Wiki Treason

From the WaPo:
U.S. embassies around the world are warning allies thatWikiLeaks might be poised to release classified cables that could harm relations by revealing sensitive assessments and exposing U.S. sources, a State Department spokesman said Thursday. More

International Business Times adds the following while adding a pretty good overview of the whole mess :

The Pentagon has already warned the U.S. Senate and House Armed Services Committees that the leaks will “touch on an enormous range of very sensitive foreign policy issues.” “We anticipate that the release could negatively impact U.S. foreign relations,” Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs Elizabeth King said in an e-mail to the defense committees. More

Watch 'Em Spin

I still have the book that was required reading in my journalism class so long ago, "How To Lie With Statistics", still it is interesting to note a couple of surveys out today:

Tea Party 48% Obama 44%
On major issues, 48% of voters say that the average Tea Party member is closer to their views than President Barack Obama. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 44% hold the opposite view and believe the president’s views are closer to their own. (Rasmussen)

Tea Partiers Are Fairly Mainstream in Their Demographics

 Tea Party supporters skew right politically; but demographically, they are generally representative of the public at large. That's the finding of a USA Today/Gallup poll conducted March 26-28, in which 28% of U.S. adults call themselves supporters of the Tea Party movement. (Gallup)

According to Moderate Voice:

A new poll suggest what I have thought was true about the Maryland’s brew of tea party activists – a good segment of them are Democratic voters who are blue collar people that tend to lean conservative in the way they want government to work. Some of these Democratic voters voted for Ronald Reagan, Bush in 2000, and Ehrlich in 2002. However, the political landscape has changed and Ehrlich has got be careful how he aligns himself with this brand of Maryland Tea.(more)

Taken together I think it points to what many have been predicting for some time i.e. a dark November for members of Congress, especially but not exclusively, democrats

Newsbusters points to the some other salient points from the poll:

Survey: Four in 10 Tea Party members are Democrats or independents

The group also vehemently dislikes President Barack Obama – even more so than those who called themselves Republicans in the survey. Over 80 percent of Tea Party members disapprove of the job he’s doing as president, whereas 77 percent of Republican respondents said they disapprove of Obama. The Tea Party members are also strongly opposed to the Democrats’ healthcare plan, with 82 percent saying they oppose it --  only 48 percent of respondents overall were opposed. [...]

Almost half the members of the group reported getting their news about national issues from Fox News, 10 percent of respondents said that talk radio is one of their top two sources, which is seven-points higher than average voter. 


And then asks: How will the press report it? 

Usually, the press is willing to take things at face value without an intelligent question to spare (e.g. the "gay" gene, global warming, etc.)  but I bet this will be different...

see....

 NOT EXACTLY A 'MAINSTREAM' FORCE.. at the Washington Monthly for an example of things to come.

Poll: Fox Is The Most Trusted Name In TV News

What I've been saying for some time now. If you really WATCH it, you'll see that by and large its true.

A new national survey from Public Policy Polling (D) finds an amazing result: The most trusted name in TV news, the only one that more Americans trust than distrust, is...Fox!

Respondents were asked whether they did or did trust the various news outlets. Fox turned out to be the only one with a positive score, at 49% yes to 37% no. CNN was at 39%-41%, NBC 35%-44%, CBS 32%-46%, and ABC 41%-46%. The pollster's analysis finds a high level of polarization, with 74% of Republicans trusting Fox, and no more than 23% of Republicans trusting anybody else. Smaller majorities of Democrats trust all the other outlets and distrust Fox. Independents register negative ratings for all the news outlets, but Fox comes the closest at 41%-44%. (more)

The Missing Link Goes Missing

It made front page news here in my hometown. Referred to by many as the "missing link" it has quickly gone the way of the "gay gene".

The fossil of a lemurlike creature that probably weighed no more than 2 pounds when it was fully grown is remarkable because it is the most complete primate specimen ever obtained from so long ago, experts say. (statesman)

Hmm, well that didn't seem so big a deal after all.

The discovery was presented with much fanfare at a press conference at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where researchers called the finding a "missing link" and a publisher from Little, Brown (which put out a related book called "The Link") called it "a scientific discovery that will undoubtedly revolutionize how we understand our own evolution." (FoxNews)

Oh well, there you have it, the precursor ahead of the book release. That explains the hoopla and the lack of science...

...David Attenborough announced with confidence that the missing link ‘is no longer missing,’ but the way the evidence has been presented and handled has raised questions about media manipulation, especially from the London Times science correspondent Mark Henderson; he seems quite miffed.

Mark Henderson reports that doubts have arisen now that others have finally been given access to the fossil and suggests that Ida is related to ‘nothing that exists today.’ Although Ida is an important fossil, he writes that ‘she isn’t all that’ and complains that the researchers haven’t provided sufficient evidence to justify their claims. He argues that this is…
‘…especially serious given the publicity blitz behind Ida…a popular book, a documentary, a website and an exhibition have been launched on the back of this find, before it has received full scientific scrutiny.’ (Uncommon Descent)

Even Time Magazine said the whole thing is overhyped:

...Most paleontologists will roll their eyes at that sort of overhyped nonsense, especially given that there's real science lurking underneath. After wading through the false advertising, though, most people might have a hard time finding it.


The sorry state of modern journalism, and science for profit make for an awkward coupling do they not?

The First Amendment in Peril

The other morning as I arrived at work I received a call from my 13 year old son. It was a little past 7:00. His bus arrives at 7:30. I was concerned that he was ill or, more likely the case, had lost something he needed for school.

"I was just thinking how Obama is like Hitler," he said. "Well, not exactly but somethings he's doing," he explained.

"OK" I said, relieved it was nothing too serious and preparing myself for what can sometimes be the tortured logic of a 13 year old's mind.

"In Nazi Germany, they tried to restrict what radio broadcasts the people listened to," he explained. (His class has been studying the Holocaust.) "Hitler handed out radios that only broadcasted the governments views," he continued, "and some of the propaganda posters showed a person listening to other broadcasts with the word "Verrater" (Traitor) at the bottom." The poster depicted an activity the Nazis considered to be treason, the highest crime against a state and its people.


Indeed, as the US Holocaust Memorial Museum points out:

Goebbels's ministry recognized the tremendous promise of radio for propaganda. It heavily subsidized the production of the inexpensive "People's Receiver" (Volksempfänger) to facilitate sales. By early 1938, the number of radios in German homes surpassed more than 9 million, roughly one for every two German households. Three years later, this figure rose to almost 15 million, providing 50 million Germans with regular radio reception.

My son continued, "Isn't Obama trying to do the same thing by trying to shut down talk radio?"

What he was referring to of course if the so called "Fairness Doctrine," a subject we will no doubt be hearing more about as the Dems approach a filibuster proof majority.

Perhaps the call was more serious than I thought.

From WND:

This isn't the so-called "Fairness Doctrine."

It's much worse.

Here's what you can expect in the coming weeks and months:

• a new appointment to the position of chairman of the Federal Communications Commission who will implement a plan to create "community advisory boards" of community activists to monitor the content of talk-radio programs, threatening stations that carry dissenting content with broadcast license challenges;

• billions of additional dollars to be invested in so-called "public broadcasting" – those entities already funded and controlled by government;

• bailouts of failing newspapers perceived as essential propaganda tools for the party.

The FCC is currently composed of two Democrat and two Republican commissioners. Obama has nominated a new chairman, Julius Genachowski, which would give Democrats a 3-2 majority once he is confirmed.

But the nominee is not just another Democrat. He's a Democrat with a plan.
Genachowski advocates creating new media ownership rules that promote a diversity of voices on the airwaves. In fact, Genachowski is credited with helping craft the Obama technology agenda, which states: "Encourage diversity in the ownership of broadcast media, promote the development of new media outlets for expression of diverse viewpoints, and clarify the public interest obligations of broadcasters who occupy the nation's spectrum."
Translation? Government control of broadcast media – particularly the kind of talk radio Democrats find so annoying.

The party in power wants to remain in power perpetually. And to do so, like so many other power-hungry parties of the past, it seeks to control the debate and stifle dissent. (more)

CNN Vs Bloggers

No doubt you remember this shameful bit of reporting by CNN.

Well it turns out that CNN was so impressed by it that they had YouTube pull it, ostensibly because of "copyright" violations.

Well the BS meter went off over at Founding Bloggers and they are fighting the action.

The folks over at Copyrights and Campaigns have a nice summary:

Founding Bloggers, the conservative web site that had its video critical of CNN's reporting on a Chicago "tea party" removed by YouTube after the cable network sent a DMCA takedown notice, is not backing down. On Thursday, Founding Bloggers submitted a DMCA counternotice to YouTube, starting the clock ticking toward a possible re-posting by YouTube -- or a lawsuit that could establish important legal precedent regarding the contours of copyright law's fair use doctrine, especially as it applies to use of news video by political bloggers. "We're not going to let this just go away," Andrew Marcus of Founding Bloggers told C&C in an interview earlier today.

Good for Founding Bloggers

Sex (inuendo), Lies and Videotape

I know it shoudn't but it does still surprise me at how far modern journalism has fallen from its lofty place. The death of many newspapers reflects this sorry state and news stations are not far behind. They days when journalism sought to be our watchdog, warning us when public figures lied and acting as the guardian of truth are fast going into the recycle bin, to meet a similar fate: we hope something good will be made of it, but suspect it will probably be found at the landfill with the other things of our lives we have no further use of.

So where to begin. first with the sexual inuendo:

Bozell: "Now the News Isn't Just Biased, It's R-Rated. MSNBC and CNN Owe the Public An Apology over at MRC.

Alexandria, VA – WARNING: The following contains material that parents may find unsuitable for younger children. It contains material that is apparently wholly appropriate from alleged “journalists” on MSNBC and CNN.

Rather than report the news, the networks were utterly derisive and dismissive of the TEA Parties and their participants. Worse still, both used the oral sex slang-term “tea-bagging” to disparagingly depict what ordinary Americans were said to be doing in attending them. (“Tea-bagging” in the sexual sense is inserting one’s testicles into someone’s mouth.)
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and her guest, liberal Air America’s Ana Marie Cox, combined to use the term “teabag” at least 51 times in a 13-minute segment. At one point, Cox said there’s “a lot of love in tea-bagging.”

Maddow’s MSNBC cohort, anchor David Shuster, also uttered the vulgar phrase and made a total of twelve separate oral-sexual puns in his April 13th attack on the event.
The next night, CNN’s Anderson Cooper twice interrupted his guest, analyst David Gergen, to gleefully declare “tea-bagging” while Gergen was stating that he thought Republicans had nothing to say, and then followed Gergen’s statement with the guttural “It’s hard to talk when you’re tea-bagging.”

Over at Powerline they have their own inuendos but make a good point:

There is something funny going on here, if not exactly where Cooper, Maddow and Sullivan find it. Cooper is widely reputed to be homosexual. Maddow and Sullivan are of course public homosexuals. It is funny in an ironic sort of way that these folks choose to disparage the tea party protesters from somewhere inside the homosexual subculture. Why not just call the protesters girly boys and let everyone in on the joke? Or would that spoil the fun?

There is not only something funny going on here, there is a story here. These supposed journalists and their networks (or publisher, in Sullivan's case) have rather seriously insulted the citizens who colorfully took to the streets to air respectable views in a most civil fashion. If they had any decency, Cooper et al. would apologize for their vile reference to sexual practices in the context of ordinary citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. (more)

Now for the lies.

Over at Fact Check we find that Obama (gasp!) may be playing a bit foot loose with the facts:

President Obama says 90 percent of Mexico's recovered crime guns come the U.S. Not true.

How about the widely (all the way down under) publisized lie that Obam is blazing new trails with the rest of the world. Not true,

"Imagine if, only a year ago, the President of the United States had visited Turkey, addressed its parliament, then kissed the Prime Minister on both cheeks.

"That might have been considered far-fetched, but so, too, would have been the President's affirmation that his country was not at war with Islam and that being Muslim in the US is part of the fabric of life.
"It is indeed unimaginable that George Bush would have embraced such thoughts, words and deeds."

Pardon? "Unimaginable?" Only to the spectacularly uninformed. (more)

Same Iraq strategy. Same kissing up to the Saudis (and it pissed us off then too)


Now for the videotape:

It's Staged. NBC News Washington's Tea Party Video On-Line Is a FAKE

From Vocal Minority: Folks, it's two days after the April 15 Tea Parties and the local page of NBC News Washington on-line still has this video of a Tea Party protest that took place across the street from the White House (mockingly entitled "Scenes from the Most Important Protest in Political History"): This is a fake, people. It's staged. These are not Tea Party protesters. It's a left-wing group called either The Billionaire Boys or Billionaires for Bush.


And finally we have this from Cairn H/T doctorbulldog:

CAIR Caught Selling Jihadist & Anti-Judeo-Christian Books to Public

Unreal: CNN reporter openly contemptuous of tea parties

Wow...I am speechless. Where does she think she is, MSNBC?

A tour de force of bias via TV Newser, from her sarcasm to her Fox-bashing to her badgering a guy who’ll be paying off Obama’s monstrous deficits for decades about why he isn’t satisfied with a $400 tax break this year. The title of the clip is “CNN Reporter Roughed Up at Chicago Tea-Party,” which, as you’ll see, is a transparent lie...

From HotAir

Studies and Stories on the Decline in American Christianity

There has been a spate of studies and stories on the decline in American Christianity lately. Well, it is the season after all. Whenever a major Christian holiday approaches the press drags out all the supposed dirty laundry and inuendo it can find. Over at MereComments some perspective is given on the subject:

...We happen to be in one of the periods when there is not a lot of social prestige or other benefit to being in the church and thus nominal members are dropping out. They have no desire to meet even modest demands of the church when they see no compensatory benefit. The drop off in the number of nominal Christians also results from the ascendancy of conservative Christianity in the United States. The more intensely the church stands for something, the less likely it is that people with low commitment will associate themselves with the church. This has always been the church's dilemma....

...What has happened in the last fifty years is that the mainline churches which had seemed to prevail during the fundamentalist-modernist controversy actually lost by becoming increasingly liberal. They became so liberal that their membership had nothing to attach themselves too other than being against conservative Christianity. They can do that just as easily on their own as they can in a liberal church. They end up in the "other" or "none" category when religionists are counted. ...

Over at GetReligion we get another perspective:

...The Trinity College survey, which you can find analyzed and linked to to in this article by Washington Post writer Michelle Boorstein, has some very interesting results. But as Trinity College’s Mark Silk asserts, these survey results show that the evangelical ranks are growing. GetReligionistas have said again and again that there is confusion (including, if one can judge by these results, among evangelicals themselves) over what constitutes an evangelical. While the number of self-declared Christians has declined, the survey doesn’t forecast the impending death of conservative Christianity....

...Infighting among conservative Christians is a sexy topic — and it is probably going on. There is considerable infighting going on in many segments of America’s religious populations. But what both Meacham and Spillius appear to assume that a decline in political influence equals defeat for religious conservatives. In his response to Meacham’s essay last week, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Moehler argues instead that his main concern is evangelism, not cultural influence. ...(more)

Controlling the Press

Every Administration tried to control the message it put s out to the public and the press. In years past there has been a healthy tension between the press and the government to keep government "honest." With the demise of journalistic integrity and evenhandedness made painfully clear in the last election, it would seem these days are over. This has been at least one factor in the demise of many newspapers.

This disturbing trend seems likely to continue with the revelation by AmSpec that the Left has been trying to manipulate the message with its own website:

...A few weeks ago, it was revealed that the Left has been manipulating the national news media via an online communication loop called "JournoList." As someone who follows political blogs closely, I had noticed how successful the Left was at (a) getting its favorite narratives picked up by the national media, and (b) discouraging coverage of narratives unfavorable to Democrats. Conservatives have long speculated on the role of back-channel communications between "progressive" activists and sympathetic journalists in this sort of coordinated messaging operation. The JournoList revelation exposed one of those back channels; that there are many others is easily inferred....(more)

At least a few people think that a similar thing is happening with the latest "Easter Seals" dispatch of the Somali pirates.

The AP breathlessly reports that:

The operation, personally approved by President Barack Obama, quashed fears the saga could drag on for months and marked a victory for the U.S., which for days seemed powerless to resolve the crisis despite massing helicopter-equipped warships at the scene. (more)

Ahem-
Well, not exactly. Blackfive gives some clarification:

...He did affirm the military's authorization to use force if the captain's life was in danger, but they already would have had that authorization as part of their standard rules of engagement. If there are innocents about to be slaughtered the same reasoning that authorizes self defense also covers an imminent execution unless the ROE specifically forbid it.The AP is making it sound like there was an active rescue ordered by the President. It was not, there was an imminent threat and the local commander gave the order to fire. Good on Obama for ensuring their authorization was clear, but let's also be clear that he did not authorize or order an active rescue attempt...

(FYI- ROE stand sfor Rules of Engagement.)

At one point I would have thought I was making a mountain ourt of a mole hill, that I was becoming a bit of a conspiracy nut. I don't know anymore....

the eager-to-please President doing the unthinkable

In 1994 the NY Times scolded Clinton for almost bowing to royalty. Hot Air points out that the unthinkable has become the unmentionable with Obama bowing to the Saudi king...

It wasn’t a bow, exactly. But Mr. Clinton came close. He inclined his head and shoulders forward, he pressed his hands together. It lasted no longer than a snapshot, but the image on the South Lawn was indelible: an obsequent President, and the Emperor of Japan.

Canadians still bow to England’s Queen; so do Australians. Americans shake hands. If not to stand eye-to-eye with royalty, what else were 1776 and all that about? …

Guests invited to a white-tie state dinner at the White House (a Clinton Administration first) were instructed to address the Emperor as “Your Majesty,” not “Your Highness” or, worse, “King.” And in what one Administration aide called “some emperor thing,” an Army general was cautioned that he should not address the Emperor Akihito at all as he escorted him to the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery.

But the “thou need not bow” commandment from the State Department’s protocol office maintained a constancy of more than 200 years. Administration officials scurried to insist that the eager-to-please President had not really done the unthinkable. (more)

(Former?) CNN Producer's Anti Israel Bias on Video

Also, the lies of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) and Roseanne Barr’s latest anti-Semitic conspiracy over at Tom Gross' Mideast Dispatch:

A FAIR-MINDED REPORTER?

Rafa is an Israeli Arab, born in the Haifa area, and is well-known around town not only as a CNN producer but also as an extremely vocal critic of Israel. For example, she engaged in another anti-Israeli outburst at an IPCRI (Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information) event in Jerusalem in February.

On other occasions in 2007 and 2008, while employed by CNN, she has publicly called for Israel to cease to exist as a Jewish state. Several years ago, in an article on how Western reporters interview Palestinians about their views on terrorism, Israel’s leading liberal paper Ha’aretz noted that “Nidal Rafa [then working for another American TV network] decides what to translate [from Arabic for the American correspondent] and what to leave untranslated.”
“The person who finally decided what the news channel would broadcast from Bartaa was Nidal Rafa,” observed Ha’aretz.

In the past, Rafa has also worked on programs for the BBC and NPR.

CNN RESPONDS
I spoke with Kevin Flower, the Jerusalem Bureau chief for CNN, and he says Rafa’s contract with CNN has been discontinued though he declined to provide a specific reason.

Despite this, Rafa handed out her CNN business card to several people, including myself, after her outburst against Danny Ayalon, and said she was still working for CNN. Even if she no longer works there, the question is why CNN employed someone like this for at least the last two years?

(There are many examples of anti-Israeli articles co-authored by Rafa on cnn.com. For example, “Jewish settlers on ‘terror’ rampage,” December 4, 2008.)...(more)

**********
REVEALED: UNRWA SPOKESMAN WHO LIED ABOUT ISRAEL PREVIOUSLY WORKED AT THE BBC WITH JEREMY BOWEN

I have previously outlined on this website the concoctions of the well-funded UN body UNRWA which have resulted in defamations of Israel and physical attacks on Jews in many different countries around the world.

For example, UNRWA has now admitted that their claim that Israel shelled a school in Gaza in January and killed 32 Palestinian civilians is completely false. The shell in question, it turns out, was in response to Palestinian mortar fire at civilians in Israel and killed nine Palestinian adults, none of whom were in the school. Seven of those killed were armed operatives and two were civilians.

The sensational and false claims of UNRWA led to headlines around the world such as “UN accuses Israel of herding 110 Palestinians into a house then shelling it, leaving 30 dead” (London Daily Mail Online UK, Jan 9 2009 11:59AM GMT).

The false reports led to anti-Israel riots and attacks on Jews in all six continents of the world.(more)


***************
Emmy and Golden Globe award-winning Hollywood actress Roseanne Barr is one of a small but vociferous band of academics, journalists and celebrities who are using their Jewish origin as an excuse to spread vicious anti-Israel (and often anti-Semitic) slurs.

In Roseanne Barr’s latest posting on her popular blog, she states that the rockets being fired from Gaza into Israel are actually being fired by Israeli forces, not by Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Such a conspiracy is almost on a par with the anti-Semitic slur that Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks....(more)

Religion Has Become An Ugly thing

Leonard Pitts over at the Miami Herald has written what he calls a "wake up call for organized religion." After discussing the American Religious Identification Survey, conducted by researchers at Trinity College of Hartford, Conn which is the poll of over 54,000 American adults that supposedly found a sharp erosion in the number of people claiming religious affiliation, he then submits a litany of failures of organized religion prefacing the whole thing with "religion has become an ugly thing."

To his credit, he does put the numbers in perspective:

"..It is important to reiterate that we are talking about overall percentages. In raw numbers, there are actually about 22 million more Christians now than in 1990. Still, the trend is clear, particularly as illustrated in one telling statistic: In 1990, 8.2 percent (about 14 million) of us said ''none'' when asked to specify their religion. Last year, 15 percent (34 million) did."

22 million more Christians and whether the fact that 7% more of those polled said "none" when asked to specify their religion actually translates to less Christians (or simply less that identify with a particular denomination) not withstanding, Pitts seems to want to focus on all that is wrong with organized religion and thus blame religion's ugliness as to why folks are staying away.

ugliness...by which I mean a seemingly endless cycle of scandal, controversy, hypocrisy, violence and TV preachers saying idiot things ...

...And people of faith should ask themselves: What is the cumulative effect upon outside observers of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker living like lords on the largess of the poor, multiplied by Jimmy Swaggart's pornography addiction, plus Eric Rudolph bombing Olympians and gays in the name of God, plus Muslims hijacking airplanes in the name of God, multiplied by the church that kicked out some members because they voted Democrat, divided by people caterwauling on courthouse steps as a rock bearing the Ten Commandments was removed, multiplied by the square root of Catholic priests preying on little boys while the church looked on and did nothing, multiplied by Muslims rioting over cartoons, plus the ongoing demonization of gay men and lesbians, divided by all those ''traditional values'' coalitions and ''family values'' councils that try to bully public schools into becoming worship houses, with morning prayers and science lessons from the book of Genesis? Then subtract selflessness, service, sacrifice, holiness and hope.
Do the math, and I bet you'll draw the same conclusion the researchers did...

Ah yes, do the math indeed.. Can one honestly equate the bombings of Eric Rudolph with the widespread institutionalized terror that is codified in Islamic teaching and carried out by thousands?

And while it is true that the church (Catholic and otherwise) has had to address the tragedy of child abuse is it fair to ignore the "ugliness" in our school systems? For example the 2007 Associated Press report, and the 2007 Annual Report prepared by the Catholic bishops and based upon an outside audit, that the problem of childhood sexual abuse within Catholic institutions is largely resolved while the problem of childhood sexual abuse within public schools is ongoing and growing. The proof lies in the numbers:

an annual average of 1.875 allegations of abuse occurring within the Catholic Church for the years 2000 to 2007 versus an annual average of 514 documented cases of public school teachers having their licenses “taken away, denied, surrendered voluntarily or restricted” as a result of sexual misconduct with minors during the years 2001 to 2005.

Or the report, from the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, that states that around 66 percent of those who sexually abuse children are parents, other relatives, unmarried partners, friends or neighbors, and that only 0.5 percent are professionals, of which clergy are a subset, and Catholic clergy a further, and by definition, smaller subset.

Charol Shakeshaft- cites in her book-that “the physical sexual abuse of students in [public] schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.” (First Things)


Do the math. Do the charlatans such as Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and the Jimmy Swaggart's really equate or outweigh the good done by Catholic hospitals, the Salvation Army (Methodist) or the Irish nuns spoken of this morning in the Boston Globe:

She was sitting on a bench on the fishing pier on Castle Island the other day, trying to explain why she does what she does, and what she does is go wherever people are dying and tries to save their lives....

...She slept in tents at night and played God by day. She looked into the eyes of the people struggling to get in the feeding center, feeling how hard they pushed against her, gauging who was the strongest, because there wasn't enough food.
She did things she couldn't back home. She stuffed children's prolapsed rectums back inside them, because if she didn't they would die. Sometimes they did anyway. She stuck needles in the bloated bellies of children to relieve pain. She slept as she spent every waking hour, haunted by death.

And when she was done in Ethiopia, she went to Sudan. Then Cambodia, Somalia. Everywhere she went, no matter where it was, no matter how bad it was, she met Irish nuns, women in their 70s who left when they were her age.

Unlike her, they never went home. She was in awe. (full story)


Do the math. Does the demonic influence in the gay/lesbian debate rest with those who reject the premise that one should get special rights based on their sexual preferences or with those who ignore the fact that such choices lead to death.

In fact, multiple studies have established that homosexual conduct, especially among males, is considerably more hazardous to one’s health than a lifetime of chain smoking.To the consternation of “gay” activist flat-earthers and homosexual AIDS holocaust deniers everywhere, one such study — conducted by pro-“gay” researchers in Canada — was published in the International Journal of Epidemiology (IJE) in 1997.While the medical consensus is that smoking knocks from two to 10 years off an individual’s life expectancy, the IJE study found that homosexual conduct shortens the lifespan of “gays” by an astounding “8 to 20 years” — more than twice that of smoking.“[U]nder even the most liberal assumptions,” concluded the study, “gay and bisexual men in this urban centre are now experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by all men in Canada in the year 1871. … [L]ife expectancy at age 20 years for gay and bisexual men is 8 to 20 years less than for all men.” (Townhall)

In the middle of his commentary Mr. Pitts answers his own question. But he is too busy working his calculator to notice:

"If all I knew of God was what I had seen in the headlines, I would not be eager to make His acquaintance."

And there's the rub, eh? If all I knew of organized religion was what I read in the headlines, I might be jaded too. Lesson: look somewhere else for your information. I won't disagree that many who claim to worship God are in fact worshipping themselves, or money or their sexuality or as Pitts says:

...religion worships and serves that which has nothing to do with Him, worships money and serves politics, worships charisma and serves ego, worships intolerance and serves self.

Because the institution of religion is made up of (acknowledged) sinful, fallen people rest assured it will continue to make headlines. But the Christian Church offers a chance to change and heal brokenness in our lives. It reaches beyond itself to help others and remains God's chosen instrument of salvation and hope in a world filled with ugliness.

The Press Strikes Again: Woman Swims Atlantic- NOT

(Ok- I know I'm a little behind but I had this appendectomy see...)



No doubt you read the headlines on the AP wires: Woman, 56, claims record Atlantic swim and 56-year-old becomes first woman to swim Atlantic.



But no, not quite:



The AP originally reported that Figge swam from the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Africa to Trinidad (2,100 miles) in 25 days while escorted by a boat. She was said to have rested every night and hopped back in the water in the morning.
Figge woke most days around 7 a.m., eating pasta and baked potatoes while she and the crew assessed the weather. Her longest stint in the water was about eight hours, and her shortest was 21 minutes.

There were problems with the story from the start. A few of the less-important ones included the fact that Cape Verde is at least 2,400 miles, not 2,100, from Trinidad. And the African islands are about 500 miles off the western coast of the continent, meaning Figge had a huge head start on her trip across the Atlantic. (It'd be like somebody saying they ran across America after starting in Cincinnati.)

Those are trivial though. The real issue stemmed from the fact that swimming 2,100 miles in 25 days is impossible. (Some newspapers picked up on this.) It's infinitely more impossible when somebody only spends 21 minutes swimming during one of those 25 days. Michael Phelps swimming his fastest would take about 20 days to cover that distance. And that's his fastest pace, sustained for three weeks, without ever stopping. Impossible.

Yet, somehow, the AP ran the story even though a few seconds of thought and a pocket calculator was enough to disprove it. They ran a correction yesterday that read, in part:
Figge swam only a fraction of the 2,100-mile journey. The rest of the time, she rested on her crew's westward-sailing catamaran. Her spokesman [said] that her total swimming distance has not been calculated yet, but that due to ocean hazards including inclement weather, he estimates she swam about 250 miles.

Swimming 250 miles is nothing to scoff at; but it's not 2,100. To go back to the running-across-America analogy, this would be like driving cross country with a friend, and getting out of the car every ten miles to run one mile for the entire trip. That'd be an impressive feat, but nobody would ever confuse it with running across the United States. ...(more)



Our press is no longer the watchdogs they used to be or that we need...