You are thinking of Arabic calligraphy. It can be quite beautiful and is practiced by secular, Christian, and others of Arab ethnicity and by others who are literate in Arabic. I am not aware that American Muslims are renowned for their English-language calligraphy, however. Apparently you think Islam is coextensive with Arabic.

Since you are so quick to find hatred where others see legitimate warnings about aggressive intent, maybe you think that to be anti-jihad is to be anti-Arab and is motivated by ethnic bias. That would be consistent with your having guilt issues regarding your own racist hatreds and projecting them onto others.

The Citizens United case was handed down on January 21, 2010 and could not have affected elections until November 2010 when the big story was not big-business influence, but the Tea Party revolution, which was a grass-roots reaction against both Obama's big government policies and also against the bank and business bailouts launched by Bush's big-government Republicans like Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

Those being forced into (relative) poverty today are the victims of the political distortions of the economy, created by both parties and the Fed, that has led to malinvestment in unproductive enterprises (like Fannie Mae, the Chevy Volt, Solandra, etc., etc.) and the consequent unemployment and impoverishment of many Americans. In other words, your campaign financing thesis is contradicted by reality and has nothing to recommend it.

Very interesting. Thanks for the links. Unfortunately this cold fusion (if that's not a dirty word) technology is still unproven. On the upside, if you have the background to evaluate the science and the businesses involved, you can try to get in on the ground floor of an investment that, if it pans out technologically, economically and politically, will make a fortune for those who are first in. This world really needs an alternative to petroleum energy for political reasons much more than for environmental ones.

Of course, if it does pan out technologically and economically, it will rise to the top of the ecomaniacs political hit list, just in time to replace the increasingly discredited global warming meme. I don't know what they could manage to find to scare people about the new technology but you will read all about it in the New York Times. You see, the real motive of the ecomaniacs is not the preservation of the environment for the benefit of mankind. The real motive is to get rid of all technology and through the consequential disease, mass starvation, and death, to return the human species to the level of primitive man or the great apes, thereby achieving natures' balance in a new paradise with the goddess Gaia.

But I am optimistic that the ecomaniacs will be so thoroughly discredited that they will lose the political battle. The left will abandon them and they will survive only as a religious cult. Then the leftists will be left with their one last best hope for world domination: their alliance with militant Islam.

Thanks for responding, Alexander. I don't agree that the (objectively necessary) axioms of science may change, only that our knowledge of what is an axiom may (but is unlikely to) change. For example, Aristotle's axioms of identity, non-contradiction, and the excluded middle still form the basis of science and have not changed in 2.4 millennia. I realize that the specialized sciences require other axioms. I do agree that in the field of morality humans need the absolute that never changes. You apparently propose that God the Lawgiver is that moral absolute while I observe that it is man's nature and the requirements of his survival and flourishing that are absolute.

Of course Marxism-Leninism is based on a kind of Godless faith in the absolutism of the laws of materialist historical determinism and the malleability of human nature which was to be conditioned by the mode of production. It should have been obvious that so far from being scientific absolutes these "axioms" contradict what we know to be true of human volition and human nature. Furthermore, in the light of subsequent history it takes intellectual evasion on a massive scale to believe such fantasies.

As for Islam, it shares with (some) Judeo-Christian thought the reliance on revealed moral law which is beyond questioning. This makes reasoned disagreement among competing moral demands difficult, to say the least.

Enlightenment thought can hardly be accused of failing to subject moral dogmas to the light of reason with Adam Smith's _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, as just one example. Although most such attempts merely substitute a proposed 'moral sense' in human nature for the imposed moral law of theism, they at least open themselves to disagreement about the true moral scope of human nature, a huge advantage where the alternative option is a holy war of your revelation vs. my revelation, don't you think?

For a complete discussion of my preferred approach to deriving morality from the requirements of human survival and flourishing see Tara Smith's _Viable Values_.

As a gentle atheist myself who, with all due respect, cannot find good reasons to believe in the supernatural, I would like to point out that not all, and perhaps only a minority of "atheists" (more on those scare quotes later) are consistently rational. Just not believing in a supreme being is no qualification for anything -- the question is what _do_ you think is real and true?

I would be interested in whether anyone has seen a poll that confirms the impression of Undezog and Gofen that atheists tend to be sympathetic to Islam, because that is indeed a bizarre corruption of rationality.

Of course, sharing a lack of evidence with others is hardly a basis for feeling shame at their _other_ lacks, so I won't apologize for these pro-Islam supposed "atheists", but I would like to propose that for many of them, atheism is an intellectual pose, used as a scent-marker by which other pseudo-intellectual leftists will recognize them as members of the faith. That's right, leftists have a faith but it is to a god known variously as the Proletariat, Society, the State, the Oppressed, and Other Minds.

That's why their "atheism" deserves scare quotes. They are congregants in the Church of Marxism and it's various splinter sects from Fabianism to Democratic Socialism to Environmentalism (Gaia worship) to Postmodernism -- the "Elmer Gantry" religion of the comfortable professoriate who knowing the intellectual bankruptcy of the "scientific" Marxist faith first hand, proclaim that reality is unknowable anyway and all we have is the Social Construction of Reality to deconstruct.

It is undeniably true, as Christian thinkers have said, that if one rejects (what I will call) the hypothesis of God, one must put in God's place some other concept of the highest aspect of reality, the highest good. For a rational atheist, this will probably be human life and that aspect of human consciousness that makes all human knowledge and human survival possible, i.e., human reason itself and specifically one's personal, most conscientious effort to know reality -- the very faculty that asks, "Is there really a supernatural realm, a God?" If the questions – and answers -- end there, then what one ultimately believes is left to the random forces impinging on one's malleable mind.

For the _irrational_ atheist, Other Minds will do as one's god, and specifically the Minds of the Significant Others, be they parents, pastors, professors, politicians, or prison punks.

For lovers of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness on the political right, however, I would remind you that both Human Liberty and Christianity benefited from the Enlightenment determination to question all dogmas, and rational atheism is not the enemy, but the ally of human freedom.

I'd like to expand on Dr. Sowell's remark that "every dime they spend comes from somewhere else, which means that there is less money to create jobs somewhere else."

If I am applying my understanding of Austrian-school economics correctly (and if you don't think that the Austrian method is your best guide, please read Ludwig von Mises books), then let me amplify what it means for there to be less money to create jobs somewhere else, even where no taxes are raised to fund such "stimuli."

It is a myth that deficit spending stimulates the real economy, i.e., the economy that responds to its participant's needs. Every new dollar borrowed or created by fiat, just like every new dollar acquired by taxation, is a new claim on one dollar's worth of the production of the goods and services of every producer in the economy willing to trade part of his production for that dollar.

It does not matter how the government gets the new money it is spending, the result is the same: What is maximized with the new money is not the satisfaction of the needs of the market participants, but the satisfaction of the desires of the governing class.

Of course the new production in the economy is NOT allocated according to the needs of the individuals trading their production -- income from sales, salaries, investments, etc. Normally, these market participants by their spending choices signal to every other trader in the economy what ought to be produced to maximize mutual benefit -- especially the net changes in spending which result in profits and losses.

No, instead the signals sent by the new movement of money in the economy are powerfully altered to indicate that production should be modified to maximize the interests of those who write the allocations. The "profits" -- better termed "booty" -- accrue to the politically favored and not to the satisfaction of the capital and consumer needs that would have been signaled by the free market allocation of production.

The net result is that the changes in demand (the new money) that in the free market would have led to profitable new investment and employment with all the multipliers of new economic activity, instead lead to vast amounts of unprofitable end-use consumption by the favored class and investment that is almost entirely MAL-investment, in that the needs it fulfills are the needs of the governing class and not those of the consumers as a whole, even when subsidized by tax rebates and other gimmicks which only further mess up the proper function of the market.

I give you "green jobs" in general and the Chevrolet Volt in particular as a test of my analysis. Anyone here want to predict the Volt's net benefit to the economy? How many jobs do you think will be created when it bombs or -- which amounts to the same thing -- sucks up more billions in government subsidies to keep it afloat?

I also recommend _The Critics of Keynesian Economics_ by Henry Hazlitt and I'm sure there are more recent refutations of the stimulus fallacy. Suggestions welcome.

"...when the State Department released the administration's correspondence with the Scottish Ministry of Justice, it confirmed in unambiguous terms that the administration was "not prepared to support Megrahi's release on compassionate release or bail," ...

Yeah, you may be right about the official correspondence, but we want to hear the phone calls too. Tell us why media all parroted the official line that Megrahi was released because he was near death from prostate cancer, known to be generally among the slowest-growing cancers of all. Why didn't we hear the outrage from the State Department at the time of Megrahi's release? Why wasn't that the big story? You think the Obama administration values its "special relationship" with the UK so much that it had to shut up and take its side against the American people? Well, come to think of it, I suppose the American people would always be the lower priority to this regime in any conflict of interest.

Yes, that's right Lary9, we don't trust this administration to tell us the truth about any of its motives or actions. Or maybe you have forgotten the deceptions and distortions that won the election for Obama. No ad hominems in that campaign, right? Now, care to outline what you see as ad hominems against Obama as distinguished from opposition to his policies and actions and lies and deceptions? At least Jimmy Carter would talk about the rights violations of various regimes, placing him several steps above this, easily the worst man ever to be President of the United States. Do you think anyone would give a rat's tail that Obama was once a Muslim if he were a defender of the Western Enlightenment against the 6th-century ideology of the savages? Have you ever heard even a whisper of criticism out of him of the rights-violating habits of Islamic law and practice? We know the tree by the fruit, so forgive us if we mention the source of that fruit -- it helps us figure out what trees need to be uprooted and burned.

You probably believed Obama during the campaign when he was a post-racial moderate healer with mainstream Democratic Party goals. Do you still believe him now after a year and a half of top-to-bottom new-left radical transformation of the federal government, where moderate Democrats have been dragged by Pelosi and Reid kicking and screaming into an Orwellian future they never wanted and never saw coming? If so, you cannot expect to be taken seriously by readers of Front Page Magazine.

"Sorry, but that looks an awful lot like a misassociation of the first and second amendment to me."

Maybe by itself, but that sentence must be interpreted in the light of TrampDorena's following paragraph, don't you think?

By the way, I do not agree with TrampDorena that shutting down Fox by itself would precipitate armed rebellion. The issue would have to be adjudicated by the courts first. There is also the possibility of a Congress in 2011-12 willing to impeach and convict the Executive for such action. If the executive were upheld by the court or Congress, that would probably start an underground resistance movement with internet streaming, pirate broadcasting, hacking of cable/satellite transmissions, and so on. Should that be suppressed by force and a fraudulent 2010 election return Obama to power, the resistance would surely start getting nasty, so as ladykrystyna says, the Second Amendment is the final check and balance. But the vast bulk of the American people, including conservatives, will exhaust all peaceful options first. I expect that leftist provocateurs would precipitate violence first and blame it on the "teabaggers" in an attempt to justify violent repression of the anti-tyranny movement by federal police power. However, I hope and believe that peaceful resistance would succeed before any serious repression could begin.

It looks like you are arguing a point I grant, namely that conservatives have of late shown little intent to control what they consider obscene so long as it is not presented in such a way that persons will be exposed to it involuntarily. Perhaps I should have been more specific in my final line about opening the door to the control of "hate" speech. That was intended as a caution not to return to the bad old days when conservatives tried to control the free exchange of indecent material even among _consenting_ adults.

I suppose we could live with laws that prohibited, for example, the criticism of Islam in plain view on broadcast television on the grounds that it was offensive hate speech in ways that the founders never envisioned a godless element would contemplate. But if we _can't_ live with that (as I can not), we have to recognize that, as you say, the television has an on/off button, and no one need be exposed to speech that is hostile to religion or anything else so long as we have the ability to control our own and our children's viewing. That means that to be consistent we must also live with explicit sexual content on television, just as we do on cable/satellite transmissions, so long as we retain personal control over what we see. Yes, I believe the FCC should be abolished.

I doubt you believe that the founders were unaware of the commerce in erotic engravings, printed on presses, of course. If the founders intended to provide a lot of leeway in this issue would they have said that "Congress shall make NO law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..."? As they say, what part of "no" don't you understand? You may well agree with me, Patriot2Opine, I just thought I would expand on this issue because some conservatives may have problems with it.

I think you should read TrampDorena's and ladykrystyna's posts more carefully. They know exactly what the 1st and 2nd Amendments are and underscored the point (as you did) that it is the accumulated result of the 2nd -- an armed citizenry -- that makes it risky for the regime to attempt the violation of the first. The danger is in a takeover of communications so gradual that it is not much noticed -- until it is too late.

"When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty." --Thomas Jefferson