Only Media Matters can bury the lede of their latest Christian-bashing missive five graphs down into a story. After starting one story on Tim Tebow, the article plunges headfirst off the cliff into insanity by switching gears and blaming poverty in America on … Christians:

… but as the network exaggerates the threat to Christianity in America, it simultaneously downplays — even mocks — the very real plight facing those whom Christian teachings demand be shown compassion: the poor.

Poverty in the U.S. is on the rise. Incomes are decreasing. According to the Census Bureau, right now there are over 46 million Americans in poverty, more than there have been at any time since they started publishing poverty estimates. Fifteen percent of U.S. households are “food insecure,” meaning they lack money to properly feed themselves on a daily basis. They face a host of problems, both quantifiable and not: lack of access to health care, chronic underemployment, disrupted family life, and so on.

But to hear Fox News tell it, the poor don’t have it so bad. Earlier this year, the conservative Heritage Foundation released a report on how the ownership of household appliances demonstrates that “most of the persons whom the government defines as ‘in poverty’ are not poor in any ordinary sense of the term.” Seizing on Heritage’s laughably superficial assessment of poverty, Bill O’Reilly asked: “How can you be so poor and have all this stuff?”

I love when progressives pause their Bible-bashing long enough to pose as sudden experts on Scripture. Oh please, let’s do this. (You’ll see my reason why at the end.)

1) “Poverty in the U.S. is on the rise. Incomes are decreasing. According to the Census Bureau, right now there are over 46 million Americans in poverty, more than there have been at any time since they started publishing poverty estimates.”

And  when did this start exactly? The answer: with this administration. Remember when Newt Gingrich called Obama the “food stamp president?” While the Dixified minds of dog whistle progressives are certain that “food stamps” is code for “black people,” the reality is that more white Americans are on food stamps–in fact, more Americans, period, are receiving government assistance now than ever:

A record 18.3% of the nation’s total personal income was a payment from the government for Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, unemployment benefits and other programs in 2010. Wages accounted for the lowest share of income — 51.0% — since the government began keeping track in 1929.

The income data show how fragile and government-dependent the recovery is after a recession that officially ended in June 2009.

More:

Americans on the government dole received an average of $7,427 each in benefits in 2010, up from an inflation-adjusted $4,763 in 2000 and $3,686 in 1990. Thus, benefits have more than doubled in the last 20 years! Keep in mind that the federal government pays about 90% of these benefits.

How can this be? Under the Obama administration, families have watched jobs disappear, incomes shrink, food and gas prices rise, and the economy downgraded for the first time in a century. Ace of Spades with the numbers:

All while government spending increased at a record pace:

Don’t you think this has something to do with the increased poverty rate? And while we’re waxing poetic on Scripture, what say you of this racket presented in the graph above, of the astronomical increase in non defense federal spending?

WWJD?

(more…)

Acting like you’re allergic to God is the wrong way to grow a big tent. Expecting Christians to willfully suppress themselves — sacrificing principle for popularity — is antithetical to the conservative ideology of individualism.

Leon Wolf takes to task the critics against Rick Perry’s prayer rally in a well-written piece worthy of a read.

(more…)

I’ve been saying this for months: appeal to the egos of any coalition and exploit the cracks. People always choose self-preservation over the greater good, most of the time, with the belief that self-preservation is the greater good.

Newsweek provides yet another piece on this topic, one of a long succession of MSM articles breathlessly seal-clapping in anticipation of the catalyst which accomplishes this.

Blah blah blah – it was this that prompted me to write:

“Most evangelical Christian conservatives I know would at least be uneasy about the prospect of the government leaving the poor to their own devices and having churches pick up the slack,” he says.

Wrong. Heinously, irresponsibly, embarrassingly wrong. This from Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. His sound bites are all about stoking libertarians to feel like disenfranchised underdogs with the goal of rousing them to lash out at the big bully Christian conservatives.

What’s wrong with his statement above? Aside from this giant “rift” to which he alludes and desires? Most evangelical Christian conservatives I know would at least be uneasy about the prospect of the government picking up the slack of caring for the poor due to Christians’ abdication of their role in society as dictated by Scripture.

(more…)

In prepping a children’s program where I’d be recording all the Duggars from TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting, I read a lot about this family on the Internet.

Boy was that unhelpful.

I wanted to make sure I got their characters right while scripting the dialogue for an episode of Life at the Pond.  And even though well over a million people watch this show weekly, the Internet was fraught with misinformation. I’ll spare you the gory details, a quick Google of “Duggars” will provide a couple hundred thousand results and you can get a bowl of popcorn and make a day of it.

But there was one common theme, sometimes from quasi reputable sites, that permeated the Internet:  The Duggar children are captives in their own home.

Before traveling to Arkansas to record, I’d only spoken on the phone with Jim Bob Duggar, the father of all 19.  I watched the TLC program, and that was my only exposure to the children.  They seemed pretty well behaved, which explains why I wanted to use them in this episode in the first place.

Jim Bob was kind enough to invite my entire family into his home.  We ended up spending parts of three days there, and I can tell you first hand, this is no ordinary family.

You won’t find a television in their giant living room.  The Internet is greatly restricted. The girls’ room (9 of 10 sleep in one room – the only exception is temporary, newborn Josie) didn’t have Hanna Montana or boy band or vampire posters or anything like it.

Lady Gaga did not make the cut. (more…)

As the left falls all over itself to claim that building the Ground Zero Mega-Mosque is the perfect chance to “showcase” our “Constitutional freedoms” and our religious tolerance, there is another state where religious tolerance is not as noticeably on display as it is for New York’s Muslims. Naturally, in Vermont, it is the religious freedom of Christians being denied. To be sure, the Old Media is not nearly as interested in this story.

Richard and Joan Downing own a hilltop property in Lyndonville, Vermont and on that property they’ve built a family chapel where they host weekly Catholic services for all. Next to the chapel they have also erected a 24-foot-tall cross called the Cross of Dozulé, a cross that the State of Vermont is insisting that they remove. (Visit The Chapel of the Holy Family website)

How does the State of Vermont justify its demands that the family pull down the cross? Vermont officials are citing environmental regulations that give it the power to determine what sort of construction violates the “aesthetics” of Vermont’s scenery.

Now in their seventies, the Downings built their Catholic chapel in 2005 to serve their large extended family. The Downings’ chapel is used by their seven children, three of them adopted, and the 35 foster children they helped raise over the years. The chapel is also open to the general public. (more…)

Terrific piece here by Lee Smith in the Weekly Standard, filling in the background on the recent firing of Octavia Nasr, a Lebanese Christian Arab, by CNN for her Twitter expressing admiration for one of Hezbollah’s recently deceased ayatollahs:

… why is Nasr being singled out for openly expressing the U.S. media’s default position on Hezbollah, Fadlallah’s one-time colleagues? For instance, does anyone doubt that the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh “respects” the late cleric’s even more vicious rival, Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah, whom he interviewed in the pages of the New Yorker?

The Western press delights in rattling the bourgeois sensibilities of its audience by showing the multifaceted aspects of Hezbollah–it’s not just a militia with an appetite for slaughtering Jews, it’s also a social welfare outfit that provides educational opportunities!–and even collaborates with the Party of God by publishing doctored photographs of Israeli “war crimes.” The op-ed pages of America’s dailies are replete with articles promoting Hezbollah’s “pragmatism” and “moderation” (which also happens to be the position of the president’s counter-terrorism czar John Brennan, and a recent CENTCOM analytical exercise), while reported pieces from Lebanon pass along Party of God press releases as objective analysis. If every U.S. journalist who quoted Hezbollah mouthpiece Amal Saad Ghorayeb as a respected “scholar” was fired, the bars of East Beirut would lose 25 percent of their business.

Smith, an expert on the Middle East whose views and insights deserve a wide audience, goes on to lay out the cozy relationship between the western media and Hezbollah, which is often romanticized as Third World freedom fighters by the Lawrence of Arabia wannabees in the press corps: (more…)

Just weeks after Comedy Central executives censored a program because of its depiction of Muhammad, the network has announced it has a new cartoon series in development that could not be more disrespectful of Christianity. Entitled “JC”, the show will depict Jesus living in contemporary New York City trying to “escape his father’s enormous shadow.”

Comedy Central’s long history of defaming Christianity.

Putting aside  Comedy Central’s religious insensitivity, it takes a lot of guts to attack Christians and wimp out to violent Muslim fanatics. (more…)

Did you ever wish you were one of those big-time journalists in Manhattan, sitting in a nice office, opining on the state of the world each week and getting well paid for it? Would you like to say the same thing over and over again at tiresome length, in prose that reads like it was translated from the original Hungarian? Would you like to occupy and depreciate some of the most valuable journalistic real estate in the country?

Well, you can. All you have to do is follow a few simple rules.

Like most of his fellow, very bad, Op-Ed writers on the New York Times, Frank Rich — non-bestselling author and showbiz wannabee — has a few little bugbears and bogeymen he likes to write about each week in the course of wasting oceans of ink and newsprint in his mind-numbing essays about… well, pretty much nothing, except the usual suspects: show tunes, gay rights, and Those Darned Republicans.

So why don’t you try it?  Just follow the erstwhile Butcher of Broadway’s lead. First, start with some cheap pop-cultural reference: (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 week ago, news began to break in San Francisco about a targeted gay-bashing crime that allegedly occurred on February 26.

Three cousins from Hayward have been charged in San Francisco with a hate crime and assault for allegedly firing a BB rifle at the face of a man they believed was gay, an attack the men videotaped, authorities said Wednesday.

Investigators believe the assailants chose the victim because he appeared to be gay. When the men were pulled over, police found a video camera that was used to film the shooting, investigators said.

Clearly, of course, this had to be a Christian right-wing, tea party, anti-government, bigoted homophobe from the South. Right?

Wrong.

The three men, Shafiq Hashemi, 21, Sayed Bassam, 21, and Mohammad Habibzada, 24, the driver, were arrested. (more…)

“America must always stand on the side of human dignity.” – President Barack Obama

I would like to thank the mainstream media for remembering Gao Zhisheng. One should give credit where credit is due, and in this case, it is well-deserved.

On February 4, 2009, Gao Zhisheng was abducted by the Chinese government. He has not been heard from since.

Mr. Gao is an attorney. According to The Economist, he is “one of China’s ten best lawyers.” He is also a Christian who has represented those persecuted by the Chinese government. His wife writes in the Washington Post that “he fought for those abused by the police, those who had their land stolen by the government and those who were persecuted for their religious beliefs.”

(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…)