The American Spectator does a nice job of deconstructing this ridiculous piece from a progressive blogger over at the Progressive Christian Alliance. The gist of the piece is this: Jesus was an illegal immigrant baby, thus if you are against illegal immigration, you are against Jesus and the entire story of the nativity is one big political story.

AS responds:

Faith dictates that churches offer their ministry and message of redemption, embodied in the Nativity story, to all people, including illegal immigrants. But there is no covert message within the Christmas narrative offering specific policy guidance on U.S. immigration law. The temptation to extract politics out of the Nativity account should be resisted. Perhaps the most infamous example was the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s 1992 Democratic Convention speech comparing Vice President Dan Quayle to murderous King Herod. The birth of Baby Jesus was significant enough by itself that it needs no political sloganeering to amplify its importance.

This religious outfit dilutes God’s word with its hippified humanism. Their “about” section reads like a vague intro to a self-help book. The emphasis is based on inclusion (Jesus Himself said He did not come to bring peace, but a sword Matthew 10:34) and accepting people as they are, regardless whether or not God’s law is followed. They are situational Christians: they love the Bible when they think they can cherry pick the Word and support leftist beliefs but are suspiciously silent on Scripture where it concerns life, marriage, law, and worship.

The Bible is quite clear on following the law where it does not conflict with faith:

Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended.  - Romans 13:1-3

If you’re going to condescend to preach to the flock, you must preach all the Bible for consistency, as even the Devil can quote Scripture. A warning from Scripture to these so-called “progressive Christians” and their perversion of His Word:

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The Washington Post’s “faith” writer (and former author of “The Party” column until she penned a column airing her family’s conflicts and after complaints by her own family was demoted to writing on faith) and beltway hostess Sally Quinn says that Norway murderer Anders Breivik is a Christian because doggone it, he says he is!

“Well I say the guy’s a Christian! He talks about Jesus Christ our Lord, he actually says ‘I am a Christian …’”

To borrow from the “Merchant of Venice,” “Even the Devil can cite Scripture.”

Quinn launches into a bizarre monologue about terrorism and Christianity and Oslo and who knows what else; honestly, I began losing interest when O’Reilly demanded that she produce a Breivik quote on Jesus and Quinn had to shuffle through her talking points.

Had Quinn perhaps skipped a party or two and did her due diligence on her subject she would have learned that not only is Breivik most emphatically not a Christian, but he’s also an environmental-worshipping socialist — the absolute opposite of what the progressives and the Soros News peddled in the press before the bodies of Norway’s fallen had grown cold:

The Judeo-Christian religions played an important and influential role in building the once mighty West but we also discovered that these religions contained aserious flaw that has sewed the seeds of the suicidal demise of the indigenous peoples of Western Europe and our cultures. This flaw was identified by the brilliant German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who described it as “an inversion of morality” whereby the weak, the poor, the meek, the oppressed and the wretched are virtuous and blessed by God … pg. 391

A pragmatic approach, which involves acknowledging the primal aspects of man for the purpose of preparing him for a martyrdom operation, should always take precedence over misguided piety … pg. 1434

Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers -already, you see, the world had already fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing Christianity!-then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. pg. 231

I’m not going to pretend I’m a very religious person as that would be a lie. pg. 1344

Myself and many more like me do not necessarily have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God. We do however believe in Christianity as a cultural, social, identity and moral platform. This makes us Christian. pg. 1307, 3,139

A “cultural Christian?” Such a thing doesn’t exist in Scripture. There is grace through faith and a relationship with Christ, grace that one does not achieve alone. What Breivik preaches is humanism, not Christianity. He believes he can achieve grace alone, thus a relationship with Christ is unnecessary. The lowliest pseudo-scholar would recognize this if they are true to their intelligence, which Quinn is not, either by choice or pure ignorance.

Quinn has spent the better part of her “faith-writing” taking partisan jabs at conservatives.

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Rep. Todd Akin, Missouri’s conservative Republican challenger against Democrat Claire McCaskill, said this during a recent interview over the NBC/Pledge of Allegiance controversy:

Well, I think NBC has a long record of being very liberal and at the heart of liberalism really is a hatred for God and a belief that government should replace God. And so they’ve had a long history of not being at all favorable toward many of things that have been such a blessing to our country.These powerful works have liberals enraged.

Predictably, the progressive media had a meltdown, led by Think Progress (you know, the outfit who promoted the short-lived ‘Crash the Tea Party’ stunt wherein progs dressed up as klansmen and Nazis and attended rallies so that edited video could be used to smear the movement, even lifting other videogapher’s work).

U.S. Rep. Todd Akin is catching flak from some Missouri religious leaders for saying last week that “at the heart of liberalism really is a hatred for God.”

Local media had to dig deep to find “religious leaders” to condemn Akin’s remark and apparently only spoke to far-left, social justice churches, one of which somehow managed to con its congregation into a modified religious faith that supports the dichotomy of infant genocide and Christ.

Faith Aloud, a St. Louis-based religious group that advocates for abortion rights, began an online petition drive calling on Akin to apologize.

The Rev. Krista Taves of Emerson Unitarian Universalist Chapel in Ellisville said Akin’s comment “shows how very little he knows about liberals, and how very little he knows about God.”

“I’m a liberal because I love God and all God’s creation,” Taves said. “ I value equality, fairness and compassionate justice because my faith informs my politics.”

Rabbi Jim Bennett of Congregation Shaare Emeth in St. Louis said he was “deeply disturbed” by Akin’s statement, which he characterized as a “grotesque politicized attack.”

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reached out to two groups, one which is definitely far-left and another that uses left-leaning code words like “we are agents of social justice” on their “About” page. I’m unclear as to why the paper chose to have representatives of a completely different faith to comment on the faith of another when the beliefs of both faiths are quite varied, but this isn’t Big Religion – a way to drive a wedge? Diversity? But it still doesn’t answer why no other religious leaders – or expressed Christian ones, not one the describes itself as “interfaith” – were represented in this article besides two left-leaning groups. I’ve asked the article’s author, Jason Hancock, on Twitter why only these two groups were included for comment.

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Tim Rutten is a left-wing, hack writer from L.A. He is always good for contemporary left wing trope but the other day we discovered that he is also good for the sort of uninformed blathering that leftists of his ilk pretend is American history. Chiefly that of America’s religious history and the so-called “wall of separation between church and state.”

In a June 1 piece about Mitt Romney, Rutten regaled us with his “reading” of Mitt’s current political reality. Rutten proposed that any question about Mitt’s Mormonism was somehow a threat to the United States.

Before I get to Rutten’s warped take on U.S. history, let’s take this business about the attacks on Mitt’s Mormonism.

To make his point, Rutten proves himself keen on unduly enlarging the supposed attacks on Mitt Romney’s Mormon religion from both today and in his earlier run for the White House. While there were attacks on Romney for his religion in 2008, those attacks were relatively minor and never really made much headway against his candidacy.

Certainly there are many thousands of Christians that don’t think Mormonism is a Christian religion. I believe that it is a correct assessment, too. But so what? Whether Mormonism is a Christian religion or not has nothing whatever to do with Mitt Romney’s suitability for becoming president of the United States. Only a small minority of Republican voters hold Romney’s Mormonism against him. I’d guess that number would dwindle to even less should Mitt become the GOP nominee, too. (more…)

Richard Cohen is what passes for an opinion editorialist in the Washington Post — not a learned one, just a bloviating one. Cohen’s latest, “The Myth of American Exceptionalism,” is at the same time as self-loathing as it is historically stupid. Not only does this nonsense Cohen ladled out upon us all serve an example that you don’t have to actually know anything to be in our modern Old Media establishment, but it is evidence that the profession of editor is long dead.

In his ten paragraphs Cohen indulges every left-wing trope that one can find. Whites are all racist, we don’t do enough for “the poor” in America, Christianity is the root of all evil, and it all started in the 1850s when the Republican Party was born. Most ridiculously, Cohen a-historically seems to think that the art of compromise died in American politics when the GOP was born. This last bit alone is guffaw worthy to say the least.

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In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground but the men said to them, “Why do you look for living among the dead? He is not here, he has risen!”
Luke 24: 5

“Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.”
Luke 24:39

He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation.”
Mark 16:15

2 Peter 3:18

In another example of a sort-of cultural suicide where western media types assume that all Muslims are blameless – while all Americans are at fault in this clash of civilizations between Islamism and the West – we have a recent episode of MSNBC’s Hardball with one-time Democratic operative Chuck Todd standing-in for host Chris Matthews.

Todd was discussing the riots in Afghanistan sparked by Islamist ire over the burning of a Koran by a Florida pastor. During the interview Todd and a guest stated that the Christian Bible was just a book written by men while the Koran was the “direct word of God.” The two implied that this excuses Muslims from murdering people over the book burning.

In the segment Time Magazine’s World Editor Bobby Ghosh told Chuck Todd that the riots and murders perpetrated by Muslims in Afghanistan were obviously understandable because the Koran is apparently more holy than the Christian Bible. Ghosh averred that it’s important to “keep in mind” that the Koran is “not the same as the Bible to Christians.” Why, you might ask? Why it’s because the Koran is “directly the word of God.” On the other hand, the Bible is just a book “written by men.”

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For some strange reason the left-wing Internet site Slate.com thinks that the City of Detroit needs a statue erected to an anti-Christian, anti-American pop icon. That’s right, Slate thinks that Detroit needs to diss Jesus, slam capitalism, and attack the United States of America as an evil, violent nation. Strange recommendation for a city that literally drove America’s capitalist success story, isn’t it?

Well that is precisely what Slate is suggesting in an entertainment feature about raising a Motor City statue to the Hollywood sci fi movie character Robocop. After all, the Robocop movie was a purposeful slam on the United States and Christianity, not some celebration of her genius. This is exactly what the film’s director has said numerous times. Strange that Slate wants to use a character that presents what it claims is bad about America as something worthy enough to which to build a memorial.

For Slate’s Patrick Cassels, a 20-something actor, “Internet enthusiast,” and entertainment writer, announced his support of the statue to the violence-soaked movie icon mostly because it is an attack on “Regonomics” and corporations. But, as if supporting a paean to Marxism isn’t grating enough for building a statue in an American city, he spends no time at all on the anti-Christian theme of the movie.

Regardless a statue to Robocop is a great idea, Cassels asserts. “Robocop,” Cassels claims, “is a great ambassador for Detroit.” He thinks that a Robocop statue has “something important to say about the place and its plight.”

The film, Cassels says, “addresses some of Detroit’s most challenging issues, issues that were pressing in 1987 and remain so today.” Issues like the decay the city has fallen to, its poverty, and its financial doldrums are sharply drawn in the movie. Cassels is, of course, correct about that. But Cassels pinpoints the wrong reasons why these dire circumstances exist in the real Detroit.

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I love it when Atheists proclaim to know more about people of faith than those people know about themselves.

The March 3 hatchet job on Christians perpetrated by the Secular Progressive Atheist Clown Phil Zuckerman is another case in point.  Now, Christians don’t need me to defend them.  They are the MSM’s favorite religious target.  The sad thing about Zuckerman is that it isn’t enough for him to just espouse his own lack of faith.  He has to attack other people’s faith.  I guess that’s part of the “new tone.”

Never mind that Zuckerman’s way into the article is to make a completely false statement derived from a Pew Poll.   Never mind that demonizing Christians for their support of the death penalty is done without mentioning that even left-leaning Californians support the death penalty.  Never mind that Zuckerman could have presented an intriguing non-partisan sociological study of religious and political beliefs among Evangelicals (he is a “Professor of Sociology” after all).

No, Zuckerman’s huge revelation — his entire reason for writing the article — is that Evangelical Christians are hypocrites when it comes to reconciling their religious and political beliefs.

Hypocrites.  Imagine that.  People…actual human beings….are flawed.  They say one thing yet do another! (more…)

I’m always highly skeptical of Benny Hinn types who claim to preach from a perspective of faith but then do so without ever citing a single line of Scripture – or worse yet, pervert that which is written. That latter proves that even the Devil can talk faith, a lot like Huffington Post’s Diana Butler Bass.

Bass begins her column with the last-distch effort of shaming Governor Scott Walker as a “bad” Christian by listing an unaccountable list of religious types — who I’m sure have no political leanings at all — as a way of saying God stands in opposition to Walker and Walker has no respect for these religious figures. While Walker’s actions have zero to do with his faith and everything to do with the mandate he was given on November 2nd — I’ll be her Huckleberry: let’s use Bass’s context for the sake of this piece.

Yet none of these prayers or sermons has swayed Scott Walker. He has steadfastly stayed on his original course, unfazed by the full weight of Roman Catholic authority or the mainline social justice tradition pressing upon him and urging him toward compromise and change.

Wait – but the left prattles incessantly about separation of church and state? Yes, except in the instances where they think they can prostitute faith for political purpose. The amazing thing about the United States, as evidence by Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists which the left only knows enough of to be comically dangerous, is how and why we are not a nation under the domination of a denomination. Freedom of religion and from religion, in a country blessed by God, a gift you are given regardless.

Walker hasn’t been swayed because the “swaying” occurred on November 2nd when Wisconsin voters went to the polls and voted for exactly what Walker is doing now: saving Wisconsin’s economy. Bass’s beef isn’t with Walker, who is just a representative of what the people wanted, but rather, with the people. The left can’t say that, though, because it deflates their populist narrative, so they focus on polarizing a bogeyman, in this case, Walker.

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When Sarah Palin recently cited the legendary C.S. Lewis and the phrase “divine inspiration” in the same sentence during a Barbara Walters interview, liberal talking heads went apoplectic.  MSNBC’s Richard Wolffe thought there were a lot of things Palin could have read besides C.S. Lewis if “divine inspiration” was the goal, and The View’s Joy Behar mocked her for reading books that were (supposedly) written for children.

Such desperate and unprofessional commentary from Wolffe and Behar is undone by the fact that millions upon millions of people have read Lewis for divine inspiration throughout the years. Moreover, those reading him for such inspiration are adults, not children. (Sure, children do enjoy Lewis’ “Chronicles of Narnia,” but his eye-opening works like “Mere Christianity,” “The Great Divorce,” and “The Abolition of Man,” to name but a few, are so in depth that an adult must read them time and again to grasp everything that Lewis is saying.)

Of course, this really isn’t about whether Lewis wrote children’s books or not, nor is it about whether Palin reads such books. Rather, it is just one more attempt to prove how dumb Palin is, and thereby show the public how unfit she is for office.

The liberal talking heads want us to know that only a megalomaniac like Adolf Hitler or, even worse, an idiot like George W. Bush, would talk so openly about divinity or divine inspiration in this secular world. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews revealed as much just days after the 2008 Presidential Elections when he examined Palin’s claim that she was “putting [her] life in [her] creator’s hands” and would make a decision on a possible run in 2012 based on whether God opened the door for her or not. (more…)

The media world has gone stark raving mad, or at least the leftist media world has gone mad.

Juan Williams being fired by National Public Radio (NPR) is absolutely foolish, nobody with half a brain can disagree with that.

It was another comment he made during that discussion that caught my attention. I’m not saying this is a fireable offense, but it certainly is inaccurate and needs to be countered before the activist old media totally turns this falsehood into something they would call a fact.

During the discussion where Williams said he gets “nervous” when he sees people on a plane in Muslim garb (that’s what got him fired).  Williams also warned O’Reilly against blaming all Muslims for “extremists,” saying Christians shouldn’t be blamed for Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh.

Timothy McVeigh was not Christian. Love ya Juan, and sorry to hear about what happened with NPR, but Timothy McVeigh was not Christian. He was agnostic. He made the statement many times to newspapers. He also said “science is my religion.” McVeigh was Catholic as a young child, but never really practiced the religion. He told the authors of American Terrorist that he “did not believe in Hell.” If there’s one tenet that’s consistent with Christian religions, it’s a belief in Hell—and Heaven, for that matter. (more…)

Newsbusters reports that Morning Joe brought on Terry Jones, the Gainseville, Florida pastor now famous for the Koran burning hubbub, so that he could be lectured on Christianity by departing Newsweek editor Jon Meacham.  So far this is all SOP at MSNBC.  Then, in what will strike most of you as a surreal (and perhaps unprecedented) occurrence that ought to go down in MSNBC lore, Jones’s feed is cut off before he gets in a single word.

From the Newsbusters write up:

In what had to be the ultimate in condescension and elitism, MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” brought Pastor Terry Jones on the show merely to lecture him on Christianity, cutting him off before he could even respond. Co-host Mika Brzezinski explained to him “we don’t really need to hear anything else, so thanks.” Newsbusters’ Mark Finkelstein first briefly reported on this segment this morning.

Panel member Jon Meacham, the departing editor of Newsweek, briefly preached to Pastor Jones on Jesus’ New Testament message of love and forgiveness and then appealed to him “as a fellow Christian” to not follow through with his threats to burn the Koran. Then, before Pastor Jones responded, his live feed was cut and co-host Mika Brzezinski continued with the show, saying that they did not need to listen to Pastor Jones.

Now all radio and television shows have to cut off a guest from time to time due to time constraints, etc., but it’s not every day you see a guest invited on, talked at, then cut off, all before he has a chance to utter even a greeting, much less a defense.  What’s more, Brzezinski emphatically explained MSNBC’s treatment of their guest by stating, “we don’t really need to hear anything else.”

You know MSNBC has sunk pretty low if they can make the nutty Pastor Jones seem like a sympathetic figure, even if for just a brief moment.

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From today’s story, assuring America that, despite what the polls say, President Obama really truly is a Christian:

The White House says Mr. Obama prays daily, sometimes in person or over the telephone with a small circle of Christian pastors. One of them, the Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, who was also a spiritual adviser to former President George W. Bush, telephoned a reporter on Wednesday, at the White House’s behest. He said he was surprised that the number of Americans who say Mr. Obama is Muslim is growing.

“I must say,” Mr. Caldwell said, “never in the history of modern-day presidential politics has a president confessed his faith in the Lord, and folks basically call him a liar.”

Now where would anybody get that idea? (more…)

As we continue with America’s most left-biased, working journalist list, we feature a woman that takes herself quite seriously and un-ironically as a non-opinion-styled journalist. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour really does think that no one can tell that she is a true-blue left-winger. Sadly, there is that all too human penchant of fooling oneself as much as one tries to fool others with this one. But that doesn’t stop her from making the claim.

In 2008, for instance, Amanpour said of herself:

I stay away from commentary and I stay away from ideology. All this stuff that we have seen marching into the space of fact-based news over the last several years, the highly opinionated, highly ideological [demagoguery] that exists and masquerades as journalism. I draw a line and I stay in the fact-based reality.

Nice story, that. Reality, though, seems to diverge a bit from Amanopour’s self-serving assessment.  Let’s take Amanpour’s recent altercation with Marc Thiessen, for example.  During a recent appearance on her show, the former Bush speech writer took Amanpour to task for saying that the waterboarding tortures perpetrated by Cambodia’s genocidal communist organization Khmer Rouge was exactly the same sort used by the Bush administration on terror suspects.

Here is how Amanpour characterized the waterboarding practices during her filmed visit to the Khmer Rouge torture camps: (more…)

*** Updated: Pamela Geller will be speaking at our event.. We are very happy and pleased that she will be attending! The TNTPC believes (CAIR) to be a hate group. We will not follow any request from them. Anthony Shreeve, convention organizer

I am one of the featured speakers at the Inaugural statewide Tea Party Convention in Tennessee’s beautiful Smoky Mountains this weekend. But look at this: the unindicted co-conspirator, terror-tied Muslim Brotherhood front group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is trying to get the good, decent Americans of the Tennessee Tea Party to crush free speech by dropping me from the Tea Party convention this weekend.

Why is CAIR starting this campaign now? This is all about the mosque that Muslims are planning to build near Ground Zero. I spoke the truth about this supremacist initiative on the Sean Hannity radio show last week, in a debate with Islamic apologist Michael Ghouse. Who won the debate? Well, you be the judge:

The next day I was scheduled to be on the Mike Huckabee Show on Fox News along with a representative from the mosque, but at the last minute they decided not to send anyone. They sent Huckabee a written statement, which he read to me on the air. And now CAIR sends around this press release full of lies and distortions, trying to intimidate the Tennessee Tea Partiers into canceling me. The CAIR press release starts this way:

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today called on the organizers of the inaugural Tennessee Tea Party Convention to be held this weekend in Gatlinburg to drop an anti-Islam speaker who claims that ‘Hitler and the Nazis were inspired by Islam’ and that Islam ‘mandates’ lies and deception.

Sounds terrible, right? Except for one thing: it’s true. (more…)

Claude Brodesser-Akner has a column in New York Magazine’s new culture blog (Vulture) recently in which he sounds a warning, in hushed conspiratorial tones, about an effort underway by Hollywood to use Evangelical/Christian organizations to spread the word of their faith-based films to Christian audiences.

Dear God, say it ain’t so!!!!

Full disclosure, I am not an Evangelical… I haven’t even been inside a church for any reason other than to attend a wedding or funeral in some 20 years… but I’m just not sure what the big scoop is here. Brodesser-Akner seems to have discovered a vast conspiracy to… well let’s take the case of The Passion of the Christ. (more…)

A girl flees from her home in fear for her life – and law enforcement goes after the people who helped her.  That’s the situation in the Rifqa Bary case.

The Columbus Dispatch reported this about Rifqa’s friend Brian Williams:

An Ohio minister accused of driving a teenage runaway to a bus station last year has retained a lawyer as police say they’re investigating whether anyone broke the law in helping the Christian convert leave home for Florida.

And why did she flee to Florida? Because, she says, when her devout Muslim father found out she had become a Christian, he said to her, “I will kill you.” And with Islam’s death penalty for apostates, she had to take that seriously. But her father is not in danger of being prosecuted. Brian Williams is. (more…)

For the Independent Weekly of Durham, North Carolina, writer Sam Wardle proves that he hasn’t a clue how the phrase “religious extremist” is properly defined. Wardle reveals his hatred of all things Christian in a piece titled, “For Rep. Sue Myrick, Islamic moderates are extreme, Christian extremists are moderate,” wherein he equates Rep. Myrick to a religious extremist.

But, I’d suggest that his confusion is endemic in the far left and proves to show why so many in the west don’t understand how to face and defeat the real religious extremism of radical Islam.

In a story about Representative Sue Myrick (R, NC) and her association with The National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, as juxtaposed with her condemnation of radical Islam, Wardle sees no difference between a radical Islamist that might blow himself up with a suicide vest or cut off the head of a helpless captive and a Christian American that wants to use properly constituted law to have the Holy Bible used in the classroom. (more…)

It’s quite a stretch to call The Nation’s Max Blumenthal a journalist.

A real journalist is free to have an opinion and even to express it, but he doesn’t fabricate things to make his subject look bad. A real journalist tries to understand his subject and help his audience understand it instead of just subjecting it to abject ridicule.

Blumenthal, who leaped to conclusions in his since-corrected Salon.com article to slander Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe, is an ethically challenged agitprop creator and self-indulgent performance artist. His slurring of O’Keefe, who helped to expose the criminal inclinations of ACORN, as a racist is the same thing that ACORN does when it’s attacked. If you disagree, you’re a racist. Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah!

This left-wing extremist, who wrote the book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party, is so consumed by his hatred of the other side that he can’t think straight. His work is littered with factual errors, non sequiturs, selective use of evidence, glittering generalities, and hyperbole.

Blumenthal hates the Christian right, evangelicals, supporters of Israel, tea party activists, conservatives, and Republicans. This is not an exhaustive list. To him, conservatives are a “movement that’s filled with people who can’t handle individual freedom and the pressures of democracy.” Conservatives also are needy losers seeking redemption, according to Blumenthal: (more…)