as it is will clearly see the hand of God."For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse."
http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/answers.html