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• PFAW: America as a 'Christian Nation' -- A Conversation with Experts on Religion, History, Law and the Constitution.

 

• Evan McMorris-Santoro @ TPM: Rick Perry Goes Full Birther: ‘Let’s See His Grades.’

 

• Tommy Christopher @ Mediaite: James O’Keefe Explains His Attack On Huffington Post’s Sam Stein.

 

• Ben Armbruster @ Think Progress Security: Gingrich Suggests Obama Is Ushering ‘Defeat’ In Iraq, Two Days After Saying He’s ‘Right’ To Withdraw.

 

• Media Matters: MSNBC's Buchanan Stands By His Bigoted Remarks About Homosexuality.

 

• Andy Birkey @ Minnesota Independent: Rick Santorum talks sodomy laws on Bradlee Dean’s radio show.

• Herman Cain seems to believe that the number "45" holds specific significance for his life.

 

• The media finally notices that Michele Bachamnn has a tendency to just make things up.

 

• On a related note, Bachmann's campaign is so dysfunctional that staffers have to publicly release letters announcing that they have quit her campaign.

 

• Rick Joyner does not seem particularly enamored with any of the GOP candidates.

 

• The Florida Family Association is going after Target for advertising on a show on a channel that also airs ads for The Trevor Helpline, which seeks to prevent suicides among gay youth. Seriously.

 

• Finally, Bryan Fischer interviews Kirk Cameron.  You are welcome.

Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation warned members that President Obama is making the military far weaker through his controversial use of drones. While the use of drones has sparked controversy, they were essential in the killing of Col. Muammar Gaddafi and Al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki, and in monitoring Osama bin Laden.

Phillips explains that Obama’s increased use of drones is a result of liberals’ aversion to military action. “Drones are great for a cowardly President,” Phillips writes, “He can order the drone to hit a target and if there is success, he can claim the glory for it and if the drone fails, there is no captured American pilot or the corpse of an American pilot to be paraded about on TV.” Phillips derides liberals for supposedly not caring about the military and claims they are only determined to protect the reputation of a “liberal president”:

Obama is a many singularly devoid of his own accomplishments. There are types of men who must build their legacy on the acts of others. Obama is one of those. His legacy of war is not only dangerous but opens the door for America’s defeat.

What is his legacy?

Obama’s primary military legacy is the use of UAV’s or drones. Drones are great for a cowardly President. He can order the drone to hit a target and if there is success, he can claim the glory for it and if the drone fails, there is no captured American pilot or the corpse of an American pilot to be paraded about on TV.

In Obama’s military, gone are the swaggering fighter jocks of Top Gun or World War Two. Instead, Obama warfare is little more than a very expensive video game.

…

Under the Obama Defense Department, unmanned vehicles are the flavor of the day. Unmanned vehicles do have their uses, but as our primary military strike tool, they leave a lot to be desired.

Of course, for liberals, there is only one consideration with the military. In liberal land, the military must never be a political embarrassment for the liberal President. Yes, they can be around to transport the President. Yes they can be around for disaster relief. But if there is a military operation, they had better not screw up and end up with collateral damage or Americans captured or killed.

That is why Obama and the left love drones so much.

…

Liberals never ask the important question about defense. What are our threats and how do we defend ourselves? Instead, defense is always a political question. How do we have defense without “embarrassing” the liberal President? The answers they come up with are always wrong.

By relying on technology alone, without American airmen and soldiers actually doing the fighting, Obama is creating a legacy like his liberal predecessors.

A hollow defense that may not serve America in her time of need.

A campaign worker for a Republican county legislator in Nassau County, New York was caught using racist and sexist slurs earlier this week against his opponent’s campaign and a family member. The sister of Democratic candidate Carrie Solages, who is black, was filming a campaign worker of legislator John Ciotti while he was trying to put the Republican legislator’s campaign signs on Solages’ office. In the video, the campaign worker calls her a “pig” and yells at her and another African American woman outside the office, “Call animal control so we can arrest ‘em.” Later in the video, he says to another Ciotti volunteer, “We will put them on the back of the bus where they belong.”

Two years ago, workers for the Ciotti campaign shouted down his Democratic challenger during her campaign kickoff speech. This time, Ciotti fired the campaign worker and denounced his remarks, but now a civil rights attorney has accused the Republican incumbent’s campaign of intimidation.

Watch:

Earlier this month, hundreds of pastors across the nation participated in the Alliance Defense Fund's annual "Pulpit Freedom Sunday," during which they openly endorsed or opposed political candidates from their pulpits in a direct challenge to the IRS.

Among those participating pastors was Bishop Harry Jackson who, along with Rev. Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, was featured in a short video from Odyssey Networks about the effort.

In the video, Jackson provided a rather unique explanation for his involvement in opposing IRS regulations that prohibit churches from engaging in politics, asserting that such regulations were put in place in order to prevent black churches from speaking out in support of the civil rights movement:

Of course, the reality is that the prohibitions grew out of an amendment inserted into the tax code by Senator Lyndon Johnson in 1954 (years before he became president) in response to attacks on him by tax-exempt groups that accused him of being soft of Communism during his re-election campaign.

If Jackson is going to be involved in leading this challenge to the IRS, it might be helpful for him to actually know what he is talking about.

Ever since the New Apostolic Reformation had its political coming out party at Rick Perry's recent "The Response" prayer rally, there has been a lot of investigation and discussion of the movement and the brand of Dominion Theology that is promotes ... so much so, in fact, that NAR-affiliated leaders have suddenly begun trying to downplay all their talk of taking dominion.

Os Hillman, the man behind the Reclaiming The Seven Mountain website, has recently suggested that activists should stop using the word "dominion" and instead use the word "influence" because "dominion" make the "secular media [think] that Christians want to rule the world."

On his website, Hillman posts pieces written by Johnny Enlow, author of "The Seven Mountain Prophecy" which asserts that goal of Christians ought to be to establish a "virtual theocracy" in which government leaders will also be religious leaders so that they can present "the nations of the world to the Lord as His possession" and bring about the return of Christ.

On Hillman's Seven Mountains website, Enlow says that the best way for Christians to accomplish this goal is through stealth:

The goal is not just to have Christians in high places, but rather to have Christians who are called to be in high places step into that role. And wearing a "Christian” label on our sleeve isn’t the point. We need to learn to be "as wise as serpents and harmless as doves” and realize that stealth authority and influence are much preferred over overt authority and influence. A low profile diffuses resistance from the opposition.

Hillman's website also sells the works of Lance Wallnau, one of the leading Seven Mountains proponents whose work has been central to the mission to "do whatever is necessary" to claim dominion.

Last week, we discovered a video featuring Hillman, Enlow, and Wallnau discussing the attention that Seven Mountains and Dominionism have been receiving during which Wallnau suggested that using language about "taking over" is fine to use when "preaching to the choir" but such language shouldn't be used in situations where the media or secular audiences are present:

Wallnau: Part of my problem is that people will take my message, link their own interpretation to it and go out and talk about taking down high places, coming against the Devil - I am very particular where I use that language because you don't want to startle the horses out of the barn. If you're talking to a secular audience, you don't talk about having dominion over them, I mean, my gosh, that's what their afraid of, that's what the Left is saying the Right wants to do and the Right is saying the Left wants to do.

So the anxiety is based on misinformation. What I've said today is I want to find out who's anointed with the right ideas and I want to serve them - to be a Joseph, you're going to shape Pharaoh.

This whole idea of taking over, and that language of take over, it doesn't actually help - it's good for preaching to the choir, and it's shorthand if we interpret it right, but it's very bad for media.

Yesterday Bryan Fischer was asserting that Muslims were responsible for slavery in America, so it only stands to reason that it must have been Christians who were responsible for ultimately ending it. 

And that is exactly what Fischer claimed on his radio show yesterday when he declared that it was the Religious Right/Tea Party that deserves all the credit for ending slavery in America:

One of the sessions at the recent Values Voter Summit featured a showing of a new half-hour video produced by the American Family Association called “Divorcing God: Secularism and the Republic.” (Back in the summer it was being promoted as "Divorcing God: Secularism, Sexual Anarchy, and the Future of the Republic.") The video features an array of Religious Right leaders and academics, whose argument can be summarized this way:  America, whose greatness is decaying because the country has turned its back on the God who inspired the founding fathers, is doomed if it continues to allow secularists to push religion into the closet.  It's time for Christians to fight back.

And just to be clear, the God in “one nation under God” isn’t any old generic God, but the same Christian God who made western civilization possible.  It’s familiar to anyone who has followed the Religious Right’s “Christian nation” rhetoric, filled with founders’ quotes about religion and  attacks on the Supreme Court’s rulings on church-state separation.

Among the stars of the video is Princeton University’s Robert George, the Religious Right’s favorite intellectual. George, a leader of the National Organization for Marriage, is one of the authors of the Manhattan Declaration, whose signers fancy themselves potential martyrs for opposing abortion and LGBT equality in America. Others include Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute; Michael Farris, homeschooling advocate and chancellor of Patrick Henry College; and Matthew Spalding, of the Heritage Foundation. The founders clearly believed that God punishes nations, says Dacus, and when countries allow their societies to become amoral, there’s a price to be paid, not just by those individuals but society as a whole.  The video suggests that the current fight between secularists and those who want to preserve the country’s divine foundation is the last stand for the future of freedom on planet earth.

Another DVD being handed out at the Values Voter Summit hit similar themes about the importance of the nation’s foundation on biblical principles.  It features a 2010 “State of the Nation” speech delivered by Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis at the Creation Museum in Kentucky.  Ham argues that the nation is threatened by the teaching of evolution and by the Supreme Court. “There really is no such thing as separation of church and state,” says Ham, who warns that “Christianity in this nation is becoming outlawed more and more in various quarters.”  Ham blames the decline more on church leaders than on secularists.  The Bible is the “absolute authority,” he says, but too many Christians have undermined the authority of scripture by compromising on the truth of the 6,000 year-old earth and great flood described in Genesis.  And that means quoting the Bible in policy debates on abortion and gay marriage has lost its effectiveness.

Meanwhile, French scholar Denis Lacorne has just published Religion in America: A Political History (Columbia University Press, 2011), in which he examines two competing narratives about American identity.  One derives from the secular values of the Enlightenment and reflects a desire to preserve liberty by freeing it from the power of an established church.  The second ties American identity to the Puritans and Protestantism.  These two narratives are reflected in competing notions of church-state separation evident today in our politics and on our Supreme Court.  At a presentation at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. this week, Lacorne suggested that what he calls the neopuritan narrative was developed in the first half of the 19^th century by historians who wanted to resurrect the influence of the Puritans, who he says were generally ignored by the founding fathers in their debates over religious liberty and whether or not to make the Constitution an explicitly Christian document.  (They chose not to.)

On AFA Today with Buster Wilson this morning, Bryan Fischer said he was stunned that Mitt Romney rebuked him, albeit not by name, for having crossed a line in civil debate and using “poisonous language.” As Kyle points out, Fischer has been playing the victim and defended himself during the same interview, saying, “Jesus used far more incendiary and inflammatory language than I have ever used.”

Fischer told Wilson that he was on Romney’s “hit list” since the 2008 campaign and “didn’t anticipate that he would go after me” at the Religious Right gathering. He also expressed bewilderment that Romney would characterize his language as “poisonous,” saying he has “no idea” what Romney was talking about. Fischer and Wilson went on to name People For the American Way’s Right Wing Watch for pressuring Romney to call out Fischer and his unremitting bigotry:

Fischer has a point, as RWW has documented and exposed Fischer’s ultraconservative, intolerant, and discriminatory bombast for years, or as Fischer puts it, waged a “jihad” and “holy war” against him. We have repeatedly asked Republican presidential candidates, congressmen and senators who appear on his radio show and the presidential candidates, Romney in particular, who were sharing a stage with him at the Values Voter Summit to denounce him.

Since Fischer seems to have “no idea” what in his rhetoric could have forced Romney to condemn him, we put together this video to remind Fischer that the word “poisonous” may actually be an understatement: