After a week of living "off line" (no blogging, no Facebook, very little peeking into cyberspace at all), I return to Vital Signs Blog with a short list of key articles relevant to the culture wars.* Here's our Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitting that Saudi Arabia, our supposed "ally" in the Middle East, is actually a major banker for the terrorists who want to destroy us.
* The Guardian reports how the WikiLeaks cables show (among other amazing things) how the Obama administration used spying, intimidation, manipulation and under the table deals to win support for the Copenhagen global warming accord.
* Standout wide receiver for the Pittsburgh Steelers dares to take on the NFL for the league's hypocrisy regarding player safety...and other matters.
* President Obama proves he can be as pretentious, as exaggerated and as ridiculously phony as any Hollywood publicist as he sings praises to White House honorees Paul McCartney, Oprah Winfrey, et al.
* "In the name of job creation and clean energy, the Obama administration has doled out billions of dollars in stimulus money to some of the nation’s biggest polluters and granted them sweeping exemptions from the most basic form of environmental oversight, a Center for Public Integrity investigation has found. The administration has awarded more than 179,000 “categorical exclusions” to stimulus projects funded by federal agencies..."
* Your tax dollars at work -- and in a very sick, wicked cause. "The federally funded National Portrait Gallery, one of the museums of the Smithsonian Institution, is currently showing an exhibition that features images of an ant-covered Jesus, male genitals, naked brothers kissing, men in chains, Ellen DeGeneres grabbing her breasts, and a painting the Smithsonian itself describes in the show's catalog as "homoerotic." The exhibit, “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” opened on Oct. 30 and will run throughout the Christmas Season, closing on Feb. 13..."
*Wes Pruden gives here a provocative post-mortem of the global warming power play.
Scams die hard, but eventually they die, and when they do, nobody wants to get close to the corpse. You can get all the hotel rooms you want this week in Cancun.
The global-warming caravan has moved on, bound for a destination in oblivion. The United Nations is hanging the usual lamb chop in the window this week in Mexico for the U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, but the Washington guests are staying home. Nobody wants to get the smell of the corpse on their clothes.
Everybody who imagined himself anybody raced to Copenhagen last year for the global-warming summit, renamed "climate change" when the globe began to cool, as it does from time to time. Some 45,000 delegates, "activists," business representatives and the usual retinue of journalists registered for the party in Copenhagen. This year, only 1,234 journalists registered for the Cancun beach party. The only story there is that there's no story there. The U.N. organizers glumly concede that Cancun won't amount to anything, even by U.N. standards...
* And finally, here's a brief clip showing how Ronnie Hastie, a Christian teenager who plays football in Spokane, Washington, was penalized for kneeling in the end zone after scoring a touchdown. The referee, paying no attention whatsoever to how this 2-second gesture has been accepted at every level and in every venue of athletic endeavor, claimed it was an "excessive celebration" and "unsportsmanlike conduct" and he threw a penalty flag directly at the kid.
Will we begin to see more of this? No doubt.
Hastie said he’s pointed up as a gesture to God after every touchdown he’s scored in every game and never had a problem before. “It’s usually one or two seconds long,” he said. “It’s something I’ve done as a tradition.”
Hastie said he asked the ref why he was penalized, and the ref responded that Hastie wasn’t supposed to draw attention to himself.
“That wasn’t the point (of the gesture), so I guess I was a little confused,” Hastie said. “I do that to give glory to my heavenly father, Jesus. He gives me the strength. He’s the one who gives me these abilities in the first place.”
Hastie’s father said his son points skyward in an effort to recognize something more important, actually trying to draw attention away from himself.
