The Twittering of the Church

The new fascination with Twitter has now entered the Church. In fact, some congregations are actually utilizing it as part of their worship services.

“It’s a huge responsibility of a church to leverage whatever's going on in the broader culture, to connect people to God and to each other," says Todd Hahn, pastor of Next Level Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, and an apologist for Twitter use in services.

But Dom Vincent has a few penetrating questions about how the new technology effects meaningful intellectual and social life.

...Who is setting the terms of what constitutes a healthy community? Is it the “wider culture” or the Body of Christ?...

The problem is that Twitter, as a tool, isn’t a fulcrum robust enough to “leverage” much of anything that can seriously be called prayer—which is the food of communion with God—or conversation—which is the life blood of friendship.

The apostle Paul in the book of Ephesians makes an extended case for the unity of the Church and by doing so shows us what true community looks like. Paul uses his favourite image of what the Church is: it is a body with each member being organically connected to the other. Despite our differences we are united through the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ, our saviour and the one true King. We have access to God the Father through the Spirit (Eph. 2:18). The eternal, loving, insoluble community of the Trinity is the foundation of our community in the Church. Paul, however still must encourage the Church to work out that unity in practical ways. We are to bear with one another (4:2), maintain an eagerness for unity (4:3), speak truth to one another in love(4:14,25), put our hands to good use in order to share with those among us in need (4:28), use our mouths to speak in ways that are fitting and encouraging (4:29), and show kindness, tenderheartedness and forgiveness. These are the activities of a healthy community, one in which its members are working in concert for each other and in service with each other.

This rich vision of community life in so many respects shows up much of what passes for community in general within our plugged-in and on-the-go lifestyles. With little time to actually establish and maintain meaningful relationships, we content ourselves by merely making digital “connections” with others, however tenuous. Twitter, and Facebook, and MySpace allow us the illusion, at least, that we are in community with others even as we run breathlessly to the next thing. By relying too heavily on these technologies we should not be surprised if the very concept of community is eroded within our understanding. This erosion occurs at least along two lines: 1) a supplanting of the healthy give and take of conversation with “updating”, a practice that, given our self-centeredness, easily becomes narcissistic and 2) a loss of an ability and opportunity to really commune with another person in person...

It's an intriguing essay Dom Vincent pens and you can read the rest of it here at Christian Heritage.

Judge Nixes Oklahoma's Ultrasound Law -- Democracy R.I.P.

A judge reversed an Oklahoma state law yesterday that required women seeking abortions to receive ultrasounds and a physical description of their "fetus" from their doctors. But that's not all. In overturning the law, Oklahoma County District Judge Vicki Robertson also reversed conscience protections that allowed doctors, nurses and other health care providers to refuse to participate in an abortion on moral or religious grounds.

Why bother with state legislatures anymore?

Since we have become a people ruled by an elite band of black-robed solons who answer to no one but themselves, why keep up the expensive charade? Let's reinvest the money we now have to pay for politicians' salaries, their hefty benefit packages, the reporters that cover their irrelevant activities, and the cost of elections in the first place. We can recycle our statehouses into museums or concert halls; we could still get some use out of them.

And then we could just lay back in comfort, knowing that we no longer need worry about any of those niggling responsibilities of democracy. We will have surrendered them (and with nary a whimper) to the enlightened judicial corps.

Democrats Deny Democracy; They Prefer Manipulation & Coercion

We are living in scary times, folks, as the Democrat commitment to a socialist oligarchy gets more ruthless by the day.

* Here's a Fox News report about Democrat Congresspersons conducting reprisals against 52 insurance companies for refusing to jump off the cliff when President Obama told them to.

* The President tried the "holier than thou" route with wacky liberal religionists like Jim Wallis yesterday, quoting Scripture out of context and for his own self-aggrandizement. As Ben Smith points out, the Prez "freights health care reform with a great deal of religious meaning, and veers into the blend of policy and faith that outraged liberals in the last administration." And though he referred to opponents of his health care debacle as "bearing false witness," FactCheck.org emphasizes that he ended up bearing plenty of false witness himself.

* Team Obama's "pay czar" Kenneth Feinberg (his official title is, no kidding, "Special Master for Compensation") is teaming up with Congressional leaders like Barney Frank to grab more and more power to tell businessmen how much they'll be allowed to earn. Can you believe the audacity of these tinpot dictators? The Constitution, law, fairness, precedent, shame -- all mean nothing to them.

Public vs Private Option

Daniel Milburn over at The Gravy Train considers President Obama's health care plan: "A simple question illustrates the issue: If you had the option of using a public rest room or a private rest room, which would you chose?"

Read the rest of Daniel's reflections (the kid is wise beyond his years) right here.

Today's Posts

Now, Now; You Can't Use the Word, "Evil." Well, Unless You're Describing Conservatives.

Nebraska's Ben Nelson Holds One (Count 'Em, One) Town Hall Meeting in Omaha

Ted Turner Wants to Step On The Gas

When Is a War Not a War?

100,000 Die Yearly from Infections Picked Up in Hospital (and Other Items You Might Not Know About American Health Care)

Obama's Post Office Reference Works Against His Health Care Scheme

Robert Novak Tributes

Your Wednesday Tea Break (Johnny Cash)

Now, Now; You Can't Use the Word, "Evil." Well, Unless You're Describing Conservatives.

William McGurn deftly pops this liberal balloon.

Remember when polite society treated a politician's use of the word "evil" as a sign that the old boy was dangerously lacking upstairs?

We saw it in 1983, when Ronald Reagan famously used the word in a speech to describe the Soviet empire. What a rube! New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis spoke for the smart set when he wondered what Soviet leaders must think: "What confidence can they have in the restraint of an American leader with such an outlook?"

We saw it again in 2002, when George W. Bush characterized North Korea, Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq as an "axis of evil." Tom Daschle, a Democrat and then Senate majority leader, warned that "we've got to be very careful with rhetoric of that kind"; former President Jimmy Carter called it "overly simplistic and counterproductive"; and comedian Will Ferrell parodied it on Saturday Night Live...

With all this history, you would think Harry Reid (D., Nev.) had ample warning. Nevertheless, the Senate majority leader invoked the e-word himself last week at an energy conference in Las Vegas, where he accused those protesting President Barack Obama's health-care proposals of being "evil mongers." So proud was he of this contribution to the American political lexicon that he repeated it to a reporter the next day and noted the phrase was "an original."

And then . . . nothing. No thundering rebuke from the New York Times. No outburst from Mr. Carter. In fact, it's hard not to notice that the good and gracious people who instinctively recoil at words like "evil" or "un-American" (the preferred term of Mr. Reid's counterpart in the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi) have all been silent...

In fairness to the senator, perhaps history will one day vindicate his "evil monger" statement as a prophetic Gipper moment. If so, the legions of white-haired grandpas and grandmas now descending on our nation's town halls will be exposed to be as irredeemably evil as, say, Iran or the USSR. When asked if the senator has any second thoughts about calling American citizens evil, a spokesman emailed me to say that Mr. Reid's only regret is the "hate-filled rhetoric and signage" being used "to disrupt civil dialogue."

Plainly the Nevada Democrat is taking no chances. Instead of pressing the flesh at a real town hall this August, Mr. Reid has opted for a tele-town hall late next week. Aides say the format allows him to reach thousands more people. Of course, it also protects him from having to come face to face with all those evil mongers out there.

Nebraska's Ben Nelson Holds One (Count 'Em, One) Town Hall Meeting In Omaha

Senator Ben Nelson constantly claims to be an independent Democrat...despite his party line votes on bloated, pork-filled budget-busting bills which he hasn't even read.

Now he's ducking for cover on the monstrously misconceived health care bill, scheduling only one (yes, just one) town hall meeting in his state's largest city.

And that meeting is being held during the middle of a business day and in a venue that seats less than 500 people.

Open government? Responsive government? Independent Democrat? Sigh. Three strikes and you're out, Ben.

Oh, by the way, Senator Nelson's latest letter to us (one responding to our criticism of the abortion promotion in the current Democrat health care bill) reminds us of his personal pro-life sentiments. But he says absolutely nothing about the provisions in the bill regarding mandated coverage of abortion, elimination of protection of conscience, even heavier government promotion of counter-productive sex education (which leads to more abortions), mandated coverage for contraceptives (including chemicals and devices which act after implantation and are thus abortifacients), etc.

Because you were working today, you weren't able to tell the Senator what you think of that "health care" bill, the one that will work every bit as efficiently as the government post office, the welfare program and the war on drugs. So, let him know through an e-mail or a phone call. He may duck those avenues too but, at least, you've given it a try.

Senator Nelson's office phone number is (202) 224-6551. And you can use this link to send him an e-mail. My quick note to him is printed below.

Dear Senator:

I couldn't make your town hall meeting because, like most Nebraskans, I was at work. And at work, it seems, to help pay for yet another budget-busting bill coming out of Congress -- one that will mandate abortion coverage, eliminate abstinence-based sex ed (proven over and again to be the most efficient), and overturn freedom of conscience.

Good grief!

Please, Senator; quit talking about how independent you are and just come out forcefully against this mess. It's way past time.

Sincerely,

Denny Hartford

Ted Turner Wants to Step On The Gas

Are the stars still shining in their places? Are the seas still rushing to the shores?

Ted Turner has had a good and patriotic idea.

Well, yes; maybe it's only because he's hooked up with T. Boone Pickens -- but this op/ed article in the Wall Street Journal, arguing that America's freedom and economic stability could be greatly aided if we start drilling for the huge amounts of natural gas we're sitting on top of, is a definite winner.

Way to go, Ted. But let's make this just the first step in a more thorough (and more spiritual) conversion, huh?

When Is a War Not a War?

Apparently when an extreme liberal serves as Commander in Chief.

Byron York has more in the Washington Examiner.

Remember the anti-war movement? Not too long ago, the Democratic party's most loyal voters passionately opposed the war in Iraq. Democratic presidential candidates argued over who would withdraw American troops the quickest. Netroots activists regularly denounced President George W. Bush, and sometimes the U.S. military ("General Betray Us"). Cindy Sheehan, the woman whose soldier son was killed in Iraq, became a heroine when she led protests at Bush's Texas ranch.

That was then. Now, even though the United States still has roughly 130,000 troops in Iraq, and is quickly escalating the war in Afghanistan -- 68,000 troops there by the end of this year, and possibly more in 2010 -- anti-war voices on the Left have fallen silent...

100,000 Die Yearly from Infections Picked Up in Hospital (and Other Items You Might Not Know About American Health Care)

David Goldhill has a lengthy article in The Atlantic about some of the most salient issues that are being left out of the health care debate altogether. Like I said, it's a long article but most provocative. Bookmark it and read it when you get time. (But you might want to make sure you make time before you or a loved one has to go in hospital.)

...My dad became a statistic—merely one of the roughly 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals. One hundred thousand deaths: more than double the number of people killed in car crashes, five times the number killed in homicides, 20 times the total number of our armed forces killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another victim in a building American tragedy.

About a week after my father’s death, The New Yorker ran an article by Atul Gawande profiling the efforts of Dr. Peter Pronovost to reduce the incidence of fatal hospital-borne infections. Pronovost’s solution? A simple checklist of ICU protocols governing physician hand-washing and other basic sterilization procedures. Hospitals implementing Pronovost’s checklist had enjoyed almost instantaneous success, reducing hospital-infection rates by two-thirds within the first three months of its adoption. But many physicians rejected the checklist as an unnecessary and belittling bureaucratic intrusion, and many hospital executives were reluctant to push it on them. The story chronicled Pronovost’s travels around the country as he struggled to persuade hospitals to embrace his reform.

It was a heroic story, but to me, it was also deeply unsettling. How was it possible that Pronovost needed to beg hospitals to adopt an essentially cost-free idea that saved so many lives? Here’s an industry that loudly protests the high cost of liability insurance and the injustice of our tort system and yet needs extensive lobbying to embrace a simple technique to save up to 100,000 people.

And what about us—the patients? How does a nation that might close down a business for a single illness from a suspicious hamburger tolerate the carnage inflicted by our hospitals? And not just those 100,000 deaths. In April, a Wall Street Journal story suggested that blood clots following surgery or illness, the leading cause of preventable hospital deaths in the U.S., may kill nearly 200,000 patients per year. How did Americans learn to accept hundreds of thousands of deaths from minor medical mistakes as an inevitability?...

Keeping Dad company in the hospital for five weeks had left me befuddled. How can a facility featuring state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment use less-sophisticated information technology than my local sushi bar? How can the ICU stress the importance of sterility when its trash is picked up once daily, and only after flowing onto the floor of a patient’s room? Considering the importance of a patient’s frame of mind to recovery, why are the rooms so cheerless and uncomfortable? In whose interest is the bizarre scheduling of hospital shifts, so that a five-week stay brings an endless string of new personnel assigned to a patient’s care? Why, in other words, has this technologically advanced hospital missed out on the revolution in quality control and customer service that has swept all other consumer-facing industries in the past two generations?

I’m a businessman, and in no sense a health-care expert. But the persistence of bad industry practices—from long lines at the doctor’s office to ever-rising prices to astonishing numbers of preventable deaths—seems beyond all normal logic, and must have an underlying cause. There needs to be a business reason why an industry, year in and year out, would be able to get away with poor customer service, unaffordable prices, and uneven results—a reason my father and so many others are unnecessarily killed...

Indeed, I suspect that our collective search for villains—for someone to blame—has distracted us and our political leaders from addressing the fundamental causes of our nation’s health-care crisis. All of the actors in health care—from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies—work in a heavily regulated, massively subsidized industry full of structural distortions. They all want to serve patients well. But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives those distortions create. Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention. That disguise true costs. That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality. That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing. And that—most important—remove consumers from our irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of value...

That’s the premise behind today’s incremental approach to health-care reform. Though details of the legislation are still being negotiated, its principles are a reprise of previous reforms—addressing access to health care by expanding government aid to those without adequate insurance, while attempting to control rising costs through centrally administered initiatives. Some of the ideas now on the table may well be sensible in the context of our current system. But fundamentally, the “comprehensive” reform being contemplated merely cements in place the current system—insurance-based, employment-centered, administratively complex. It addresses the underlying causes of our health-care crisis only obliquely, if at all; indeed, by extending the current system to more people, it will likely increase the ultimate cost of true reform.

I’m a Democrat, and have long been concerned about America’s lack of a health safety net. But based on my own work experience, I also believe that unless we fix the problems at the foundation of our health system—largely problems of incentives—our reforms won’t do much good, and may do harm. To achieve maximum coverage at acceptable cost with acceptable quality, health care will need to become subject to the same forces that have boosted efficiency and value throughout the economy. We will need to reduce, rather than expand, the role of insurance; focus the government’s role exclusively on things that only government can do (protect the poor, cover us against true catastrophe, enforce safety standards, and ensure provider competition); overcome our addiction to Ponzi-scheme financing, hidden subsidies, manipulated prices, and undisclosed results; and rely more on ourselves, the consumers, as the ultimate guarantors of good service, reasonable prices, and sensible trade-offs between health-care spending and spending on all the other good things money can buy.

These ideas stand well outside the emerging political consensus about reform. So before exploring alternative policies, let’s reexamine our basic assumptions about health care—what it actually is, how it’s financed, its accountability to patients, and finally its relationship to the eternal laws of supply and demand. Everyone I know has at least one personal story about how screwed up our health-care system is; before spending (another) $1trillion or so on reform, we need a much clearer understanding of the causes of the problems we all experience...

Obama's Post Office Reference Works Against His Health Care Scheme

The United States Post Office is a train wreck.

The fumbling, stumbling government agency which gets subsidies reaching into the billions of dollars every year (thanks to the taxpayers' generosity) STILL lost $2.4 billion in just the last quarter. In fact, the USPS guesses that the total net loss for the year will reach $7 billion! And they're already in debt to the tune of $10 billion.

So, good golly, Miss Molly; why did President Obama so foolishly remind Americans of the government's ineptness to do business during one of his carefully-controlled town hall meetings last week?

Team Obama may have weeded out contrary voices before the event but they obviously didn't think to weed out the dopey comments the Prez comes up with he's off teleprompter. The damage was done (and big time) not by some heckler but by Obama himself.

Here's a couple of choice responses to the President's bonehead play.

* From Caroline Baum at Bloomberg.com --

When Obama compared the post office to UPS and FedEx, he was clearly hoping to assuage voter concerns about a public health-care option undercutting and eliminating private insurance.

What he did instead was conjure up visions of long lines and interminable waits. Why do we need or want a health-care system that works like the post office?

What’s more, if the USPS is struggling to compete with private companies, as Obama implied, why introduce a government health-care option that would operate at the same disadvantage?

* And from John Stossel at ABC News --

Obama brought up the post office last week, in attempt to show how a public health plan would not eliminate private ones.

"If you think about it, UPS and FedEX are doing just fine... it's the post office that's always having problems. There's nothing inevitable about this somehow destroying the private market place as long as... it's not set up where the government is basically being subsidized by the taxpayers."

But the post office IS government subsidized, to the tune of billions a year. Does Obama not know that?

Does Obama believe that when the new “health care co-ops” go broke, or just try to save money by not buying someone a new hip, that Congress won’t rush in with your tax money to bail the co-ops out?

His mistake is telling. If he didn't notice that the Post Office, despite providing worse service than UPS and FedEX, is bailed out by Congress, will he notice when a government-run health care plan is feeding off billions of your tax dollars?

Or would he care? Before the election he supported a single payer system. Subsidized co-ops would be an easy back-door way to achieve the same thing.

But at least he's willing to criticize the post office. On that note, economist Justin Ross points out on his blog how, for 44 cents, you could mail a letter via USPS - or buy a kiwi fruit that had to be grown and watered in New Zealand, picked, carefully packaged, and shipped across the world to a store near you.

That's the spontaneous order of the free market at work. I hope it will still be allowed to work for American health care.

Robert Novak Tributes

In honor of Robert Novak, one of our era's best reporters and most important conservative voices, who succumbed yesterday to a malignant brain tumor, I provide links to a few of the finest reviews and remembrances.

* Kenneth Y. Tomlinson's "Bob Novak, a Giant of Journalism" in Human Events.

* R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.'s "Robert Novak, RIP" in American Spectator.

* Fred Barnes' "Robert Novak, 1931-2009" in the Weekly Standard.

* Larry Kudlow's "Robert Novak, R.I.P.: Faith, Freedom, and Free Enterprise" in National Review.

I might also mention that Novak's remarkable memoir, The Prince of Darkness, made #1 in my non-fiction reading list from 2008. It is a terrific book. And using the Search feature here at Vital Signs Blog, I discovered no less than 18 posts where I cited Novak's work. He was a principled, honest and thorough reporter who kept the highest professional standards as well as being a brave American patriot who understood how deeply our nation needed the virtues of its Christian heritage. He will indeed be missed.

Your Wednesday Tea Break (Johnny Cash)

Here's three from the late and great Man in Black:

Today's Posts

A Study in Overreaction and Bad Reporting: Bellevue Police Gear Up Against Fictional Demonstrations

Go Directly to Jail (And Do Not Collect $200)...For Praying?

"Pulling the Plug on Grandma" Is No Laughing Matter, Mr. President

Obama Administration Comes Out Against Marriage

Sneaky Journalism 101

Do the Tyrannical Anti-Population Views of Obama's Science Czar Show Us Where ObamaCare Could Lead?

A Study in Overreaction and Bad Reporting: Bellevue Police Gear Up Against Fictional Demonstrations

The Omaha World Herald has joined in the hoopla (along with at least one local TV station and one radio station) and is passing along the hysteria of the Bellevue Police Department that there's mass protest demonstrations heading for Leroy Carhart's trashy abortion business. They're talking about 500 angry anti-abortion protesters ready to shout, carry signs, make threats and -- good grief -- throw rocks.

It's the same kind of tired clichés and laughably scurrilous slander that we've come to expect. The police and the press both know very well that the violence, the lies, and the disorder comes from the abortionists. And yet they continue the canards against pro-life activists.

Very unprofessional. Very dishonorable.

Would you like to know the truth of the matter?

Except for the ongoing sidewalk counseling ministry that occurs there, there are no protests scheduled at all. Count 'em -- zero. No interventions. No marches. No mass gatherings.

There is a fellow employed by Operation Rescue who will be in town sometime in late August for a speaking engagement. One simple speaking engagement which will be, I have no doubt, to a pretty small crowd. That's it, folks.

The Bellevue Police Department (and the media) certainly seem to be overreacting here. I mean, they're gearing up for mass demonstrations. They're bad-mouthing pro-lifers. They're giving personal watchdog service to abortion clinic employees.

They're even monitoring pro-life web sites...like this one.

But that's fine. For perhaps they'll not only learn what the motivations and methods of pro-life activists truly are, but they'll see their ratcheted-up rhetoric and paranoia are unfair and way out of order.

Whatever the motives are, it's time for both the police and the press to get the facts, get some perspective...and lighten up.

Go Directly to Jail (And Do Not Collect $200)...For Praying?

Welcome to the New American Order -- where a prayer can grab you 6 months behind bars.

Think I'm kidding? Think I'm falling for a conspiracy theory or envisaging some far out scenario from the future?

Uh huh. It's happening right now as a Florida school principal and an athletic director are facing criminal charges and up to six months in jail over their offer of a mealtime prayer.

Here's the Washington Times report.

"Pulling the Plug on Grandma" Is No Laughing Matter, Mr. President

If you're not creeped out by ObamaCare yet, you will be after you've read this passage from the New York Times transcript of the president's "town hall" meeting in Portsmouth, N.H., yesterday: "The rumor that's been circulating a lot lately is this idea that somehow the House of Representatives voted for 'death panels' that will basically pull the plug on grandma because we've decided that we don't -- it's too expensive to let her live anymore. (Laughter.)"

Laughter? Way to knock 'em dead, Mr. President!...

Now, this column certainly is not above finding humor in grim subject matter. That is one of many reasons we'd make a lousy politician. But President Obama is attempting to transmogrify America's entire medical system. It is literally a matter of life and death. If Obama and his supporters find mirth in the thought of "pulling the plug on grandma," do you trust them anywhere near your health care?

(James Taranto, Best of the Web, Wall Street Journal, August 12)

Obama Administration Comes Out Against Marriage

William C. Duncan, the director of the Marriage Law Foundation, jots down this observation over at NRO's The Corner:

"In other news, the U.S. Department of Justice has decided to express its disapproval of the federal Defense of Marriage Act in a brief in federal court. The case is a challenge to DOMA, and the Department of Justice is charged with defending the law, but it has chosen to repudiate the arguments in its favor embraced by the highest courts of New York, Washington, and Maryland. A straightforward legislative repeal would be the more honest approach, but the Obama administration seems to have decided that the easier route is to try to undercut the law with legal arguments, perhaps in the hope that they will be spared the effort of going through Congress if they can just get a court decision invalidating DOMA."

Sneaky Journalism 101

So deep in the tank of Democrat politics are the liberal old-guard media, they've stooped to inventing stories, sources and factoids out of whole cloth.

No, it's not a new thing. But it's getting worse by the day as modern scribblers throw out fairness, thoroughness, honesty and all other standards of professionalism in their passion to force "enlightened progress" on the rest of us.

Here are just a couple of examples from my weekend web browsing of Power Line showing how Democrat politicos and their reporter pals deliberately (and shamefully) mislead the public.

The first comes from this post (via the original source, Patterico's Pontifications) about the Houston Chronicle's rank amateurism (or something much worse) in a false report it gave of a town hall meeting of the infamous Texas Congresswoman Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee:

...During the event, one Roxana Mayer presented herself as a physician supporting Obamacare. "I don't know what there is in the bill that creates such panic," she said. According to "Dr." Mayer, the health care system is broken and in need of Obama's cure. In a Houston Chronicle photograph whose caption described Mayer as a pediatric primary care physician, Lee hugged "Dr." Mayer. Very touching.

Mayer, however, is an impostor. She is not a physician, but rather a graduate student in social work and a former Obama delegate to last year's Democratic national convention. She was also an Organizing For America "host" during the Texas primary last year. The Houston Chronicle knew Mayer was an Obama delegate at the time it published the photo, but omitted the information.

The second item is here, giving a telling example of how journalists regularly portray persons they quote in their stories as being "randomly" and "unbiasedly" selected when, in truth, the reporters have carefully chosen them beforehand in order to present a particular point of view. Then these people are sneakily presented as just "men in the street." Bad form, indeed.

Do the Tyrannical Anti-Population Views of Obama's Science Czar Show Us Where ObamaCare Could Lead?

Most Americans remain ignorant of just how extreme, how loopy and how dangerous are the various philosophies exemplified by Barack Obama and his zany crew. The state-run media simply will not report these things.

So then it's up to the alternative media and then to you and I passing on the salient facts to others.

One particularly flaky fellow I've pointed to before is Obama's "science czar," John P. Holdren. (April 9, July 14, and July 20). Holdren's jackbooting jive on compulsory abortion and sterilization should be terrifying to any sane person -- especially as it may be a portent of where ObamaCare will lead us.

Check out this weekend's Washington Times editorial. It's definitely one of those articles we should be encouraging others to read so please make liberal use of the E-MAIL THIS feature at the bottom right of this post.

When it comes to having past views that should frighten every American citizen, Ezekiel Emanuel (see this editorial) has nothing on the president's "chief science adviser," John P. Holdren. The combination of Mr. Holdren with Dr. Emanuel should make the public seriously concerned with this administration's moral compass concerning care for the old and weak.

Earlier this month, Mr. Holdren served as co-chairman when the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology met for the first time. It's a disgrace that Mr. Holdren is even on the council...