What Bush wants in IndiaThe president's trip this week has strategic and economic import.

By Howard LaFranchi | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON –

President Bush and his policymakers like to stress how much 9/11 has changed America's foreign-policy objectives, but one goal the terror attacks did not alter is to build a stronger partnership with the world's largest democracy, India...

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Why the Left Doesn't Blame Muslims for Muslim Violence

February 28, 2006
By Dennis Prager

There's a certain consistent pattern regarding the worldwide Left's assessment of culpability for Muslim terror. It is the fault of the murdered...

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Is Abortion a Moral Issue? A Fascinating Debate on the Left

Monday, February 27, 2006
By Albert Mohler
A

merica has been embroiled in a seemingly endless debate over the issue of abortion for four decades now, but the most fascinating dispute on this issue may now be among those who consider themselves, in one way or another, advocates of abortion rights.
An unprecedented view into this debate is available on the pages of Slate.com--a prominent Web site that features some of the liveliest reporting available anywhere today. Nevertheless, this exchange between writers William Saletan and Katha Pollitt did not begin on the Internet, but in the pages of The New York Times and The Nation...

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Record Crowd for St. Louis Love Won Out Event

February 27, 2006
by Wendy Cloyd, assistant editor

More than 1,700 hear about hope for those struggling with same-sex attraction.
In its eighth year, Focus on the Family's Love Won Out conference drew its largest crowd ever at First Evangelical Free Church of St. Louis County (First Free) on Saturday.
The event shares the message that there is hope for those who want to leave homosexuality...

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Britney Spears, Beyoncé, Blasted by Body Shop Founder for “Pimp Culture”

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By Terry Vanderheyden
LONDON, February 21, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) –

Body Shop founder Anita Roddick has criticised pop stars such as Britney Spears and Beyoncé for glorifying a “pimp and whore” culture through their sexually suggestive performances and lyrics.
“A lot of people seem to think it’s cool to be a pimp or a whore,” she told London’s Evening Standard. “It’s not cool. The reality is dark and evil and appalling and unregulated.”...

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High school senior discovers ironing deactivates anthrax

By Jennifer Bails
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Monday, February 20, 2006

Protecting yourself from biological weapons might be as simple as using a hot clothes iron.
Through a project for a statewide science competition, Central Catholic High School senior Marc Roberge discovered truth in the urban legend that ironing can kill anthrax spores in contaminated mail...

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Afrocentric Curriculum Divisive, Not Unifying

February 21, 2006
By Dennis Byrne

The achievement gap between blacks and whites is the tragic result of centuries of isolation, inequality, exclusion and separation of the races. How regrettable, then, that self-separation now is considered a way to close that gap. Unfortunately, that's the direction that some want to take Evanston/Skokie School District 65, by establishing an Afrocentric curriculum for struggling black students...

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New Study Shows U.S. Girls Surpassing Boys in At-Risk Behaviors

By Jim Brown
February 20, 2006
(AgapePress) -

The White House drug czar has released a new study that indicates teenage girls across the United States are using marijuana, alcohol, and cigarettes at higher rates than boys...

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Who’s Afraid of an Argument? The Insecurities of the Abortion Rights Movement

by Albert Mohler
Monday, February 20, 2006

"Don't waste time talking to anti-choice people." That is the straightforward instruction provided by NARAL Pro-Choice America in its "Campus Kit for Pro-Choice Organizers." The director of the Pro-Choice Action Network answered a question about why his group does not engage in conversation with pro-life advocates with this statement: "Along with most other pro-choice groups, we do not engage in debates with the anti-choice." In other words, they are scared to death of a genuine argument...

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No More '08 Polls!

February 17, 2006
By Jay Cost

Sometimes, I think this new 24-hour news cycle creates more problems than it solves. Case in point: last week’s FOX News poll on the 2008 presidential elections. Not content to inquire about any of the 504 elections we will have in 9 months, FOX preferred to ask about the one in 33 months...
...However, Gallup got in the act yesterday, producing its own 2008 poll for CNN and USA Today. With the gold standard in public opinion on this bandwagon, this much has become clear: we have to nip this nonsense in the bud.

So, here it is. No poll about the next presidential election is worth your attention until Summer, 2007 at the earliest. The reason for this is that their predictive power is literally nil...

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Al Gore's Embittered Remarks

February 17, 2006
By Jack Kelly

Former Vice President Al Gore is bitterly disappointed he was not elected president. Periodically, he expresses his disappointment in ways that gives us reason to be thankful he wasn't.
The most recent was last weekend, when he traveled to Saudi Arabia to make a speech denouncing the United States. The occasion was the annual Jeddah economic forum, which is sponsored in part by the family of Osama bin Laden (which claims to have distanced itself from the family black sheep).
Mr. Gore has not disclosed how much he was paid for his words of wisdom. It probably is less than the $267,000 former president Bill Clinton was paid for speaking to the group in 2002, but odds are his fee was in six figures...

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Quell the Quailgate

February 17, 2006
By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
WASHINGTON --

I'm just glad he didn't shoot Scalia.
Well, everyone's entitled to one Quailgate joke, so that's mine. Although the best one, occurring at the Monday White House news briefing, was only inadvertently funny: Reporter's question to Scott McClellan, ``Would this be much more serious if the man had died?''
This news briefing got famously out of control (as a psychiatrist, the groups I ran for inpatient schizophrenics were far more civilized) over the new great issue of our time: Why was there a 14-hour delay in calling the press?
Let's pose a hypothetical. You're at a gathering at a friend's house in the country. You're all playing touch football and, as you lunge to tag someone, you stumble and accidentally barrel into a would-be receiver running a crossing pattern and you knock him down, breaking a few of his ribs, maybe puncturing a lung and who knows what else.
What do you do? You get him immediate help. Then you notify and tend to his family. Then you try to calm the host and the guests and try to mitigate the damage you've caused...
...If there was a sin against the public interest, it was in the desire to retain control over what was a still-chaotic situation. But it is a minor sin. There was no cover-up, nothing to cover up. There was no scandal. It hardly merited the quite overwrought charges of excessive secrecy, imperial arrogance, abuse of power and other choice selections from the lexicon of Nixoniana...

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Union bosses get in the way of common sense

By John Stossel
Feb 15, 2006

Bosses, have I got an idea for you: Don't pay your best employees more, don't ease out your least productive workers, and for crying out loud, never fire anyone, not even for the most blatant misconduct on the job.
It works for the public schools, doesn't it?
Actually, it doesn't, but since they're government monopolies, they don't care. They never go out of business. They just keep doing what they're doing, year after year, churning out class after class of students handicapped by a poor education.
Don't get me wrong -- not all public school teachers are bad...

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Turning a funeral pulpit into a political soapbox

By Star Parker
Feb 13, 2006

It's sad to say but it must be said. It should be clear to anyone who watched the tasteless politicization of Coretta Scott King's funeral by a black minister and by a former president why the black community remains, after all these years, as troubled as it is...
...Why do things go on with so little change? Why do they get worse?
One big reason, as the Rev. Joseph Lowery so aptly demonstrated at Mrs. King's funeral, is that those who have exercised leadership in our community since those days in the 1960s, those whom black citizens have listened to and heeded, have never understood, or never wanted to understand, when it's time to turn off the politics and the show business...

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10 mistakes conservatives make in art and entertainment

Conservatives need a new vision
Feb 7, 2006
by Erik Lokkesmoe

...Conservatives, by definition but not always by practice, are curators of the good, the true, and the beautiful. In the popular arts, however, we have become champions of the tame, the trite, and the temporal. (See “safe for the whole family” radio stations, movie reviews that count body parts and swear words, and paintings of nostalgic sugarplum cottages.) Wrong-headed in our approach, seduced by fashionable (and profitable) trends, debilitated by our passion for the cheap and comfortable, our “vision” for popular art and entertainment – if one can call protests and boycotts a vision – is doing more harm than good in the culture.
The remedy is easier than one might think. It begins by identifying and admitting our errors. Here are ten to start us off, no doubt there are dozens more:

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Democrats endorse domestic spying

By David Limbaugh
Feb 14, 2006
In what can only be called a major reversal, two Democratic leaders, Rep. Jane Harman and former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, admitted the controversial NSA surveillance program was necessary for fighting terrorism...
...What changed their minds? New information? Not on your life. They had the same information as the president, though many of them weren't interested enough to study it in detail...
...What changed their minds on Iraq is the same thing that's changing their minds today on the NSA program: public opinion...(Read rest of article by clicking title)

Arizona House Approves Measure Helping Women Know Baby's Abortion Pain

by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
February 13, 2006
Phoenix, AZ (LifeNews.com) --

The Arizona House on Monday approved legislation that would require abortion practitioners to tell women considering an abortion that her unborn child will feel intense pain during the procedure. The measure also allows the woman to ask for anesthesia to be provided to the baby during the abortion...

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Adult Stem Cell Research Scientists Find New Stem Cell in Umbilical Cord Blood

by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
February 13, 2006
Minneapolis, MN (LifeNews.com) --

In yet another advance of adult stem cell research, which is more ethical and has proven more effective and embryonic, scientists at the University of Minnesota Medical School have discovered a new population of cells in human umbilical cord blood that have properties of primitive stem cells.
Umbilical cord blood is generally known to contain hematopoietic stem cells that can only produce cells found in blood, though they have already been highly successful in curing or treating numerous diseases and conditions...

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Frau Clinton für Präsidentin!

AP dispatch

AP dispatch tells a story from Jeddah that is purely amusing. It seems that 997 days before the 2008 election, Hillary Clinton has picked up an endorsement--but one that she may not want:
Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, a fierce critic of the Bush administration, said Saturday that he's pulling for U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to win the White House...
...Schroeder made the statement during a discussion of global women leaders at a gender-segregated theater where a plastic barrier separated women from men.

So here we have a founding member of the "axis of weasels" endorsing Frau Clinton and drawing cheers from a segregated Saudi audience. It would be hard for Republicans to write a better campaign commercial.

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Our Friend Al Gore

BY JAMES TARANTO
Monday, February 13, 2006 12:44 p.m.

The man who came within a hair's breadth of the presidency in 2000 is denouncing his own government on foreign soil, the Associated Press reports:
Former Vice President Al Gore told a mainly Saudi audience on Sunday that the U.S. government committed "terrible abuses" against Arabs after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and that most Americans did not support such treatment....
...There is a comical element to this, as Glenn Reynolds notes: "Only Al Gore could come up with the idea of criticizing Bush for not sucking up to the Saudis enough. Sigh."
Heh. Indeed. But blogger "TigerHawk" makes some serious points:
This is asinine both substantively and procedurally... The only consolation is that Gore likely would have done a lot more damage had he spent four years in the White House. And given the precedent set by Jimmy Carter, it isn't hard to imagine Gore as an embittered one-term ex-president giving the same speech in Jeddah....

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Money really doesn't buy happiness, study finds

Copyright AFP 2005,
Feb 13 12:19 PM US/Eastern

Money doesn't buy happiness, and now there's a study to prove it. Australian researchers found that people in well-off Sydney are among the most miserable in the country, while those in some of the poorest areas are much more satisfied with their lives...

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The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised As Freedom

by David Kupelian

Americans have come to tolerate, embrace and even champion many things that would have horrified their parents' generation—from easy divorce and unrestricted abortion-on-demand to extreme body piercing and teaching homosexuality to grade-schoolers. Does that mean today's Americans are inherently more morally confused and depraved than previous generations? Of course not, says veteran journalist David Kupelian. But they have fallen victim to some of the most stunningly brilliant and compelling marketing campaigns in modern history.
The Marketing of Evil reveals how much of what Americans once almost universally abhorred has been packaged, perfumed, gift-wrapped and sold to them as though it had great value. Highly skilled marketers, playing on our deeply felt national values of fairness, generosity and tolerance, have persuaded us to embrace as enlightened and noble that which all previous generations since America's founding regarded as grossly self-destructive—in a word, evil...

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Long night's journey into day

By Burt Prelutsky
Feb 11, 2006

People often ask me just exactly when I stopped being a liberal and, depending on their own political persuasion, saw the light or sold my soul to the devil. My fellow conservatives assume I had something akin to an epiphany. Liberals simply wonder if I suffered a head injury in a traffic accident...

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Blessed are the Greens?

(Bad theology followed by junk science, just to placate the left, DUMB. - Florence)
By Steven Hayward

This week some evangelical Christian groups issued "a call for their faithful to press the Bush administration into action on climate change," the Guardian newspaper reported. A union of evangelicals, who voted for George Bush by a four-to-one margin, and environmentalists, who voted for John Kerry by a four-to-one margin, is the perfect man-bites-dog story for the media.
Both camps are wary at their unlikely common cause. There is a fitting symmetry to the suspicions each camp holds of the other, which can be reduced to the common theme of fundamentalism. The phenomenon of fundamentalist Christianity is well-known; the phenomenon of what might be called "fundamentalist environmentalism" is equally applicable but less clearly recognized in the media and elsewhere...(read more by clicking title)

Educating Our Children With Our Values

(My favorite Democrat - Florence)
By Ed Koch
I was struck by the incongruity of a news item that recently appeared in The New York Times. Under the headline “California School Drops Intelligent Design Course,".....

The first amendment was not intended to ban mention of God in a public school setting. The intent was to protect us from the government imposing on the nation a preference for one religion over another. The Founding Fathers clearly believed in intelligent design, as evidenced by their statements referring to the Creator in the Declaration of Independence...

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Abortion Causes Mental Disorders

New Zealand Study May Require Doctors To Do Fewer Abortions
Pro-Choice Researcher Says Some Journals Rejected Politically Volatile Findings
By The Elliot Institute
February 10, 2006

A study in New Zealand that tracked approximately 500 women from birth to 25 years of age has confirmed that young women who have abortions subsequently experience elevated rates of suicidal behaviors, depression, substance abuse, anxiety, and other mental problems.

Most significantly, the researchers--led by Professor David M. Fergusson, who is the director of the longitudinal Christchurch Health and Development Study--found that the higher rate of subsequent mental problems could not be explained by any pre-pregnancy differences in mental health, which had been regularly evaluated over the course of the 25- year study...

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"Quoting Barkley"

Kids are great. That's one of the best things about our business, all the kids you get to meet. It's a shame they have to grow up to be regular people and come to the games and call you names.

Charles Barkley

Internet Suicide Pacts Increasing in Japan

Friday, February 10, 2006. Issue 3350.
Reuters

TOKYO -- The number of Japanese killing themselves in groups after meeting through the Internet -- strangers afraid to die alone -- soared to a record 91 last year, nearly double that of 2004, police said on Thursday...

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20 sneaky credit card tricks

By Amy C. Fleitas • Bankrate.com

Credit card companies can be as slippery as a handful of greased Jell-O. They have all kinds of tricks to gouge your wallet and drive up your bill. While arguably unfair, all these tricks are legal, leaving you no alternative but to stay as informed as possible to protect yourself...

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Philosophy Prof at Halifax “Catholic” University calls Christianity “Pernicious”

By Hilary White
HALIFAX, February 9, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) –

As Canadian society becomes more secularized, Canadian Catholic universities are following suit. In one case this week in Halifax, Peter March, St. Mary’s University professor of philosophy, said that he believes Christianity is a “pernicious thing.”
March made the comment after he posted to his office door some of the cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad that have offended Muslims and sparked riots and violent protests around the world.
When confronted by Muslim students March said, “I don't believe in your faith. I believe your faith is a pernicious thing -- the same as Christianity, the same as Hinduism.”...

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Virtually Silent Film about Carthusian Monks a Surprise Hit in Germany

By Hilary White
BERLIN, February 9, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) -

A virtually silent film about silent monks in an ancient French monastery is proving a surprise hit with German audiences, the BBC reports. With no dialogue, no script or voiceover and only Gregorian chant as background music, Into Great Silence is an unusual documentary of the daily lives of the monks of Le Grande Chartreuse, the extremely remote original foundation in the French Alps, of the Catholic Church’s most rigorous religious order, the Carthusians.
The film depicting this devoted and austere life has the highly secularized German audiences spellbound and is playing to packed houses. It has hit a benchmark in Germany with over 100,000 viewers. The film was featured at Berlin’s Film Festival and was awarded the World Cinema Special Jury prize at the Sundance festival...

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TV Viewing Hampers Children's Creativity, Time Spent with Family says New Study

By Terry Vanderheyden
AUSTIN, Texas, February 9, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) –

Children who spend more time watching television spend less time interacting with their family and playing creatively, according to research from The University of Texas at Austin and Harvard Children’s Hospital appearing in the February issue of the journal Pediatrics.
By studying children’s activities over 24-hour periods, Dr. Elizabeth Vandewater and her colleagues provide evidence for the first time that supports the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) television viewing recommendations. AAP recommends that children under the age of two should not watch television and children older than two should watch no more than two hours of television daily...

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Michael Schiavo PAC to Target pro-Terri Lawmakers Fails to File Paperwork

by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
February 8, 2006
Clearwater, FL (LifeNews.com) --

Michael Schaivo created a political action committee at the end of last year to "hold accountable" lawmakers who supported Terri Schiavo and her family's efforts to prevent her euthanasia death. Apparently, Michael Schiavo isn't being accountable for filing his paperwork with national and state elections officials.
After filing an organizational statement with the FEC, the national elections office responded with a request for more information and asked TerriPAC treasurer, Michael's brother Brian Schiavo, to respond by January 20.
The web site indicates no response has been filed.
"Failure to provide an adequate response by this date may result in an audit of the committee," the FEC wrote Brian. The nonresponse could also trigger "enforcement action" against the committee.
Should the FEC decide to audit Michael's group, their work won't take long. The FEC web site indicates TerriPAC has yet to receive any donations and has a $0 bank balance...

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Family-Friendly Films Consistently Translate Into Box Office Success, Authoritative Study Shows

By Terry Vanderheyden
HOLLYWOOD,

February 8, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Millions of moviegoers are lining up to see family-friendly movies reflecting traditional values, according to the results of an annual study of the domestic box office. Statistics from the survey show that the public’s choices for their favorite films – which they vote for with their wallets – veer sharply from the selections by the various awards shows and critics’ associations...

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Men, women, and the lie that is the feminist movement

A review of Women Who Make the World Worse
Feb 1, 2006
Review by Molly Stark
Much has been written, said, and screamed lately about Kate O’Beirne’s new book, Women Who Make the World Worse: and How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports.
The most vocal participants—the screamers—rather than debating honestly and openly the merits of O’Beirne’s meticulously researched and thoroughly evidenced assertions, have instead chosen to ambush her cowardly from the sidelines—shouting O’Beirne down like a group of catty junior high school girls...(continue article by clicking above title)

Woman Arrested For Allegedly Killing Exotic Fish

(AP)

WALNUT CREEK, Calif. Police have arrested a Walnut Creek woman who allegedly killed a tank of exotic fish during an argument with her husband.
Thirty-four-year-old Susan Goselin was arrested on suspicion of animal cruelty.
Goselin is accused of dumping bleach into a 300-gallon salt water tank filled with tropical fish, killing all seven inside...

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