The lies of Michael Moore

The pattern of dishonesty in Michael Moore’s “documentaries” isn’t nearly as well known as should be. It’s amazing, for example, how few people realize that the wonderful health care system he attempted to pass off as available to everyday Cubans in Sicko is in fact available only to foreigners and members of the Cuban Communist party.

Dan Gifford provides an opportunity for you to educate yourself regarding Moore’s habit of fictionalizing the truth.

Time is running out for Obama and his media posse

Steve Huntley of the Chicago Sun-Times has figured out that the Obama administration and its acolytes in the media can only blame George W. Bush for its own shortcomings for so long- and that the excuses are already wearing thin.

Rich Lowry of the National Review makes pretty much the same point.

HT: Drudge,
Real Clear Politics

Jews not allowed at Comen breast cancer conference in Egypt

The Susan G. Comen Breast Cancer organization is holding a conference in Alexandria, Egypt.

Jews are not allowed. Israeli participants- including Nobel prize winners- have had their registrations canceled at short notice.

Apparently the religious bigotry of local authorities is to blame. The Comen organization, which is headquartered in the United States, shouldn’t put up with this.

HT: All in Faber

Jews banned from Comen Breast Cancer Conference

The Susan G. Comen Breast Cancer Conference is about to convene in Alexandria, Egypt.

No Jews are allowed.

Israeli doctors were told on short notice that their registrations had been canceled.

Cancer is a terrible disease. So is religious bigotry. The Comen Foundation- an American group- should insist that the restriction be removed, or else cancel the conference.

HT: Flo Johnson

Britt Hume chimes in

Krauthammer strikes back

Charles Krauthammer answers the Administration’s attacks on Fox News- and White House Communications Director Anita Dunn’s statement that she was joking when she called Mao one of her favorite political philosophers.

Hmmmm, Mr. Axelrod?

Fox’s John Gibson asks what, if- as the White House suggests- Fox News is not a real news organization, MSNBC is.

Good question:

Maybe this lady should just shut up

White House Media Director Anita Dunn- who boasts that Mao Tse Tung, the greatest mass murderer in history, is one of her “two favorite political philosophers-” herein admits that rarely if ever during the 2008 campaign did the media get to cover any Obama story that the campaign didn’t “control.”

HT: Drudge

Fie.

The Bears should have won 35-21 last night.

You can’t turn the ball over three times in the red zone and beat a team as good as the Falcons. And yes, the Falcons are a good team.

Last year, the Bears lost to Atlanta  because of an incomprehensible decision by Lovie to kick short after Robbie Gould knocked through what should have been the game-winning field goal. The decision gave Matt Ryan the field position to set up what really was the game winning field goal with a single completed pass.

This year, it was Jay Cutler throwing the ball to people wearing the wrong color jersey at the worst possible times, the usually sure handed Matt Forte being unable to hang on to said ball at the most critical possible moment, and Orlando Pace picking exactly the wrong point in the game- seconds to go, deep in Atlanta territory, and fourth and one- to jump early and make it fourth and six instead.

I’m not giving up yet. With all respect to Pastor Esget, I fully expect Brett Favre to self-destruct as usual late in the season. But the Bears are now two games back. I think they can beat Minnesota once. I don’t think they can beat them twice.

Right now, I’m looking at 10-6 and a possible wild card. Next week they play the 4-1 Bengals, who are, as their record indicates, no longer pushovers. A loss against Cincinnati would be disastrous.

You have to to better than this, guys. You are better than this.

One more thought: when opposing QB’s have a quarterback rating of only 40 on one side of the field, and of over 100 on the other side, it’s time to get a new cornerback. Fast.

A tale ot two statements

One of them, Rush Limbaugh never actually made- not even close- but it’s been shouted from the housetops that he did. It even cost him an ownership share in the St. Louis Rams.

The second, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn- the critic of Fox News- certainly did make. Nobody has heard about it, though.

They should.

Joe Biden is one heartbeat from the presidency.

And that’s scary.

HT: Real Clear Politics

The last thing the world wants is to "believe in America again"

One wonders how long it will take before Bono and other Europeans, Leftists, Hollywood types, and other such individuals will realize how yesterday talk about the world “wanting to believe in America again” really is.

Barack Obama has been for nearly a year, and has wimped out over and over again all over the globe. He has yielded, and conciliated, and generally played the patsy at nearly every opportunity. Other than getting him the Nobel Prize, it hasn’t really accomplished much. The world may love him, but it respects the country he supposedly leads the less for his alleged leadership.

The world still hates us- and precisely because it wants to. We are a convenient scapegoat. Too much satisfaction is there to be derived from the tough times America is facing economically for the jealousy of decades to simply be forgotten. There is too much reveling to be done in the perceived decline of American power in the world.

No, Bono. The world doesn’t want to believe in America again. That’s the last thing it wants. Hating America is just too satisfying. And now that the second Jimmy Carter is in the White House, if the world really wanted to love us, it would.

It doesn’t- though it does love Barack Obama. In George Will’s telling phrase, it “adores him- and ignores him.”

HT: Real Clear Politics

St. Luke, Evangelist

Marching Orders
Luke 10:1-9
St. Luke, Evangelist
October 18, 2009

Today is the feast day of the only writer of any book of either Testament who was a Gentile.

Luke was a Greek doctor and sometime companion of Paul on his missionary journeys. He was the author both of the Gospel which bears his name, and of the Acts of the Apostles- the New Testament’s record of the spread of Christianity through the ministry of Paul and Luke and Barnabas and Silas and John Mark and the others who were involved in the Church’s first, explosive growth. That being the case, it’s especially appropriate that the reading from his Gospel, which is appointed for his feast day, is about being sent by Jesus into the world to proclaim the Good News to those who haven’t heard it.

The actual context is the sending of the Seventy-Two, a group of those beyond the Twelve Apostles who followed Jesus. They were, in effect, to act as His “advance team,” visiting the places where Jesus Himself would go later. Our Lord’s instructions are remarkably brief. They involve no elaborate preparations. As church growth programs go, this set of directions is remarkably simple and to the point.

The first thing Jesus tells the Seventy-Two to do is to pray that God would send laborers into the harvest. “The harvest is plentiful,” He tells them, “but the laborers are few.” That hardly seems to be the case! Any of us who have ever been involved in evangelism know just what a discouraging task it can be.

There was an area of central and western New York State, which the heretic Charles Finney- who believed that evangelism was simply a matter of salesmanship, involving nothing whatever of a supernatural character- called “the burned-over district.” So much evangelizing had been done there that Finney complained that there was no “fuel” left to re-kindle the fire. People had seemingly become immune to evangelism. Mention Jesus to people in that area, and their eyes would glaze over. Knock on their doors, and they would immediately tell their wives, “Oh, no. Another evangelist. Get rid of him, Martha!”

There’s a sense in which all of America is a kind of burned-over district. Just about everybody has heard about Jesus. That doesn’t mean, of course, that what they’ve heard is accurate- it’s probably not- nor does it mean that they can see what relevance He has to their lives. Unfortunately, Finney’s spiritual descendants- those who look upon evangelism as a sales job- have predominated among those who have taken it upon themselves to spread what they believe to be the Gospel in this country, and it’s often been a mixture of legalism and jargon which has distorted the Message and obscured the Good News. That’s what always happens when mere humans usurp God’s job of making Christians, instead of being content to be His humble instruments.

But Jesus didn’t send the Seventy-Two do be salesmen. Nor did He send Paul andv Luke and their companions to be salesmen. And He doesn’t send us to be salesmen, either. He didn’t tell the Seventy Two to advertise for harvesters, or to recruit harvesters. He told them to pray that laborers be sent into the harvest. From the beginning, He wanted to be sure that they understood that- Finney to the contrary- God is the One Who is in charge when the Gospel is shared. The Holy Spirit, Who operates through the Word, is the only “soul winner.” Our job is to speak the word.

We are not, the Church Growth people to the contrary, told to succeed in filling the pews, and the only way to fail in our mission is to fail to do the one thing we’re commanded to do: to speak the Word. It does not return to Him empty. It either converts, or it plants a seed, or it judges. But it never fails. Never.

But first, we are told to pray that God would send laborers into the harvest- because whether we can see it or not, the harvest is plentiful. There are multitudes who are carrying burdens too heavy for them to bear, and who think that what we have to offer is a greater burden still. But the yoke of Jesus is easy, and His burden is light. He sends us, not to add to their burdens, but to be the means by which He lifts them.

He calls us to be, in the words a D.T. Niles, “one beggar telling another where to find bread.” He offers the Seventy Two no courses in evangelism. The procedure He lays before them involves a notable lack of premeditation. He tells the Seventy-Two not to bother with a moneybag, a knapsack, or even with shoes. He tells them not to waste time saying “hi” to that neighbor they pass on the road. The task is too urgent. The job is too big.

There is a scene in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in which the resurrected Aslan, accompanied by Edmond and Lucy, recruits his army for the coming battle by breathing on those the Witch has turned into stone, and bringing them to life again. Aslan, of course, is Jesus, Who breathed on His disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Pneuma in Greek means “spirit.” But it also means “breath-“ just as the Old Testament Hebrew equivalent- ru’ach, what God breathed into Adam so that Adam became a living creature- means both “breath” and “spirit.”

The task is not to sell. The task is not to debate. The task is to share the breath of God, the Spirit of God, Who alone can give spiritual life and Who alone can win souls- and who does so through the Word about Jesus.

Jesus sent the Seventy-Two out as sheep among wolves. He sends us out that way, too. Despite the size of the harvest, our perception is right about one thing: we live in the midst of a culture that is profoundly hostile to the Word.

But the world of the First Century was that way, too. We may be rejected when we speak of the forgiveness of sins and the gift of eternal life through Jesus. But we will not be made into pariahs for our faith. We will not be boiled in oil, or skinned alive, or beheaded, or crucified upside down, as tradition says the Apostles were. We will not be exiled, as was John- the only one of the Apostles to die a natural death. But Jesus does not promise us that the fruit our witness bears will always be visible, or that it will always lead to acceptance. Sometimes the Word judges rather than converts. And sometimes even when it converts, it bears fruit years later.

But we are not asked for results. We are simply sent out as the Seventy-Two were, to bear witness to the coming of the Kingdom of God.

The Word that we are called upon to speak does sometimes judge, even if we ourselves are commanded not to. People don’t like to hear that Word of judgment. But here’s a point, which the latter-day Finneys forget, but which is of the very essence: we are sent, not as sheriff’s deputies bearing a writ of condemnation, but as liberators, bearing a word of pardon. The Word of judgment- where the Word does judge- does so only in order to prepare the way for the Word of healing. The Law always prepares the way for the Gospel. We are sent, in the words of the pastor from Giertz’s The Hammer of God, as a visitor to the cell of the condemned bearing a letter of pardon in his pocket.

We are sent, not to indict, but to deliver God’s pardon. Our task is to represent, as the gang-bangers put it; to show the colors, to be whom God the Holy Spirit has, through baptism and the Word, has made us.

And what is it that baptism and he Word have made us? Forgiven. Healed. Pardoned. Strengthened. We are sent out as exactly what the people we encounter are: ordinary, fallible people no better and no worse than they, but whose failings are washed clean every day by the water of our baptism, and by the blood of Jesus.

We are sent out as people who are often confused and bewildered and at a loss, just like those to whom we are sent- but who by God’s grace trust that God has our times in His hands, and will bring us through our stumbling journey through all the detours our own willfulness and lack of trust take us on and all the disasters life can dish out to an eternal home.

We are sent as people who make mistakes, who drop the ball- and who, worse, act and speak selfishly and sometimes hurtfully to others, but who in Christ have both forgiveness for our sin and the means of healing for the relationships that it bends and sometimes breaks. We are sent as people who screw up.

We are sent out, not as people who have arrived, but as people who know where we are going; not as people who succeed, but as people whose shortcomings are forgiven and, at length, healed; as people in need, but whose need has been met- and continues to be met every day.

We are sent out as people in the same boat as others, as so many beggars telling other beggars where bread can be found. Some will listen; others may not. That is not our concern. We are not called to bring people to Christ. We are not called to prosper, to fill the pews, or to grow as a congregation.

We are called to be nothing more or less than what our baptism has made us: unworthy people made worthy by the merits of Jesus; sinners forgiven by a grace God wants to share with all human beings; people drowning in a sea of our own unworthiness, made worthy and kept alive by a life preserver in the shape of a cross, able to keep any number of the drowning people we encounter afloat as surely as it has rescued us.

We are called to finally do nothing more or less than to invite the drowning people all around us to grab hold, and live. Or rather, to give them the opportunity to be grasped through the Word by the One Who has rescued us, and who is able to bring them to safety as surely as we.

May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Amen.

Slandering Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh has been forced out of a group seeking to purchase the St. Louis Rams on the basis of certain racist statements attributed to him by Leftists- but which, in fact, he never made.

The Wall Street Journal opines.

This is a truly bad idea

This post is about a product that would be inappropriate if it commemorated any president. That it commemorates our first African-American president adds an element of apparent racism to what otherwise would be mere disrespect and bad taste.

I saw the commercial below the other night. At first, I was certain that I’d dozed off, and was dreaming. But it’s apparently real. And it is so incredibly disrespectful not only of the president but of the office he occupies that I can hardly find the words.

Walgreen’s has pulled this product from their shelves. Good. Perhaps its originator, Joseph Pedott, had only good intentions. But he should have known better- and given the fact that I saw the ad only the other night, apparently this thing is still being sold.

Barack Obama as Jimmy Carter, and his fans as Chauncey Gardiner

David Rothkopf of Foreign Policy magazine says that Barack Obama’s foreign policy is rapidly turning him into the second coming of Jimmy Carter.

Charles Krauthammer is even more brutal, comparing the rhetoric of Obama’s wide-eyed admirers in Stockholm and elsewhere to that of Chauncey Gardiner, the blithering innocent in the 1979 film Being There whose banal and inane ramblings are mistaken by the Washington intelligentsia for profundity.

Obama’s naive and ineffectual foreign policy views may impress the Nobel Committee, but thus far they has made him the most ineffectual president in the international arena since- well, Jimmy Carter.

HT: Real Clear Poltics

Rasmussen: Huck leads 2012 GOP pack

A Rasmussen Poll reports that former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is favored by the most Republicans to be their 2012 candidate for president.

Huckabee gets 29%, compared with 24% for the man usually seen as the front runner, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who probably would lead the pack if she wasn’t signaling her disinterest so strongly, gets 18%, followed by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich with 14%, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty with four percent.

Six percent of those polled prefer another candidate, while seven percent are undecided. Pawlenty’s relatively poor showing may be a reflection of low name recognition.

Meanwhile, according to the same poll, 81% think it at least somewhat likely that the Republican candidate will defeat President Obama in 2012. Half- 50%- think it very likely.

HT: Drudge

Ready to be patronized?

Noam Chomsky is an extremist, I grant. But listen to his rhetoric here- not about Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage (although what he says about them is offensive enough), but what he says about the average American.

Chomsky does what liberals do best: patronize and marginalize. And he does an absolutely superb job of illustrating the truth of what he finds it so regrettable that the yokels are being told by Limbaugh and Savage and others about people like himself.

You know. The yokels who are bitter and cling to their guns and religion, as somebody or other said a while back.

HT: Drudge

If this is a joke, it’s a bad one

I saw the commercial below on television the other night. I thought I must have stumbled across a re-run of Saturday Night Live or Mad TV.

But apparently not.

This is in such amazingly bad taste that I don’t know quite how to react. It also strikes me as vaguely racist. It’s certainly disrespectful of the highest office in the land, as well as of the man who occupies it.

No purple here

Peggy Noonan draws the contrast between President Obama’s “bring us together” campaign rhetoric (which many of his supporters continue, incredibly, to associate with him), and his divisive rhetoric and actions since taking office.

A “purple America?” Not, it seems, under this president!

HT: Real Clear Politics

The only one

Tom Norris- boyhood friend and neighbor of economist/comedian Ben Stein- is a unique figure in American history.

He is the only man ever to win the Congressional Medal of Honor, and have his life saved in a separate incident by another hero- awarded the Medal of Honor for doing so.

HT: Real Clear Politics

Moore "confused?" At the very least!

John Stossel reacts to propaganda film maker Micheal Moore’s latest attack on the American system by calling Moore “confused.”

That’s a little like calling Osama bin Laden “rude.”

The geysers of Enceladus: a clue to possible life on Saturn’s moon?

Controversy rages as to whether the saltwater geysers on the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus mean that it might have a potentially life-bearing ocean under all that ice, as astronomers suspect Jupiter’s moon Europa- and perhaps also Ganymede and Callisto- may have.

We’re talking about a really, really huge distance from old Sol here. The theory is that the metallic cores of moons orbiting gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn experience huge tidal pulls by both the planets they orbit and other passing moons. This, astronomers theorize, could generate heat much the same way rapidly bending a paper clip warms the medal- perhaps enough to make it possible for life to gain a foothold.

So is the geyser portrayed in the picture evidence of potential life, or just “Cold Faithful?” The jury is out.

That could have been me one afternoon in 1967…

I have always loved football, and wanted in the worst way to play it. But alas, when I got to high school, I discovered that I just wasn’t the type.

I went out for the Frosh-Soph team my freshmen year, and lasted one practice. I simply wasn’t in good enough shape to even give it a decent try that first year. But between my sophomore and junior years, I did a lot of running and calisthenics. I went out for the varsity my junior year.

I tried so hard that Coach Stedman didn’t have the heart to cut me. Or rather, I had come out after all the cuts had already been made, and he decided to humor me rather than give me the bad news all by myself. He carried me, as he put it, as “Luther South’s one-man taxi squad.” What that actually meant was that I got to practice and to stand on the sidelines with the team during games. I got a “Certificate of Participation,” and was technically a member of the team; some of my friends who really were members of the team speculated that if we had won the league championship (which we very nearly did), I would- incredibly- have actually gotten a letter.

But I never suited up for a game. I never actually wore a uniform. Nevertheless, one Saturday afternoon, as I stood there on the sidelines, I had my chance to be a hero.

It was a very windy day. We had the ball deep in the other team’s territory. It was fourth down and long. Coach Stedman decided to attempt that rarity in high school football, the field goal.

The kick was blocked. Since field goals are so rare in high school, every player on both teams reacted as if it had been simply a missed extra point. They all assumed that the ball was dead.

But I knew better. Unlike the guys on the field- on both teams- I’d followed football closely enough for long enough to realize that on an attempted field goal (or actually, even on an attempted extra point) a blocked kick that never crossed the line of scrimmage remained a live ball. Anybody on either team could have picked the ball up and run with it- and likely scored a touchdown, because it would have taken everybody on the other team by surprise. They would never have realized what had happened before it was too late.

But alas, I was on the sidelines. I considered yelling or gesturing or something to the guys on the field. The trouble was, of course, that if somebody on the other team had understood what I was saying….

So I decided not to take the chance. After shouting a couple of times, and failing to get the attention of any of our players, I just shut up. Nobody seemed to notice that the referee never blew his whistle. The officials just stood around, waiting. Finally, after a long enough pause that one would have thought that somebody on the field would have noticed, the officials looked at each other, shrugged- and finally blew the play dead.

As I recall, we won the game anyway. But I have always remembered the moment when I could have scored a touchdown- if only I had been on the field. Or been responsible for a teammate scoring one, if I hadn’t been so afraid of being to blame for the other team scoring one.

That incident comes to mind tonight because I just read on the Internet that something similar happened in a high school game in Michigan this past weekend. But this time, somebody on the sideline who knew the rule (A coach? An injured player? John Glenn High School’s “one man taxi squad?”) did holler and gesture and carry on- and caught the attention of one of the players on the field, who picked up the ball and- while the other team was celebrating- ran into the end zone, scoring the winning touchdown.

Watching the video reminded me of my one chance to have been a gridiron hero, even standing on the sidelines. And now, looking back on that play from a distance of twenty two years, I wish I’d taken the gamble and tried a little harder to get the attention of one of the guys on the field wearing red that afternoon.

The Emperor’s nudity causes further comment

Debra Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle has noticed that the BBC has noticed that the globe just isn’t getting warmer any more- and that there are major problems with the notion that the human race was responsible for past warming.

HT: Real Clear Politics

Breathtaking cluelessness for the White House Press Office

Sometimes somebody in government says something so utterly and mind-bogglingly clueless that one stops and wonders how our the mail gets delivered. Never was this more the case than with an interview given by White House Communications Director Anita Dunn on CNN as part of the Administration’s ongoing war with Fox News.

Savor the utter failure to grasp the essentials of the topic manifest in the following quotation: “What I think is fair to say about Fox — and certainly it’s the way we view it — is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party. They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.”

Two things. First, whatever criticism one might be disposed to offer concerning the objectivity of Fox News, a compelling case can be made that CNN- and ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, and the mainstream media generally- are at least as much a wing of the Democratic Party, and for the same reasons. And secondly… well, let’s let Fox News respond.

“It’s astounding the White House cannot distinguish between news and opinion programming,” Fox News Senior Vice President Matt Clemente replies. “It seems self-serving on their part.”

Yeah. It kinda does- especially since every newspaper in America has an editorial page.

The problem comes in when opinion and news coverage melt into each other. The regularity with which this happens in the mainstream media has been a conservative talking point for at least a generation, and with good reason; upward of ninety percent of working reporters regularly vote Democratic in presidential elections. With all the ethical grounding and integrity in the world, the filters of opinion and worldview through which any journalist views the news inevitably color how he or she reports it. The trick is for a journalist to be aware of those filters, and to strive to minimize their impact on his or her reporting.

Those who see the often outrageous liberal bias in the mainstream media as an intentional plot of some kind are in pretty much awash in the same sea of naive and self-serving cluelessness as Dunn. While commentators like Glenn Beck are no more news reporters than MSNBC’s… well, pretty much anybody on MSNBC, of course Fox News tilts to the Right in its news reporting. Its journalists, too, are only human, and Fox News does tend to serve as a kind of refuge for that endangered species, journalists whose personal politics are something other than hard Left.

The point Dunn misses is that even to the degree to which it does so, it doesn’t even begin to compensate for the tilt to the Left reflected in news coverage by major outlets just about everywhere else.

HT: Drudge

Desertion in the face of the Enemy

Why do members of the clergy remain silent amid the storms of the Culture War?

Doug Giles offers us not one reason, but ten.

BTW, the “Enemy” in the title of this post is not the people who disagree with the Christian world view. He is much more ancient than they are- and far more guileful.

Science vs."Scientism"

Andrew Sullivan- a doctrinaire Homosexualist- would doubtless disapprove of the notion that his views on how his own sexual orientation should be treated by society constitute an ideology. This does not stop him, of course, from speaking of the attitudes of certain Christians toward the relationship between their beliefs and public policy (attitudes which Sullivan understands far less than he knows) as “Christianism.” Sullivan claims to be a Christian himself. Doubtless the rejection of his sexual values by the historic Christian tradition constitutes, for Sullivan, an example of “Christianism.”

In this interesting article, William McGurn argues in the Wall Street Journal that a kind of doctrinaire ideology of materialism has developed in our culture which he terms “Scientism.” McGurn defines Scientism as the belief that “science alone can speak truth about man and his world.”

Not all scientists- or materialists, or atheists- are adherents of Scientism, McGurn points out. The wonders of scientific discovery itself inculcates far too much humility for that in many scientists with a thoroughly materialistic world view. But alas, there are also those like Richard Dawkins- or New York Times reporter Gardiner Harris, who recently rather snarkily reported that many scientists see “outspoken religious commitment as a sign of mild dementia.”

The contrast between humble agnostics like Jay Gould or Carl Sagan, on one hand, and doctrinaire ideologues like Dawkins is obvious. The former have open minds; the latter, as McGurn observes, are “every bit as dogmatic as the William Jennings Bryans of yesteryear.”

One might, perhaps, usefully think of them as Scientism’s fundamentalists.

The Blackhawks set a record- and remind their fans why they hope

Anyone who wonders why we long-suffering fans of the Chicago Blackhawks are so hopeful about this team need not go back to last year’s impressive regular season or amazing playoff run. All such a person needs to do is to look at tonight’s game.

Calgary opened the game by scoring five unanswered goals. Cristobel Huet was pulled after allowing three goals in the Flames’ first five shots . Backup Antti Niemi didn’t look much better. Things didn’t look good after the first period.

The Hawks then proceeded to tie an NHL record and set a team record for the biggest comeback in history by scoring five unanswered goals of their own- before winning it on a goal by Brent Seabrook 26 seconds into overtime.

The UC must have rocked tonight. Oh, how I wish I’d been there!

CBS’s Schieffer: The prize is the loser

Bob Schieffer of CBS’s Face the Nation says that the lasting impact of the odd decision to award President Obama the Nobel Peace Prize for having good intentions is that the prize is devalued in the eyes of people to whom it once meant a great deal.

Interestingly, Schieffer admits in the process to his own bias in favor of Obama’s foreign policy.

Meanwhile, Robert Tracinski of The Intellectual Activist frankly labels Obama’s award “the Nobel Prize for Moral Posturing.”

HT: Real Clear Politics

School superintendent defends song praising the Glorious Leader

The superintendent of that Burlington, N.J. school where the students were videotaped singing a song glorifying President Obama in terms reminiscent of North Korean kids singing the praises of Kim Sung Il or Soviet children singing about Stalin has pointed out that the song was part of a celebration of African-American history in general, and says that there was no intention on anyone’s part of advancing a political agenda. Uh-huh.

The teacher who taught the kids the song has since retired.

HT: Drudge

Russell Simmons: off the wall and over the top at HuffPo

John Nolte over at Big Hollywood points out a stunningly bizarre rant by Russell Simmons at HuffPo on how God is gonna “get” America if we don’t get behind Barack.

Nolte lists ten points made by Simmons and asks us to try to find the only one that wouldn’t scare the living daylights out of any reasonable person.

Go ahead. Try your luck.

Mayans say the world will NOT end in 2012

According to Mayan Indian elder Apolinario Chile Pixtun, all the hype about the Mayan calendar “running out” in 2012 and the world ending is just that- hype.

It seems that while 2012 will mark the end of an era in Mayan belief, plenty of Mayan calendars do, in fact, refer to dates after that year- in fact, as many as two thousand years later.

Sorry, Harmonic Convergence fans.

HT: Drudge

Hopefully, this time the story of the Visitors from Canis Major won’t be such a dog

In 1983, NBC produced a miniseries about reptilian aliens from a planet orbiting the Dog Star arriving on Earth, dressing up as humans, and posing as benefactors in order to conceal their intent to eat us and steal our resources. They told us that they had a desperate need for our garbage, or some such thing, and in exchange for our giving it to them they supplied us with cures for various diseases and various technological breakthroughs. But then, they “exposed” a “plot” by Earth’s scientists and political leaders to conceal the fact that we’d had cures for cancer and other horrible diseases all along. Public opinion turned against the very people who could have saved us, and the “Visitors” began their takeover of Cattle Pen Earth.

All in all, a Sirius situation.

A small group of humans, however, learned the truth, and organized a resistance movement, borrowing Winston Churchill’s “V” for victory as its symbol- and providing the miniseries with its title in the process.

The miniseries eventually spawned another miniseries, a full blown series (that lasted all of one season), and finally a novelization by sci-fi author A.C. Crispin. All in all, the V story struck me as a first-rate plot undermined by mostly bland, one-dimensional characters; the villainess- the evil Diana- and a friendly alien defector played by Robert Englund of Freddie Kruger fame were really the only interesting characters in the show. True, there were a couple of elderly Holocaust survivors among the Resistance, but the movement was deprived of credibility by the predominance in its leadership of young, blond Southern Californians with perfect teeth and no personality. Despite the interesting plot, I found it hard to care very much about most of the people with whom I was supposed to identify. They always seemed as if they would have been more at home riding a surf board than hurling a Molotov cocktail.

Diana swallowing that live guinea pig was a great gross-out scene, though- especially the way the lump moved ever so slowly down her throat.

ABC has remade the miniseries, and will broadcast it beginning next month. Those who have seen the pilot give it good reviews. Here’s hoping the story gets a better telling this time.

On the folly of a best-of-five playoff series in baseball

While I was rooting for the Dodgers in the NLDS (given the obnoxiousness of so many Cardinal fans, how could I not?), I really don’t take all that much pleasure in the Cardinals suffering the same fate that my Cubs suffered the previous two years.

Really, the parallels are scary. Not only has the Central Division champion been swept in the first round three years running, but each year they have managed to score exactly six runs in those three games.

666. The Number of the Beast. This is the sort of thing I would have expected to work for the Cardinals, not against them.

Seriously, though, if it’s any consolation to Cardinal fans who read this blog, this is just one more example of the utter absurdity of a best-of-five series deciding anything in baseball. Even best-of-seven is pushing it. One best-of-seven World Series you might be able to justify. This business of having to win two short series before you even get to the World Series is absurd. It’s all about who happens to get hot during a stretch of two or three weeks- after playing 162 games over a period of six months to get there.

As Jean-Paul Sartre might have said, C’est absurd.

ADDENDUM: Looks like the Twins were swept by the Evil Empire, too. Sorry, Pastor Esget!

BBC notices that global warming isn’t warming the globe

The BBC has admitted that 1998 was the warmest year on record- and that global warming hasn’t been warming the globe for the past eleven years.

In a rare fit of objectivity for a mainstream news source, it has actually acknowledged that natural causes, rather than human activity, may be responsible for most of the warming that has happened.

Meanwhile, Al Gore- who rarely debates his vocal assertion that the planet is headed for climatic disaster due to human abuse of the environment- actually took questions on the subject at a meeting in Wisconsin. When an Irish filmmaker challenged Gore about what he said were a series of inaccuracies in his film An Inconvenient Truth, Gore pointed out that a British court had upheld its showing to English schoolchildren. When the filmmaker attempted to challenge Gore further, his microphone was cut off:

Approximately two hundred protesters showed up to register dissent from Gore’s position.

HT: Drudge

Obama Nobel demoralizes Chinese human rights activists, but elates Fidel

The vapid silliness of the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to an American president whom nobody pretends has done anything to deserve it is underscored by the demoralization it has caused among human rights activists in China. The possibility that one of their number might have received the prize had been much discussed, and the gesture might have achieved some positive good in a nation governed by the most murderous regime in recorded human history.

It made Fidel Castro happy, though.

Meanwhile, Peggy Noonan- with her usual blend of eloquence and insight- calls the award “wicked and ignorant,” while British columnist Minette Martin says that Obama should have declined it.

HT: Drudge and Real Clear Politics

Sermon for Trinity 18

All
Matthew 22:34-46
Trinity 18
October 11, 2009

Why did the Pharisees ask their question? The text says that it was to “test” Jesus. What would the “right” answer have been? Was his response a matter of academic interest? Did they want Jesus to settle an argument? Were they curious about how to go about winning the maximum number of brownie points from God with the minimum amount of effort?

All of the above, probably. Though they would have been surprised to hear it, the Pharisees were sinners, just like the rest of us. The Old Adam in each of us misses the point of the Law. It wants to rank the Commandments, as if the violation of the even least of them, being an affront to God, were not of ultimate seriousness. The Old Eve in each one of us wants to excuse our own sins by telling itself that, after all, they’re not as bad as somebody else’s. The fallen nature in every ever human being- Christians included- wants, first of all, to be accepted by God because we’re such spiritually hot stuff, while at the same time winning that acceptance with the minimum possible amount of effort.

No, the Old Adam just doesn’t get the Law. It clings to the illusion that it can, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s phrase, “stand before God and say, ‘I have done my duty.’” And if its sin is pointed out to it, no problem. It can always try harder next time.

Dr. Hein back at River Forest used to call the kind of Law the Old Adam goes in for “watered down Law.” An awful lot of it gets preached in Christian circles, and even more of it is practiced. “Watered down Law” is the kind that elicits a resolution to roll up one’s spiritual sleeves and try harder.

We don’t know the exact motivations of the Pharisees who asked Jesus which was the greatest commandment, other than that it was “to test Him.” But Jesus did. He knew the human heart. He knew its fondness for trying to tame and domesticate God’s Law to serve the needs of the ego, or to get by with offering God less than is His due, and keeping the difference for oneself. And so Jesus declined the gambit. He refused to rank the commandments, so as to justify offering God less than total obedience. And He refused to preach watered-down Law to the Pharisees.

The opposite of watered-down Law, Dr. Hein used to say, is full-strength Law. It does not elicit a determination to try harder. It does not flatter the Old Self’s ambition to stand before God and claim to have done its duty- if possible on the cheap. Instead, it crushes us. It brings us to the point of despair. It makes it absolutely plain that when it comes to meeting God’s minimum demands, we haven’t, we don’t, and we can’t.

Jesus let them have it with both barrels! Which is the greatest commandment? “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.”

All. Every single bit. Jesus doesn’t tell them that God has to simply come first. He points out that He comes last as well as first- and everything in between, too. God, He points out, deserves every last bit of their allegiance, and every last scrap of their loyalty. His due is nothing less than every last bit of us. Every thought, every word, and every deed must be taken captive to His glory and His will.

No matter how well you obey, it’s not enough. God is entitled to better obedience. No matter how well you serve Him, it’s not well enough. God is entitled to better service. He’s entitled to every scrap of our intellect, every crumb of our devotion, and every bit of our very selves.

And we don’t give it to Him, do we? Oh, of course the Pharisees might have claimed that they did. Pharisees always do. Denial, as a certain freshman United States senator used to point out on Saturday Night Live, isn’t just a river in Egypt! But the more honest and self-aware a person is, when confronted with the heart of the Law as Jesus confronted the Pharisees, the closer to the surface is our knowledge that when we claim to serve God with all our heart, all our souls, and all our minds, just as He commands us to, what we are really doing nothing is more or less than trying to stave off the despair that would arise from the honest realization that we haven’t, we don’t, and we can’t meet His minimum demand of us.

It’s that despair to which the Law seeks to drive us. It’s that despair to which Jesus sought to drive the Pharisees. That’s the most important role of the Law: to show us that our best just isn’t good enough.

But wait- He wasn’t done yet! They’d asked him what the greatest commandment of the Law was. Well, He was going to tell them what the second greatest commandment was, too. And it was not calculated to lessen that rising sense of despair.

Skeptics about the Faith often pont out that many unbelievers and followers of other religions have lived noble lives of self-sacrifice, and served humanity with great dedication. “Do you mean to tell me,” they ask, “that God would refuse a place in heaven to such people just because of their religion?”

But even if we ignore their failure to keep the first and greatest commandment- we, who are pf the Faith, also fail it- the greatest philanthropist who ever lived fails the second, too- and that regardless of his religion.

The second commandment is not merely that one must love one’s neighbor. It’s not even that one must, on occasion, subordinate one’s own welfare to that of one’s neighbor. No, the second commandment Jesus lays before the Pharisees is that they must love their neighbor as themselves. And not merely occasionally, or even usually or customarily. No more than we are only occasionally or ordinarily expected to love God with all our hearts and souls and minds does God demand that we only occasionally or ordinarily love our neighbor as ourselves.

What would it look like if we did? That man standing along the expressway with the sign, “Will work for food.” What would be do for that man if we truly loved him as we loved ourselves? Could we drive on without being sure that he had a place to sleep tonight? The hospitals are full of people who never get visitors. The nursing homes are still fuller. How would we spend our leisure time if we truly loved our neighbors as ourselves?

How many times do we find ourselves acting selfishly and thoughtlessly even toward our closest neighbors- those of our own household? As it is with loving God, so it is with loving our neighbor: no matter how complete our devotion and self-sacrifice, it will always fall short of all- and “all” is the minimum God demands.

My vicarage supervisor was fond of pointing to Micah 6:8- “He has shown you, O man, what is good; And what does the LORD require of you, but to do justly,to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?-” and calling it “the John 3:16 of the Old Testament.” But it’s not. We know all too well what is good. God has written it on our hearts, and not even the ravages of sin have erased it. What is good is that we love the Lord our God with all our hearts, and with all our souls, and with all our minds, and our neighbors as ourselves. But that’s just the problem: we haven’t, we don’t, and we can’t.

No, there is only one John 3:16. And it’s the only answer for our utter and abysmal failure to meet God’s minimum standards for us, for our sad and sorry failure to love God with every moment with everything we are and everything we have, or our neighbors remotely as much as we love ourselves.

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life.” God loved us with all His heart, and all His soul, and all His mind. He loved us enough to become one of Us, and to love us even to the point of death. And He loves us that way still.

We do not love our neighbors as ourselves, even when we love them the most deeply and sincerely. But God loved us more than He loved Himself- loved us and gave Himself for us. We love Him because He first loved us. We love our neighbor because in loving our neighbor, we love Christ. And if our love for God and neighbor always remains a sad and paltry thing- and it does- then our knowledge that in His love He stood in the breech and made up for what was, what is, and what in this life always will be lacking in our own by His total and complete and reckless giving of Himself inspires in us a gratitude and a love and a desire to be like Him that leads us to love Him and our neighbor ever more in this life, until in the next life our love is like His.

What does it look like to love God with all one’s heart, and soul, and mind? What does it look like to love one’s neighbor as ourselves? It looks like Jesus. It looks like our God and our dearest Neighbor hanging in absolute love and total self-abandonment on the cross for our failure to love. Through the dying to sin and rising to life that is the substance of the baptized life, through the Word of the Gospel, and through the Meal in which He comes to live in us that we might live in Him, leach day- inperceptable though it may be to our own eyes- He is formed in us, and through us more and more loves the Father as He deserves to be loved, and loves our neighbor as He loves us- with the absolute and total and all-sufficient love of the One Who daily is being formed in us, and who is our only righteousness.

May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.

Can anyone take the Nobel Prize seriously anymore?

First Al Gore, and now this.

President Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. And the question is being asked all over America and the world: “For what?”

In reality, it’s not for anything he’s done- other than giving in to tyrants and bullies at every opportunity, he hasn’t really accomplished anything worth mentioning in the international arena, any more than he has at home- but rather, in Chris Wallace’s phrase, for “not being George W. Bush.”

Yes, the role of the United States in the world has changed under Barack Obama. It has diminished. Other countries don’t have to take us nearly as seriously as they used to. And that’s what President Obama got the Nobel Prize for.

At least some in the UK, anyway, understand just how silly this award is- and what a mockery it makes of what was once a prestigious award. And in an unguarded moment, one White House staffer responded to the news by asking, “It’s not April 1, is it?”

HT: Real Clear Politics, Drudge

A major achievement

With their victory over the Hawks tonight- a victory largely achieved because a lack of discipline on the Hawks’ part led to too many penalties- the Wings have now tied the Lions in victories for the season with one.

Just had to let loose with that one in Glen Piper’s direction!

Ice fishing on Europa?

For a long time, astronomers have believed that Jupiter’s moon Europa (along with two of the other Galilean moons, Ganymede and Callisto- all three of which, along with the volcanic Io, are visible in a good pair of binoculars) is the best candidate for extraterrestrial life in our solar system.

The three moons are believed to be covered by global, ice-encrusted oceans, containing sufficient oxygen to support life and warmed by the tidal pull on their cores exerted by Jupiter and its other moons.

But now, evidence is increasing that Europa in particular is an even better candidate to be the abode of life than we had thought.

Sigh.

3-2 Wings.

Same old same old.

Iran admits to playing the U.S. for suckers at Geneva

We have got to get these gullible amateurs out of Foggy Bottom- and the White House!

Is it 2012 yet?

A short off-season

One thing about going deep into the playoffs is that it makes for a short off-season. The Hawks play the Dead Things tonight, and I’ll be listening on the computer once again.

It’ll give the Cubs something to do as well. I’d hate for them to be bored during the National League playoffs.

Anyway, this will be our first test this season against our main competition for the Central Division and Western Conference championships, and the team that embarrassed us in the Conference Finals last year. Maybe we’ll get some indication of how much we’ve improved since then.

It’s early, though. Probably best not to read too much into tonight’s outcome either way. Detroit has lost both games they’ve played so far this year, and you know that’s not going to last.

But beating Day-twah is always nice, just on general principles.

George Will nails President Obama

“The world adores him,” the bow-tied conservative Cub fan recently remarked, “and ignores him.”

Our ineffectual chief executive continues to make Jimmy Carter look macho by comparison- and he is rapidly turning into a joke.

Victor Davis Hanson makes the same point- but without seeing the humor in the situation.

HT: Real Clear Politics

I have a new blog

For several years I’ve run an email support group, The Scrupe Group, for Christians suffering from scrupulosity, the spiritual manifestation of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. This subgroup of the Church has an even more acute need than most for the proper distinction between Law and Gospel.

I’ve started a new blog in connection with the Group. Stop by if you get a chance.

Bradstad will run for governor again!

Former Iowa Governor Terry Branstad- the only likely Republican candidate whom the polls say would unseat incumbent Governor Chet Culver- has filed papers essentially beginning his campaign to do just that.

Branstad currently holds a twenty point lead over Culver in the polls.

Interestingly, the polls do say that a rematch between Culver and the man he defeated in 2006, former Congressman Jim Nussel, would be too close to call.

Here’s a commercial the Draft Branstad people already had prepared:

HT: The Iowa Republican

So where is health care the best- England, Canada…. or the USA?

Those calling for a greater role for the Federal government in health care need, perhaps, to step back from their rhetoric and examine just what nationalized health care has done to the quality of patient care in two democracies with whom we have close ties: the United Kingdom and Canada.

HT: Real Clear Politics

So House is going back to work.

I figured he would. The big question, of course, is not how he’s going to stay off Vicodin. It’s how he’s going to be both House and not a jerk at the same time.

American Toryism, or why John McCain is a conservative

Here’s an interesting article on the contrast between American-style conservatism (what Andrew Sullivan calls “Palinism”) and British-style Toryism.

Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe are “moderates.” John McCain and Tom Ridge, the author persuasively argues, are really British-style conservatives.

While I am very much a social conservative, in other ways I have some sympathy for what the article describes as “Toryism.” I have a tough time fitting into the American political spectrum, too. So do members of a conservative group with which I have little in common- the Libertarians, whom Robert Bork describes as a kind of hybrid between liberals and conservatives.

In any case, a great deal of unrest on the American Right is caused by the fact that it is composed of an ideologically diverse lot. Maybe a better understanding of how all those mutually-antagonistic ideologies fit under the broad banner of “conservatism” will help everybody make sense of a political spectrum which can be rather confusing these days.

ADDENDUM: Here is an article on where the potential 2012 candidates stand on the conservative spectrum, including some helpful graphics.