I was on Spring Break vacation with the family last week, so other than my post-dated blog posts, I didn’t write much … well, anything.  But I did surf the web and kept track of some articles I wanted to highlight when I came back.  Here they are, in mostly chronological order of when I found them.

Amnesty International decided that jihad was not antithetical to human rights so long as it’s "defensive". 

The bump in polling numbers after passing health care "reform" was supposed to go to Democrats.  Instead, while it’s just a measure of emotion at this point in time, you’d think that all the promises of the bill would give Democrats a few higher point.  Instead, they’re at an 18-year low.  It’s quite possible that people are only now understanding what they supported all along, because the "free" stuff isn’t materializing right now.

What was the point of the resurrection on Easter?  Don Sensing has (had) some thoughts.

The Tea Party’s ideas are much more mainstream than the MSM would like you to believe.  And Tea Partiers are much more diverse that the MSM realized.  Turns out, they did some actual journalism and found out the real story.  Imagine that.  Has the liberal slant of the press become a problem of corruption, especially with, first, the willful ignoring of the Tea Party story, and second, the willful misreporting of it?

Toyota cars have killed 52 people, and got a recall for it.  Gardasil, a cervical cancer vaccine, has had 49 "unexplained deaths" reported by the CDC and it’s still required in some states.

Changing the names to protect the guilty, the words "Islam" and "jihad" are now banned from the national security strategy document.  When the next terror attack Islamic jihadists happens, it’ll be interesting to find out how they describe it.

Cows have been exonerated of helping to cause global warming.  No, really.

Rep. Bart Stupak’s reversal of his principles is having the proper effect; he’s decided not to seek re-election.  Likely, he couldn’t get re-elected anyway, after betraying his constituents, but let this be a lesson about trusting "conservative" Democrats too much.

And finally, media scrutiny of church vs. state (click for a larger picture):

Oh, that liberal media.

Shire Network News #178 has (already) been released. This week the Anglosphere’s hardest-hitting political podcast returns to the dark days of the 1940s and wonders what would have happened if today’s politicians and thinkers had been in charge of the United States. The results are about as unpleasant as…well, as reading the news today I suppose. Click here for the show notes, links, and ways to listen to the show; directly from the web site, by downloading the mp3 file, or by subscribing with your podcatcher of choice.

Below is the text of my commentary.

Hi, this is Doug Payton for Shire Network News asking you to "Consider This!"

In case you have missed the news for the past, oh, 2 months or so, you may have missed one particular trifling development.  The United States decided that it was time to federalize a sixth of its entire economy, and force all its inhabitants to make a purchase.  Nothing big, just one small step for Congress, one giant leap towards socialism.

Now, you may think that all this forced purchasing would stimulate the economy, but there’s the rub.  See, that requirement doesn’t kick in for 4 years.  In the meantime, Americans will be paying the bill, up front, and then keep paying it.  In perpetuity.  Even if they don’t need it or don’t want it.  For starters, the first 10 years of payments will pay for 6 years of benefits.  After that, Obama will be long gone, so hey, it won’t be his problem.  We’ll just muddle along and wait for someone to bail us out.

Hey, it works for folks with mortgages they can’t afford, and banks that lent money to folks who couldn’t afford it, and car companies that can’t build a competitive product.  It’s another gilded age!  Spend like there’s no tomorrow, and the government will bail you out!

Until it’s the government that needs bailing out.  Just this month, our Social Security system paid out more money than it took in, years ahead of schedule.  Our deficit, as a percentage of GDP, is about what it was when we were in the middle of fighting the Nazis, et. al.  Who are we fighting now?

Well, apparently, we aren’t fighting enough.  It’s time to get serious about this.  Well, it’s past time, frankly, but we’ll take anyone who’s recently woken up, as well as those who have been paying attention but just didn’t think this could happen here.

It has.  Consider this.

Presented here with no other commentary than a hearty, “Amen!”  James Taranto:

“The majority is deeply wrong on the law,” according to a critic of yesterday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. FEC . “Most wrongheaded of all is its insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights. It is an odd claim since companies are creations of the state that exist to make money.”

Whose opinion is this? We don’t know exactly, because it is not attributed to any individual. It is an unsigned editorial in the New York Times. That is to say, it reflects the collective opinion of the Times editorial board, a division of the New York Times Co., a corporation that exists to make money.

It’s lucky for the New York Times Co. that the Supreme Court upheld its First Amendment rights. Otherwise, it could not have exercised its First Amendment right to denounce the court for upholding its First Amendment rights. Right?

Not quite. As Justice Anthony Kennedy noted in his opinion, the McCain-Feingold “campaign finance” law–which until yesterday’s ruling made it a felony for corporations to engage in certain political speech–exempted “media companies” like the New York Times Co. (and News Corp., publisher of The Wall Street Journal and this Web site) from this restriction.

McCain-Feingold, in other words, granted a small group of companies, including the New York Times Co., the privilege to speak freely about politics, while denying it to all other corporations–not only “companies . . . that exist to make money,” but also taxable nonprofits that exist to represent a point of view, including the advocacy arms of the Sierra Club, the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Rifle Association.

The editorial published by the New York Times Co. includes no mention of the special privilege the New York Times Co. enjoyed under McCain-Feingold–a privilege that creates at least the appearance of a journalistic conflict of interest. Is not the failure to disclose the New York Times Co.’s interest in McCain-Feingold a serious violation of journalistic ethics?

The Times’s opinion is wrongheaded as well. Under the paper’s cramped view of the First Amendment, the privilege the New York Times Co. enjoyed under McCain-Feingold was just that: a privilege, not a right. The First Amendment does not say “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech of media corporations.” If the Constitution doesn’t protect corporations, it doesn’t protect the New York Times Co. And if Congress had the power to grant an exemption to media companies, it also had the power to take it away.As Justice Clarence Thomas noted in McConnell v. FEC (2003), such reasoning would permit “outright regulation of the press.” Some on the far left, complaining about “corporate domination” of the media, would like to see just that.

In past generations, the New York Times Co. had a proud tradition as a defender of free expression. It was the prevailing litigant in two landmark Supreme Court cases expanding and vindicating First Amendment rights, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964) and New York Times Co. v. U.S. (1971). The former case, by the way, involved a political advertisement.

What a shame it is to see a once-great media corporation become a fair-weather friend of free expression.

Blaming God for the earthquake in Haiti got Pat Robertson some major blowback.  (He didn’t really blame God, he blamed Satan, but work with me here.)  All manner of scorn was heaped upon him.  Fair enough.  Then how about this lesser-publicized remark regarding the earthquake?

When we see what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens, you know what I’m sayin’?

(Emphasis mine.  Well, actually it’s Tim Blair’s, to whom the hat tip goes.)  See it’s OK for actor Danny Glover to blame a planet for these problems.  Heck, Al Gore’s made a living doing that.  But talk about what Blair calls “a less-fashionable deity” and all hell breaks loose.

That’s a phrase that Brit Hume used to describe his mentioning of that same deity.  Sounds like his contention that someone else wouldn’t have faced the same firestorm if they had said the same thing he did about Tiger Woods but suggested a New Age guru, is sounding more and more correct.

Want to nail Robertson for his comment?  Have at it.  But you you should give the same treatment to Glover.  The media and the liberal elite don’t, which suggests which side their on (or, more specifically, against).

Any religious expression, it seems.  A commentator can’t say anything remotely religious without getting lambasted by the Left.  (And, no doubt, with exclamations like “Jesus Christ!” thrown in for good measure.)  While commenting on the Tiger Woods situation, former Fox News anchor Brit Hume dared dig deeper into the story and commented on one of the underlying issues.

Tiger Woods will recover as a golfer. Whether he can recover as a person, I think, is a very open question… the extent to which he can recover, it seems to me, depends on his faith. He’s said to be a Buddhist, I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So, my message to Tiger would be: ‘Tiger, turn to the Christian faith, and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.’

This has led folks like Keith Olbermann to compare Hume to a “jihadist” and his guest Dan Savage to consider him a “lunatic”.  Later, Olbermann said that Hume was attempting to “force” or “threaten” Woods into conversion.  From my local paper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jay Bookman called Hume arrogant and pompous.  Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly trashes Hume and seems to think that if adherents of a particular religion aren’t perfect then it’s perhaps hypocritical to suggest turning to that religion.  His multitude of commenters seem to agree.

But as LaShawn Barber notes, this was all inevitable.  The Secularists, those trying to essentially make religion a taboo in the public square and who overwhelmingly live on the Left, simply will not tolerate any mention of religion.  (How tolerant.)  And certainly not comparatively.  If you dare insist that belief in Jesus is any better than venerating a toaster, you’ll get shouted down.

On top of that, LaShawn links to Christian apologist and author James White who points out that, indeed, Brit Hume is right.

The secularists are, of course, howling in protest, but if you read what they are saying, one obvious underlying theme comes to the fore. No one is offering reasoned, objective criticism of the substance of Hume’s comments, because, quite simply, he is right. Buddhism does not, in fact, provide for redemption and forgiveness, but instead directs one to look inward for enlightenment and eventual freedom from suffering (via freedom from desire). But redemption? Not in this life, for in its classical expression, this would involve a long process of moving toward enlightenment through many lifetimes. In any case, secularists do not care about the objective truth contained in Hume’s words, but instead they are enraged that he would actually dare to express his thoughts in public—the realm over which they now claim absolute authority and control.

(Emphasis his.)

If we are not allowed to speak of religion in public, it may be time to hold a wake for the First Amendment, something the Left claims to uphold.

UPDATE:  Jay Bookman linked to my cross-post of this on Blogger News Network, in this sentence:  “Thanks to an earlier post on this subject, I’m now among those being accused of being anti-Christian and intolerant.”  My post is linked on the word “anti-Christian”, and you’ll note that nothing in this piece accuses anyone of that.  I’ll accept the accusation, though, of considering him intolerant for coming out publicly against free religious speech.

I’ve posted a comment on his blog.  (Hasn’t showed up yet; might need to be moderated because I’m a first-time commenter there.)  I’ll be interested in seeing what he says.

Hollywood, are you listening?  Liberals who think at least Chavez isn’t the monster he’s often portrayed as, are you paying attention? 

President Hugo Chávez has risked international ire by lauding Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan terrorist notorious for a series of bombings, kidnappings and hijackings across Europe, as a "revolutionary fighter" unjustly imprisoned for trying to defend the Palestinian people.

The leftist Venezuelan leader praised Carlos — whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sánchez — as "one of the great fighters of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation", denying he was a terrorist and claiming his lifetime imprisonment in France was unfair.

"I defend him," he said during a speech on Friday night. "It doesn’t matter to me what they say tomorrow in Europe."

Of course, this is now in addition to all his other BFFs.

The fiery anti-American leader sought to defend leaders he said were wrongly branded "bad guys", heaping praise on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is to visit Venezuela later this week, and the Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe, who he called "brothers".

He drew the wrath of Ugandans after casting doubt on the crimes of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. "We thought he was a cannibal," said Mr Chávez of Amin, whose regime was notorious for torturing and killing suspected opponents in the 1970s. "I have doubts … Maybe he was a great nationalist, a patriot."

Hat tip: Betsy Newmark, who wonders if those Hollywood leftists who have made common cause with Chavez will ever get asked about this latest news.  Yeah, probably not.  After all, it is the leftist media most likely to do any interviewing.

Remember "Paul Harvey News and Comment" on the radio?  (Or am I showing my age?)  At least that guy had the guts to let you know that he had commentary in his show, unlike some journalists these days that sneak it in.  Well, no hiding it here.  This is "Doug Payton Links and Comment".

Becky Garrison, writing at the liberal "God’s Politics Blog", on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, says that "more walls need to fall".  Fair enough, and I’d tend to agree with that.  But sometimes walls are necessary, and are the least intrusive method of dealing with an actual problem.  They can protect more so than divide.  One of the walls that Ms. Garrison says needs to come down is the Israeli wall on the West Bank.  Meryl Yourish, however, compares these two types of walls — Berlin vs. Israeli — and notes major differences in the motivation and the result of each.  The Christian Left perhaps needs to understand a little nuance here.

Dale Franks, writing at Q&O, notes that the supposed upside of the government takeover of Chrysler, and subsequent sale of a large portion to Fiat, hasn’t, and looks like it won’t, materialize.  Your government, and your money, at work flushed away.

An insufficiently colorful color guard.  Scott Johnson at Power Line point out political correctness in the smallest aspect of our lives.  (And he needs to because the media doesn’t seem to want to notice it.  Or it looks on with admiration and doesn’t consider it news.)

For all the accusations of hate directed at the Right, and the religious Right in particular, Jeff Jacoby points out that they don’t hold a candle to the irreligious Left.

President Obama doesn’t think that the prospect of jail time over choosing not buying government-mandated health insurance (and likely choosing not paying the fine) is not the "biggest question" Congress is facing now.  Yeah, no big deal.  (Riiight.)  And in an Irony Alert, candidate Obama criticized Hillary Clinton for proposing a health care system with a mandatory purchase requirement. 

The New York Times has no problem calling Jim DeMint a "conservative Republican", but decides that Bernie Sanders, a self-described "socialist", is only a "left-leaning independent".  Courage and truth from that liberal media.

The latest war between the White House and Fox News has come to a truce, with the Press Secretary of the Nobel laureate for Peace and a senior VP for the news organization (I think I can still call it that) meeting together to call a cease-fire.  The website The Wrap notes, "No word whether the White House will backpedal on its pledge to keep Barack Obama from appearing on the News Corp. network until 2010."

Can’t face Fox, but claims to be able to face off against terrorists.  Indeed.

From Chuck Asay (click for a larger version):

In an incredibly chilling move, the White House tried to freeze out Fox News from interviewing Obama’s Pay Czar, while granting interviews to all the other major news organizations.  As the video notes, often the White House makes a particular official available to all the groups, one after the other, but today’s event broke with that tradition.

To the credit of the other groups, they all decided to not do any interviews unless Fox was allowed to as well.  The administration blinked, and the interviews, from all news groups, commenced.  Before, it seemed that only Jake Tapper of ABC cared about this situation, as it was something of a big deal when he asked his question of Robert Gibbs.  However, this overreach by the Obama administration finally jolted all the other groups into action.  "First, they came for Fox News…" and all that sort of stuff.

This proves, beyond all doubt, that this has no real equivalence in previous administrations of either party.  This is a President and his staff shutting out a major news organization, and it is absolutely wrong.  First, because of general First Amendment, freedom of the press issues.  Secondly, because of the double standard employed in the reasoning.  If Fox News isn’t a news organization because it has a perspective, we don’t have any news organizations in this country.  And as I noted before, the incredibly liberal bias is merrily ignored, belying Obama’s motivation.

Not to mention liberal media "watchdogs" like Media Matters.  Instead of recognizing this for what it was, they pilloried Jake Tapper for daring to ask such a question.  And of course, if you look at their front page today, you’d think that Fox News was the only TV news organization in the country.  For a group that supposedly knows the media business, it’s pretty clear that what matters to them is not the media, just their (dare I say it) perspective, especially when they cheer this sort of thing on.

Again, it has nothing to do with "perspective".  It has everything to do with not wanting to deal with disagreement.  The Van Jones issue, the ACORN scandal, Anita Dunn fondness for Mao, and many other issues, covered by Fox and virtually ignored elsewhere, clearly shows that, while you could make a case against Fox’s "Fair and Balanced" motto, they at least provide a fair hearing to otherwise ignored stories, and they provide the balance in the extremely one-sided new coverage in this country.

And the White House is trying to silence them.  When did dissent stop being patriotic and start being a club to silence the opposition?  Do rank and file Democrats really think this is okey dokey?

P.S. Ironic, isn’t it, that Obama says he is willing to talk to our enemies with no preconditions, but goes to war with a media organization that is challenging him (which is arguable what all media organizations are supposed to be doing, the whole 4th Estate thing).  Good thing he’s already been given the "peace" prize.