The Detroit News has video excerpts of the pertinent testimony of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick where it is alleged that he perjured himself during a whistleblower trial on August 30, 2007:

http://info.detnews.com/video/index.cfm?id=1235

From the Southern Bapist Theological Seminary website:

R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has undergone successful surgery for the removal of a pre-cancerous tumor from his colon. The surgery was performed in Louisville on March 20. Results of pathological testing on the tumor are not yet available, but doctors expect Mohler, 48, to have a full recovery. The tumor was discovered during a routine colonoscopy in February.

The Mohler family has expressed appreciation for all concern, prayer and encouragement.

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. In the current issue of The American Conservative he gives an assessment of the Bush Administration that I am warming to:

In 2001, President Bush took command of a massive, inefficient federal bureaucracy. Since then, he has substantially increased the size of that apparatus, which during his tenure has displayed breathtaking ineptitude both at home and abroad. Over the course of Bush’s two terms in office, federal spending has increased 50 percent to $3 trillion per year. Disregarding any obligation to balance the budget, Bush has allowed the national debt to balloon from $5.7 to $9.4 trillion. Worse, under the guise of keeping Americans “safe,” he has arrogated to the executive branch unprecedented powers, thereby subverting the Constitution. Whatever else may be said about this record of achievement, it does not accord with conservative principles.

As with every Republican leader since Reagan, President Bush has routinely expressed his support for traditional values. He portrays himself as pro-life and pro-family. He offers testimonials to old-fashioned civic virtues. Yet apart from sporting an American flag lapel-pin, he has done little to promote these values. If anything, the reverse is true. In the defining moment of his presidency, rather than summoning Americans to rally to their country, he validated conspicuous consumption as the core function of 21st-century citizenship.

Should conservatives hold President Bush accountable for the nation’s cultural crisis? Of course not. The pursuit of instant gratification, the compulsion to accumulate, and the exaltation of celebrity that have become central to the American way of life predate this administration and derive from forces that lie far beyond the control of any president. Yet conservatives should fault the president and his party for pretending that they are seriously committed to curbing or reversing such tendencies. They might also blame themselves for failing to see the GOP’s cultural agenda as contrived and cynical.

Finally, there is President Bush’s misguided approach to foreign policy, based on expectations of deploying American military might to eliminate tyranny, transform the Greater Middle East, and expunge evil from the face of the earth. The result has been the very inverse of conservatism. For Bush, in the wake of 9/11, ideology supplanted statecraft. As a result, his administration has squandered American lives and treasure in the pursuit of objectives that make little strategic sense.

. . . . . . . .

Social conservatives counting on McCain to return the nation to the path of righteousness are kidding themselves. Within this camp, abortion has long been the flagship issue. Yet only a naïf would believe that today’s Republican Party has any real interest in overturning Roe v. Wade or that doing so now would contribute in any meaningful way to the restoration of “family values.” GOP support for such values is akin to the Democratic Party’s professed devotion to the “working poor”: each is a ploy to get votes, trotted out seasonally, quickly forgotten once the polls close.

HT: Rod Dreher

My friend Joe Carter at The Evangelical Outpost has an excellent post today on being certain about your faith.

…while I may embrace and defend my opinions with firmness, it is a humble form of certitude in which I have to acknowledge that there is a statistical likelihood — whether trivial or significant — that I could be wrong. Not so, however, when it comes to matters of faith. I don’t doubt that God exists or that the Bible is his Word. I don’t doubt that Jesus was born of a virgin, that he died and was buried, or that he rose again after three days in the tomb. I don’t doubt that he died for me, a truly wretched sinner, or that I will spend eternity in His presence. I would find it easier to doubt my own existence than to doubt the Nicene Creed. Maybe I’m delusional (though I doubt that) but I have few doubts about my faith. My certitude is admittedly personal. I believe I have justification and warrant for my beliefs and that if pressed, I could attempt to provide proof and evidence for these claims. The level of “proof” I could give, though, would not provide the same level of certitude for you that I find sufficient for me. Proof is rather limited in that regard. I couldn’t prove that Joe Carter exists much less prove that he likes the color blue, that he kissed Christie Cozart in the 7th grade, or that he hates referring to himself in the third person. While I can’t prove those things beyond a shadow of a doubt, I don’t doubt them at all. Similarly, my certainty in my faith isn’t based on what I can prove to other people or even, for that matter, what I can prove to myself.

Read the full post here.

Senator Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech was political rhetoric at its finest. While skillfully denouncing the words of his pastor and spiritual mentor, Barack Obama left intact a tacit endorsement of the philosophical worldview that fuels the incendiary rhetoric of Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

When Rev. Wright says things like,

“The government gives them (black people) the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three strike law, and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America?’ No, no, no! Not ‘God BLESS America,’ ‘God DAMN America.’ That’s in the Bible. For killing innocent people. God Damn America for treating her citizens as less than human,”

it’s not mere ranting. Those words betray a commitment to a political philosophy which is an amalgam of Marxist socialism and a truncated view of the gospel of Jesus Christ which has as its chief goal the obliteration of Anglo/European influence on American life, culture, and politics. You don’t even have to listen very carefully to Rev. Jeremiah Wright to hear this philosophy loud and clear:

“…[Jesus] cares about what a poor black man has to face every day in a country and a culture controlled by rich white people…Jesus was a poor, black man who lived in a country, and who lived in a culture that was controlled by rich, white people. The Romans were rich. The Romans were Italian, which means they were European, which means they were white. And the Romans ran everything in Jesus’s country.”

Senator Obama has a two decades long association with Rev. Wright and his church, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Trinity’s commitment to Black Liberation Theology is clearly outlined in its mission statement on its website. In an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News Channel’s Hannity and Colmes television program on March 2, Rev. Wright confirmed that the work which informs his worldview is the writings of James Hal Cone, widely considered to be the founder of Black Liberation Theology. Joe Carter cites Cone in a recent post, as having written:

Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community … Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.

The media, both conservative and main stream, is focused on the incendiary rhetoric of Jeremiah Wright while totally ignoring the political/religious philosophy fueling the words. Obama skillfully (and successfully) convinced us that he repudiates the words of his mentor and spiritual advisor, but what politician wouldn’t? The real question we should be asking the Senator to answer is this: do you repudiate the philosophy of Black Liberation Theology espoused by your church? He can distance himself from Rev. Wright, referring to him twice in his speech as his “former pastor” (the Rev. Wright retires at the end of March), but the fact remains that Obama remains a member of a church whose mission is rooted in Black Liberation Theology.

Christian Apologist Robert A. Morey characterizes the goals of Black Liberation theology as “…to turn religion into sociology, Christianity into a political agenda, Jesus into a black Marxist rebel, and the gospel into violent revolution. They are more interested in politics than preaching the gospel.” Morey points out that ministers like Jeremiah Wright who espouse this worldview seek to “…manipulate embittered young blacks by turning their feelings of inferiority, alienation, jealousy, hopelessness and self-hate, into racist rage against whites, Orientals and affluent blacks who are conveniently blamed for their lack of personal initiative to better their lot in life.”

If you are bewildered as to why an up and coming politician would remain a member of a church whose pastor preaches hate against whites and Europeans, the answer is NOT because he agrees with the rhetoric. He rightly condemns the rhetoric. The only logical answer has to be because he agrees with the church’s philosophical worldview. Senator Obama has yet to publicly denounce the political philosophy that inspires the rhetoric, and in fact Obama’s “A More Perfect Union Speech” bears the marks of Black Liberation Theology in at least two parts.

First, the call for a merging of spirituality and political philosophy:

“In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand: that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.”

By the way, nowhere does Scripture command us to “be our brother’s keeper.” On the contrary, it was Cain who, after killing his brother, justified the killing on the grounds that he WASN’T his brother’s keeper. It is this kind of scripture twisting that is used to justify wealth redistribution and to condemn the capitalist system in which our democracy is rooted.

Second, his veiled assertion that the private creation of wealth is “the culprit” in racial tension in America:

“Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.”

There is no question Senator Obama repudiates his pastor’s hate speech. The question that remains unanswered, however, is does he repudiate a political philosophy that calls for the suppression of more than half of the American population and is fundamentally at odds with American democracy?

…before the Democrats decide to actually hold a FAIR primary in Michigan (or not!)

Get yours here: http://www.cafepress.com/buy/anti-obama/-/pv_design_prod/p_storeid.232703516/pNo_232703516/id_26331607/opt_/pg_/c_/fpt_

HT: Schuyler Rogers

…that Obama concluded his speech addressing issues of anti-American statements by his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, by NOT saying, as EVERY politician does when he concludes a speech, “God Bless America”??

Ellison Research has the numbers in this interesting study of what Americans believe about sin.

How many times did Obama refer to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright as his “former pastor” in his race speech today? The man is STILL his pastor, at least until March 31 when his retirement is official. Unless, of course, Obama is no longer a member of Trinity United Church of Christ which Wright is STILL the pastor of, which I doubt.

I’m listening as I type this post to Barack Obama’s “Race in America” speech and the irony is overwhelming: The first black man who has a legitimate chance at becoming a major party nominee for President of the United States, and possibly even winning the White House, giving a major address which embodies the contradiction of the claim that opportunity for black Americans is unequal to that of white Americans.

How much more opportunity will black Americans need before we can stop talking in terms of black and white?