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Now every Sunday at 6:00 pm PT hosts Babe Huggett and Warner Todd Huston discuss and examine current political events, put them in historical context and follow trends to their logical conclusions through a conservative, Christian viewpoint. Scheduled guests will enjoy their own feature interview segment. Phone in comments from listeners always welcome!

On Tonight’s Episode of Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Conservatism

Date / Time: 1/03/2010
6:00 PM Pacific/8:00 PM Central/9:00 PM Eastern

Category: Politics Conservative

Call-in Number: (347) 237-4040

Our featured alpha and omega guest of the Twelve Days of Christmas, Selwyn Duke, will help us finish up the 2009 Christmas Season with a look at the meaning of January 6th as the Epiphany, as Twelfth Night and what he thinks the year ahead will hold for us with the wise guys in Washington, DC.

Or CLICK HERE for the show website.

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No Church on Christmas, Mr. President? Of Course Not, Communists Don’t Do Church

-By Warner Todd Huston

Time Magazine reported that President Obama and his family didn’t attend a church service this Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. He is, to my knowledge, the first president to skip a Christmas Eve service for a long, long time.

But, while it is interesting to note that Obama is quite unchurched in a position where profession of the Christian faith has been nearly of a piece with the office, his skipping church — again — shouldn’t surprise anyone. Obama is not really much of a Christian after all.

Time notes that Obama has only attended church three times in the year he’s been in D.C. as our president and even when he pretended to be an active member of Trinity United, the uncouth Chicago church where the Racist Reverend Jeremiah Wright belched his hate on a weekly basis, he never attended with regularity or fervor.

Obama’s claims at being a Christian are entirely a political move, not a religious one. It seems plain that he only attended the hate church in Chicago because that’s where all the high profile blacks in Chicago went. He went there to say “look at me” as opposed to “God save me.”

Naturally, many will jump into the discussion here and say it’s all because he’s a Muslim, to which I must disagree. He is not a Muslim. But he really doesn’t present himself as much of a Christian, either. I won’t presume to read his soul, but who cannot see that his entire political and philosophical upbringing makes of him more of an atheist by way of communism as opposed to a lapsed Christian?

An ingrained anti-religious ideal is the hallmark of Obama’s political philosophy as it was created by Karl Marx. Remember, in the introduction to a book on critiques of the philosopher Hegel, Karl Marx wrote, “Die Religion … ist das Opium des Volkes,” which means religion is the opiate of the people (or the masses). A fuller quote in that introduction finds Marx calling religion a thing that is the “sigh of the oppressed creature.”

Of his new philosophy, communism, Marx later wrote, “But communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis…”

From Marx, their philosophical father, the left has launched one war against Christianity after another. The ACLU, for instance, has been on a crusade to destroy Christianity for decades and few liberals have any interest in attending church at all. Most profess to hate religions, but especially Christianity.

This is the climate that gave birth to Obamaism. This is the anti-Christian fervor in which Barack Hussein Obama’s very core principles were formed. So, it really isn’t a surprise to see him jettison his church attendance once he got to the highest office he could ever hope to reach. He no longer needs the cloak of this pretension. He no longer has to pretend he is a Christian, no longer has to waste his time — in his eyes — attending a church service.

Barack Obama is truly liberalis modernus. Unchurched, godless, and callous about those who are. A major question remains, though. Will a nation that still finds 78% of its citizens claiming the Christian faith continue in its support of such a godless president?

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Israel a Menace to Bethlehem?

by Maggie at Maggie’s Notebook

Did you know that Israel has destroyed life for Christians in the town of Bethlehem to the point that Christians have exited in a “massive flight.?” Have you ever thought of Israel being a menace to Bethlehem? No, I had not thought of either of these, but the worldwide mainstream media reports this untruth every year at the Christmas season.

WorldNetDaily has this story, and I found it via AmerIsrael. According to WND’s Aaron Klein, Reuters, the GuardianUK and others, are in the habit of reporting, each year at this time, the terrible treatment of Christians by Jews in Bethlehem. If you do not have time to read the portions below, or time to go directly to WND to read the entire piece, read the three paragraphs in bold text below, and you will get the idea.

TEL AVIV – Like clockwork, every year at this time reporters file misleading and, in some cases, outright false reports about the state of Christmas in Bethlehem [blaming Israel for the demise of the Christian population].

They claim Israeli policies have wreaked havoc on the city’s economy and that Israel is responsible for the massive flight of Christians from Bethlehem. Yet the news media completely ignore Muslim intimidation and get their facts wrong on documented history and the true state of affairs in this ancient town.

A widely circulated Reuters article, for example, laments “Christmas cheer hasn’t spread to all of Bethlehem’s residents,” squarely blaming “an Israeli wall” for the town’s misfortunes. Britains’ Press and Journal also paints a dismal picture of Bethlehem, claiming the city is “divided by a huge wall” and that the “26ft-high security wall completes the isolation of Bethlehem and prevents it from ever expanding.” The piece also wrongly states that about 2 percent of Bethlehem’s population is Christian.

An opinion piece by Austen Ivereigh in the London Guardian, meanwhile, also claims Bethlehem is “shuttered and depressed” by an “Israeli separation wall.”

“I don’t just mean the structure itself – 30 feet high, bristling with watchtowers and formed of grey concrete slabs – but where it is built, deep into the town itself, far into the West Bank, severing Bethlehem from Jerusalem and ensuring the relentless expansion eastwards of Jewish-only settlements built on land seized from Palestinian farmers,” the Guardian piece claims. Regarding the “wall” that “surrounds” Bethlehem: Israel built a fence in 2002 in the area where northern Bethlehem interfaces with Jerusalem. A tiny segment of the barrier, facing a major Israeli roadway, is a concrete wall that Israel says is meant to prevent gunmen from shooting at Israeli motorists….

Amazingly, Ivereigh’s piece in the Guardian falsely claimed: “Bethlehem is shuttered and depressed not because of Koran-wielding thugs but because the wall has smashed its economy. The town has become a ghetto, severed from lands to the north and west by the wall, and to the south and east by settler-only roads and a forest of checkpoints, leaving it barely able to trade.”

Simple demographic facts disprove this contention entirely. Israel built the barrier seven years ago. But Bethlehem’s Christian population started to drastically decline in 1995, the very year Arafat’s Palestinian Authority took over the holy Christian city in line with the U.S.-backed Oslo Accords.

Bethlehem was more than 80 percent Christian when Israel was founded in 1948. But after Arafat took control, the city’s Christian population plummeted to its current 23 percent. And that statistic is considered generous since it includes the satellite towns of Beit Sahour and Beit Jala. Some estimates place Bethlehem’s actual Christian population as low as 12 percent, with hundreds of Christians emigrating each year.

As soon as he took over Bethlehem, Arafat unilaterally fired the city’s Christian politicians and replaced them with Muslim cronies. He appointed a Muslim governor, Muhammed Rashad A-Jabar, and deposed of Bethlehem’s city council, which had nine Christians and two Muslims, reducing the number of Christians councilors to a 50-50 split.

Arafat then converted a Greek Orthodox monastery next to the Church of Nativity, the believed birthplace of Jesus, into his official Bethlehem residence.
Suddenly, after the Palestinians gained the territory, reports of Christian intimidation by Muslims began to surface.

Christian leaders and residents told this reporter they face an atmosphere of regular hostility. They said Palestinian armed groups stir tension by holding militant demonstrations and marches in the streets. They spoke of instances in which Christian shopkeepers’ stores were ransacked and Christian homes attacked.

They said in the past, Palestinian gunmen fired at Israelis from Christian hilltop communities, drawing Israeli anti-terror raids to their towns.

In 2002, dozens of terrorists holed up inside the Church of the Nativity for 39 days while fleeing a massive Israeli anti-terror operation. Israel surrounded the church area but refused to storm the structure….

Some Christian leaders said one of the most significant problems facing Christians in Bethlehem is the rampant confiscation of land by Muslim gangs.

One religious novelty store owner recently told WND that Muslim gangs regularly deface Christian property.

“We are harassed, but you wouldn’t know the truth. No one says anything publicly about the Muslims. This is why Christians are running away.”

The City of the birth of Christ, the birth of King David, and the tomb of Rachel is under Palestinian governance, and has a Muslim majority population.

In 2007 the city had approximately 25,000 residents with Christians making up 20% of the citizenry. With life made difficult for Christians, and the fact that Christians propagate at a much slower rate than Muslims, the Christian presence in Bethlehem is dwindling.

Read about Christmas observances by Christians in Bethlehem here and about the Church of the Nativity and the birthplace of Christ here.

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Yes, Virginia, There Is A Santa Claus

Every Christmas, after the presents are opened and breakfast is being made, I read this first in the paper (ye olde parental units get the paper, and they live in NJ). It is a Christmas classic that has always touched my soul. While some people outside of the Tri-State area have heard of it, rarely do papers outside of the NY-NJ-Conn area see it in print, and it always surprises me when I run across someone who has never heard the first line. I humbly bring it to you, and hope it touches you as much as it touches me:

Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus

Editorial Page, New York Sun, 1897

We take pleasure in answering thus prominently the communication below, expressing at the same time our great gratification that its faithful author is numbered among the friends of The Sun:

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?
Virginia O’Hanlon

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a sceptical age. They do not believe except what they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus? Thank God he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!!!

And a Merry Christmas from deep down in my heart to all my friends and visitors out there.

If you would like to know the background on the letter, you can go to the 2004 posting of this.

Merry Christmas, Everyone!

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Merry Christmas 2009

Copyright © 2009 Big Dog. Visit the original article at http://www.onebigdog.net/merry-christmas-2009/.

My traditional Christmas message:

To My Liberal Friends:

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2010, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere . Also, this wish is made without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishee.

To My Conservative Friends:

And a Happy New Year. Wishing you good health and great prosperity in 2010.

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