As I sit back and listen to more and more evangelical Christians join the AGW bandwagon, I am moved to speak to them about their decision. On the scientific side there is still much to be learned about whether AGW even exists, as many climatologists are not convinced that any undue warming is even happening today, but the theological underpinnings of this for evangelicals is shaky at best.

While I understand that we are to be good stewards of the earth and all of creation, I flatly reject the notion that we should be joining forces with the environmental left in trying to stem the tide of AGW. There is no scriptural basis for the belief that man is powerful enough to destroy this creation of God, and in my view is borderline blasphemy. We are not, I repeat NOT, able to destroy this earth no matter what we do.

Many have searched the Scriptures and have hung their claims on the words of Revelation 7:3 which reads, “…Do not harm the earth, the sea, or the trees…” but that is totally divorced from the Scriptural context. This entire passage is actually the words of the angel that is about to seal the foreheads of the 144,000 from the tribes of Israel; it has absolutely nothing to do with man not harming the environment. In fact the Bible in several places makes clear that this earth is going to last until Jesus returns. Jesus is going to return to Israel, to the very place that he ascended to Heaven and no amount of alleged global warming is going to change that fact. Psalm 24:1-2 tells us that the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness it holds is His. How can we destroy the thing that belongs to God Himself? Further, Ecclesiastes 1:1-11 tells us that the earth abides forever, the sun will rise and set, and there is nothing new found under the sun; in the face of that, the belief by Christians that we can destroy what God has said will abide forever is blasphemy. It is saying that we do not believe what God has told us through his Holy Word, and that we are more powerful than God Himself in that we are convinced that we can destroy His creation.

Correct me if I am wrong, but wasn’t the last election held in this country over on November 4, 2008? After that election the next national elections are not slated until 2010, correct? So could someone please, please tell me why there is such a furor over the losing vice presidential candidate from the last election!?! The way many on both sides of the political spectrum act, you would think that Sarah Palin was responsible for Global Warming, bitter beer face, and I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!

Somewhere along the campaign trail, people decided that Sarah Palin was the bane of the McCain campaign, the scourge if the Republican Party, and the least qualified vice presidential candidate ever…as if that mattered when she was on a ticket opposing the most radical, leftist, inexperienced presidential candidate EVER!!! Somehow the inexperience of Palin as veep overshadowed the inexperience of Obama, although one was running to remake the Republic in his image, while the other was trying to help a flawed warhorse ascend to the White House.

What was amazing was to hear the same attacks that the left launched, as was their place as the opposition, coming from people who ostensibly stood on the same side of the issues as Palin. The leadership of the GOP looked down on her with their studied patrician arrogance for many of the same reasons she was savaged from the left; she only went to a state school for college; she was from Alaska, for goodness sakes!; she had a veritable tribe of children; she was not polished enough for the national stage, and by God she could not best Katie Couric in an interview on CBS News! Take her to the guillotine and take off her political head, because she is finished as a political player in national politics for all time!

That was to be expected from the Republican leadership, which has always seen itself as an exclusive country club an only tolerates those not to the manor born out of the necessity of garnering their votes come election time. The country-clubbers have never had any real use for those conservatives not located along the Boston-DC-Manhattan corridor; they hated Nixon, they hated Reagan, and they only liked George Bush because he had the right bloodline to be a member in good standing. But what I never expected was to see the “rank and file” conservatives turn on Governor Palin the way she did, especially after she decided to resign as governor of Alaska.

When Palin stepped down, many in the rank and file exploded in anger. To them the move just seemed to confirm the bad things being said about the governor in the media; she was ‘erratic’, unpredictable, and just plain strange. Why, oh why, would she just quit on the people of Alaska? No reason that the governor cited was good enough to assuage their anger, even if they were not actually her constituents. Neither the frivolous ethics complaints, nor the massive FOIA requests, nor the vicious attacks on her family were reason enough for the governor to step down. No, it was somehow felt that she owed it to the state of Alaska, the people of America, the Republican Party, and the conservative movement to bear those slings and arrows, no matter how much they impeded her ability to govern, or how personally hurtful the attacks on her family were. And when Governor Palin decided that she had a responsibility to do right by her family first and foremost, and that meant stepping down as governor, she became persona non grata to many people who had supported her in the presidential campaign.

Then came the insistence that resigning as governor meant that Sarah Palin was doomed as a political entity for all time; why the anti-Palin commercials calling her a quitter were already being written. Yet for someone that is a political non-entity, there is certainly a great deal of attention paid to her. If she were so politically radioactive, why do there continue to be hit pieces written about her**cough**Kathleen Parker and Peggy Noonan**cough**? If she’s so over, why does anyone care what she has to say about the current healthcare debate? I mean, she is finished…right?

People constantly come back to one theme with Sarah Palin that I would like to take a little time to address. One of the things people both left and right ask about Governor Palin is, “Why do you like her?” According to many she is just…well…simple. She isn’t polished like most people in politics; she doesn’t come off like she knows everything, and she doesn’t seem like the usual professional office seeker. And those are just the qualities that draw so many people to her. She is a genuine person, not a prepackaged product that is sold to us at election time. She has faults that she doesn’t spend her whole life attempting to cover up; she makes mistakes; she gets knocked around and pulls herself together, and she stands by what she believes in no matter the political costs. People like that about her; heck, I like that about her. In a world where politicians are commodities to be sold to potential voters, Sarah Palin stands out as different type of politician; namely the kind that doesn’t need to be in the political spotlight to be happy. Nowadays that is truly a rarity, and many people appreciate that about her.

None of knows what the future holds for Sarah Palin as a political player, and I’m not going to speculate about it. But I wouldn’t write her political epitaph quite yet; you never know what Sarah from Wasilla has in store for the future!

“Waving the bloody shirt” is a timeworn political ploy first used by the venerable Republican Party in the aftermath of the Civil War. After the war, in order to get controversial legislation passed through the Congress the Republican Party would not so subtly remind the public in general, and the Democratic Party in particular, just who had fought first to preserve, and later to reunite the Union…and whom had worked to tear it asunder. By using such rhetoric, and by sometimes literally waving a shirt allegedly stained with the blood of Union soldiers spilled in the War Between the States, the Republicans were able to silence Democratic opposition to all manner of policies. “Waving the bloody shirt” was used in part to give us the so-called Reconstruction Amendments that outlawed slavery, made the former slaves citizens of the United States, and granted them the right to vote. The tactic was also used to help in the passage of the first civil rights legislation in the history of the Republic in the years of 1866, 1872, and 1875.

In the decade of the 1960s the Democratic Party brought the tactic back with a vengeance after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Nearly every major piece of legislation that Lyndon Johnson wanted passed was foisted onto a mourning public as one of Kennedy’s major legislative priorities, which allowed Johnson to get just about anything through the Congress and onto his desk. It seemed that everything from the Job Corps, to Operation Head Start, to Medicare were packaged by the wheeling-dealing Johnson as one of Jack Kennedy’s most cherished ideas, and in the shocking aftermath of Kennedy’s murder no one wanted to be seen as thwarting the last wishes of King John of Camelot, so several trillion dollars later we are still stuck with LBJ’s Great Society schemes.

Since then, politicians have used some variation of the bloody shirt in nearly every decade, especially when there is a war being fought. John Kerry and his band of lying miscreants used it in the fraudulent Winter Soldier hearings; George H. W. Bush did it when he campaigned in 1988 with the badge of a slain New York City police officer as a symbol of why we needed to fight the War on Drugs; and various politicians use the tactic when they stage photo ops with wounded servicemen to show their support for the troops. The bloody shirt will occasionally recede into the political closet, but it never truly gets retired.

With the death of Edward “Teddy” Kennedy, the Democrats have decided to dust off the bloody shirt again and wave it wildly in a last desperate attempt to resurrect a healthcare bill that seems to be dead on arrival. Senator Robert Byrd (Klan-WV) has proposed that the bill (or bills) winding through the Senate be named in honor of Senator Kennedy, whom everyone recognizes as a staunch supporter of a nationalized healthcare bill in a last ditch attempt at getting the sympathy vote for a bill that the majority of the people of America simply do not want. The line of thinking seems to be that Kennedy’s death should be used as a catalyzing agent to bring any recalcitrant Democrats around on the issue, and to stir up some much needed public support for the failing plan. What this line of thinking ignores is the most obvious point in the whole debate: The people do not support this idea! No matter whom the bill is named for, or said to be in memoriam of, the American people have spoken in poll after poll and the conclusion is always the same: We don’t want government run healthcare or government issued health insurance.

What is really appalling about this idea is the base motives involved in even making the proposal. The vast majority of the members of the United States Senate publicly claim to have been friends and admirers of Senator Kennedy, but before his body could get cold or his family could properly mourn his passing, his “friends” in the Democratic Party began plotting to use his passing as a political tool to pass their beloved healthcare legislation. They had barely begun rewriting the history of his life to make him into some type of tragic/heroic figure before they struck upon the idea to use his death as the bloody shirt they hoped would get them  power over one-sixth of the American economy. Alas, I should not have been surprised with this after the way the memorial for Senator Paul Wellstone was hijacked and turned into an impromptu anti-Bush political rally; yet it is just as unseemly now as it was then, and I had hoped they would avoid exploiting the death of their treasured “friend” for naked political gain.

However, no matter how enthusiastically they wave this bloody shirt, it will probably not have its intended effect. Even if the American people were united in their love and admiration of Teddy Kennedy, it probably would still not be enough to shake them from their fears of the federal government doing to American healthcare and health insurance what they have done with the postal service and Social Security. The American people will not fall for such a shameless ploy, and the Democrats should be embarrassed by their attempts at exploiting the death of one of their own in the pursuit of political power. Alas, we know that they won’t because liberal Democrats may feel your pain, but they feel no shame.

Liberals come in all shapes and sizes, from the anti-nuclear power protestors to the Code Pink crowd. They have many individual concerns that fire their political passions, but there is always an underlying philosophy that unites them, no matter their personal political projects. Because at heart, liberals all believe in the same thing; government should strive to meet al of the needs of the people from cradle to grave, no matter whether or not there is any actual authority for the government to do so. And when push comes to shove liberals recognize that they all need one another in order to achieve the big government goals they have set for the nation. It is rare to see liberals divided over matters of ideology and even rarer to see even the most contrarian liberals culled from the left wing flock.

Conservatives like to look on liberals and say that they are disjointed, or just a loose amalgam of different pressure groups seeking political power in order to serve their specific ends. That is very true of the Democratic Party in general, as well as the GOP, but what we often miss is the fact that liberals almost always unite when the need arises. Look at the current healthcare debate as a prime example; nearly any plan that is passed will eventually have negative impacts on union members and their healthcare plans. Yet the unions have set aside, for the most part, their individual concerns to push for President Obama’s plan in a show of liberal unity. And it is this type of unity that allows the liberals to carry the day on so many important political and policy fights in the country; they will stick together through thick and thin.

On the conservative side, however, that unity does not seem to exist. When people look at the conservative side of the aisle, they do not see a movement made up of people pulling together to reach a single destination. What they see instead is a much fractured group that can hardly stop bickering long enough to even make a show of opposing the left wing agenda being promulgated by the current presidential administration. “National defense conservatives” are at odds with “paleoconservatives” over national defense strategy, while “border security conservatives” clash with “free market conservatives” over whether we need secure borders or a steady stream of sla…uh…cheap labor. And it seems that every other conservative faction seems to have a bone to pick with the “religious conservatives”, who by the way, seem to always bear the blame for the electoral failures of the GOP. The ultimate unity of purpose that is found on the liberal side of the spectrum just seems to be missing from the conservative side.

What I have noticed among conservatives is that whenever conservatives start adding qualifiers to their ideological leanings, there is going to be some internecine battles about to be fought. It seems that many people that want to identify as conservatives also want to claim the mantle of “true conservatives” and wrap themselves in it, while diminishing their fellow conservatives. Case in point: After the 2006 midterm elections when the GOP lost control of the Congress, what was the loudest complaint from many conservatives? The complaint, which as echoed in some quarters after McCain was beaten by Obama, was that the “religious conservatives” or “social conservatives” had cost the GOP the elections, and that they should be jettisoned from the movement. Little time was spent on figuring out what conservatives could do to win back public trust, while finger pointing inside the conservative movement ran rampant. Many conservatives were more concerned with attacking other conservatives that they did not agree with than opposing the massive government intrusions into the financial life of the country.

What conservatives of every stripe should be doing is what the liberals always do when it counts: Focus on the unifying characteristics of their ideology instead of picking fights within the group. There are certain characteristics that should be part of the political DNA of every conservative: smaller government, fiscal restraint, strong defense, secure borders, judges who actually respect the Constitution, and a fair chance for everyone to succeed or fail on his own merits. Whether your particular passion is national defense or fiscal policy, all of the other conservative characteristics are there in you as well. If we can learn to put aside our petty fights and differences when big issues are on the table, we can stall the list to port of our ship of state, and maybe even bring her back to starboard. But we have to be unified to do it, because we are facing an adversary that is relentless, aggressive, and above all else, unified. Only with a similar unity from conservatives can the slide towards socialism be arrested; to continue on a fractured path is to condemn the country to the continued ravages of the left and its ideas.

So to borrow a phrase from the left: Conservatives of the world unite! Because as one of the Founders so succinctly phrased it, “Either we all hang together, or we will all hang separately.”

On this past weekend's Sunday political gabfests a theme arose that was repeated repeatedly: Is the recession over? Most of the answers that I heard were ambivalent on the subject, with most leaning towards a qualified "Yes", which was then used as a jumping off point to praise the wonderful workings of the Obama stimulus plan. Now, we all know that the $787 billion boondoggle hasn't quite lived up to the promise of the program, what with unemployment steadily rising, banks going under, and the government taking over private enterprises in order to "save" them. However, the worshippers of the One-Who-Makes-Oceans-Recede do not see it that way, because BHO works in mysterious ways.

But one of the other things that has caught my attention for a couple of years now, and caused them to perk up again was the trotting out of the canard that this particular recession started way back in 2007, so that all that we are going through right now can be conveniently laid at the feet of the not so dearly departed Bush Administration. By pushing the idea that the recession started in 2007, the unholy alliance of the media and the Democratic Party is able to paint a picture that establishes a narrative where the Bush Administration drove the economy off the proverbial cliff, but the ever heroic BHO slapped on his cape, tights, and boots and swooped in to save the day....just before the economic engine crashed into the ground below. Now our Economic Superman, and his Economic Justice League partners are hard at work using the unlimited powers of the government to set things right! Just like an old Saturday morning cartoon!

However, there is just one tiny bit of a problem with that scenario: it is built on one of the basest lies ever told! It is built on a lie that anyone with a computer, an internet connection, an inclination, and a little bit of time can easily debunk. Moreover, it is only a viable lie if the left is allowed to redefine common terms, as it is wont to do whenever a word has an inconvenient meaning for their particular position.

The only way that the left (i.e. Democrats and media) can even start to advance their 2007 recession story is to redefine what constitutes a recession. As commonly understood, a recession is when the economy goes through two down quarters as measured by GDP, or two quarters of negative growth, also known to us plebeians as "a loss".  However, in order to make the year 2007 the beginning of the recession a new definition was needed, so the left created a new definition of recession that substituted negative growth (a loss) for less growth. It may not seem like a big deal, but in reality, it is a huge change. By defining less growth as an indicator of recession, an economy that continues to grow can be declared to be in a recession in the midst of a growth cycle.

Now, I do not claim to be an economist but I can tell you that by no stretch of the imagination did the recession start in 2007. According to statistics published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the numbers for 2007 told a different story on the economic climate than the Blame Bush crowd would have you believe, to wit:

• GDP for 1st quarter: +1.2%
• GDP for 2nd quarter: +3.2%
• GDP for 3rd quarter: +3.6%
• GDP for 4th quarter: +2.1%

Now, I do not know about you, but that seems like four straight quarters of positive growth! Only by redefining the meaning of recession can a case be made that the current recession started in 2007 on the Bush Administration's watch. In fact, the well-regarded Hoover Institution think tank based at Stanford University reports that for the year 2007:

• GDP rose by 2.2%
• Personal consumption spending rose by 2.9%
• Personal income rose by 3.1%
• Industrial production rose by 1.5%
• The national deficit was down by 34%, to $163 billion
• Unemployment stood at 5%...virtually zero unemployment
• The trade deficit was down 7% to $650 billion
• Consumer prices rose by 4.1%
• Consumer credit debt rose 4.2%
• Producer Price Index rose 3.9%

Even with the last three indicators being generally negative, the economy of the US was in very good shape all through the year of 2007. Moreover, things were in generally good shape in the first two quarters of 2008, with growth rates of 1% and 2.5% respectively; it was not until the third quarter of 2008 that the economy began a downturn (-0.5%) before totally catering in the fourth quarter (-6.3%) with the twin collapse of the housing and banking sectors. Yet for nearly three years we have been fed a steady diet of misinformation about the starting date of the current recession, all the better to turn a tough recession into a catastrophe to be simultaneously blamed on the previous administration and used to advance a radical political/economic agenda.

It is well past time that the Obama administration stops lying to the American people about the measures being taken in the name of rescuing a flailing economy; a stimulus that stimulates nothing, continued government takeovers of private enterprises, and continued rising unemployment rates in the face of government promises to reduce unemployment.  It is also time to stop the lies about the economic conditions during the Bush years and take ownership of the mess that BHO campaigned to take control of, and his policies have made worse. Bush is eight months removed from office now, and continuing to blame him for everything that has gone wrong is a mark of immaturity and unprofessionalism. Barrack wanted it, now he has it, and it is up to him to do something constructive about it; the Blame Bush Pity Party is at an end. As they say in this neck of the woods, "That dog just won't hunt!"

I understand that with a voice like that of President Obama on his side, Dr. Henry Louis Gates doesn't need the voice of a lowly conservative on his side, but he's going to get it. I understand exactly where Dr. Gates and his defenders are coming from, because I have been there. As a black man in the South, I have been pulled over by the police simply for driving through the "wrong" town at night after work, had the officers block me in like I was a bank robber, approach my car with guns drawn, and all to inform me that my tags had just expired. And this with my wife and toddler son in the car. My mother was pulled over in the same town coming from another town where she had been visiting her boyfriend and his mother, with the cops demanding to know where she was coming from and where she was headed. In addition, my father was once pulled over by a state trooper on a lonely stretch of NC 64 between Morganton and his hometown, was insulted with a racial epithet, and wasn't even given a ticket! I had a friend who was harassed constantly by the police in my former hometown, mainly because he was Lebanese.

However, with all that said, I still have great respect for the police and the job they have to do. Moreover, in all reality, I would in no way try to defend Dr. Gates, because even if the police overreacted...which I don't think they did...he was out of line in the way he acted. A neighbor of Dr. Gates who saw what she believed were two people trying to break into the Gates home, which apparently had been vandalized recently, called the police. The police responded to the scene, found two men in the residence, attempted to ascertain who the people were, and were responded to by a belligerent man who refused to produce any identification to prove that he lived in the home. What were the police supposed to do in that instance? Take it on faith that the unidentified man actually lived there, simply because he said so?

The completely dramatic episode could have been avoided if Dr. Gates had handed over some identification, instead of trying to threaten the police officer by claiming to want to contact the chief of police, or by using the time he spent braying about how poorly black men are treated in America in showing them that he actually lived there. If Dr. Gates had acted like a professional, instead of like a professional victim and accusing the police officers on the scene racists, there would have been no problem at all. All that Dr. Gates had to do was something like this: "Officer, I live here. Here is my driver's license, with my home address; I was just having some trouble with the locks on the front door and allowed my frustrations to boil over a little bit. But I would like to thank you for your quick response to the scene, and appreciate the fact that the police are on the job." Would that have been so hard to do? Instead we get baseless accusations of racism, of racial profiling, and demands that the officer apologize for doing his job!

Personally, I think that Dr. Gates and bigmouthed Obama owe an apology to the officers involved for accusing them of racism, and to the entire police department for saying they acted "stupidly". Moreover, black folks in general should distance themselves from this foolish conversation, because it accomplishes nothing in the end. No one was racially profiled, no one in uniform did anything untoward, and none of the officers reacted in an unprofessional manner. They did what we claim we want the cops to do; they responded to a possible B&E with no idea of who lived there, showed no favoritism, and attempted to protect the rights and property of the person who lived in the home. Unfortunately, the person who lived there acted like a jerk and caused a public uproar, when none of the drama was needed.

As for the stories that I related in the opening paragraph, they were all true. However, even with that said, I never held those actions against the entire police forces...just the people involved. The same police force that pulled my mother over, and harassed my Lebanese friend also responded quickly to my sister's home when she needed them, and acted in a very professional manner. In addition, the same highway patrol that treated my father so badly has officers that have allowed me and my late brother skate on several speeding offenses with warnings when tickets were really in order. The actions of a few bad officers do not taint the entire profession, and the totally professional attitude of the officers in the Gates case are what we should want in police officers; namely, men and women who enforce the laws without any respect to persons, professions, race, color, creed, religion, or socioeconomic status. The police have nothing to be ashamed of, or sorry for; the embarrassment should fall on Dr. Gates and the clueless Obama, for respectively accusing good officers of racism and impugning the reputation of an entire police force...simply for attempting to enforce the law. Shame on the race baiting Dr. Henry Louis Gates, and shame on the clueless buttinski President Obama.