As bad as the police brutality against the OWS demonstrators was it was not the scariest thing that happened last week.  The most disturbing thing has to be six of the would be Republican candidates for president pandering to the greatest threat to this nation – the Evangelical Christians or the American Taliban.  It happened at the Thanksgiving Family Forum. At a forum on moral values, which was held...

Is NATO pondering an Arab-backed, Libya-like invasion of Syria? Are Israel and the West planning to strike Iran’s nuclear program? Columnist Mohamed Kawash of Jordan’s Al-Arab Al-Yawm writes that the Arab street has a sinking feeling that history is about to repeat itself. For Jordan’s Al-Arab Al-Yawm, Mohamed Kawash writes in part: How similar today is to yesterday. History is repeating itself....

The Arab league today gave a three-day extension to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to stop killing his own people or face expulsion from it, despite being a founding member. This is big. The Arab League, notorious in the Arab world for decades of mealy-mouthed equivocation, is suddenly roaring led by Qatar, a sliver of gas-rich sand with less than 300,000 citizens. Syria, where civilization is traced back to 10,000...

Has Washington intentionally set things up so that Iraq will have no choice but to allow U.S. forces to remain in the country past 2011? According to Sotal Iraq columnist Qasim Al-Kafaji, the U.S. has no intention of pulling out, which explains its 16,000 ‘diplomats’ at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and its failure to fully prepare Iraqis to take contol of their own territory. For Sotal Iraq/aka...

Aliaa Magda Elmahdy isn’t new to controversy. She and her boyfriend Kareem Amir were thrown out of a public park for engaging in public displays of affection earlier this year. Elmahdy responded to the incident by posting a video of the two of them arguing with the park managers who expelled them. That seems mild now. To protest limitations on free expression in Egypt, Elmahdy recently stripped down to...

When the Tea Party was at its heyday during the 2010 elections, when the Palins and the Bachmanns ruled the day, we were treated to some soaring oratory by real, “take-our-country-back” Americans: You know, those real Americans, real patriots, real believers who belong to the party of core values, of family values — the good party, the party of God. Feeling quite dejected, feeling like a...

ARCHBISHOP TIMOTHY DOLAN The tone deafness of the Roman Catholic Church in American is in full regalia as the church’s bishops this week rejoined the culture wars by recasting their opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage as a struggle for “religious liberty” against a government and culture that are infringing on the church’s rights. Yes, as with the pedophile priest scandal,...

by WALTER BRASCH “O.K., class, we have a few minutes at the end of today’s lecture about how the godless Communists created evolution to try to destroy the decent loyal patriotic capitalist society of America. Any questions? Yes, Billy Bob.” “Mr. Jim Bob, I heard about this thing called a person. What is that?” “Good question. With all the distortions by the lyin’ liberal left-wing, it can get...

by Rafael Jesús González, M.Div: University of Creation Spirituality, California ministry to the poor. Veterans Day When the First World War officially ended June 28, 1919, the actual fighting had already stopped the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month the previous year. Armistice Day, as it was known, later became a national holiday, and in 1954 (the year I graduated from high school),...

Penn State and their sexual abuse intrusion cases are not alone is being peered at by a Grand Jury in Pennsylvania. See excerpt from EWTN news Feb 15 of this year 2011 below detailing Grand Jury findings on abject neglect of credible complaints of sexual intrusion of children in Catholic Diocese… one wonders what the h.e. double hockeysticks is in the water in Pennsylvania. But, then, it must be in the...

Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune According to the Washington Post, ballot initiative Amendment 26 in Mississippi that would have granted “personhood” to a fertilized egg has failed. With more than half of precincts reporting, the voters were rejecting the proposal to amend the Constitution by 59 percent to 41 percent. The text of the amendment: The term “person” or “persons”...

The revelations that the storied Penn State football program harbored a serial child rapist for over 40 years and that presidential wannabe Herman Cain is almost certainly a serial groper and harasser of women would not appear to be connected, but they very much are. By all rights, the arrest of longtime Penn State defense coordinator Jerry Sandusky on rape charges and the university’s athletic director...

WASHINGTON — We have embarked on yet another presidential campaign in which religion will play an important role without any agreement over what the ground rules for that engagement should be. If you think we’re talking past each other on jobs and budgets, consider the religious divide. One side says “separation of church and state” while the other speaks of “religion’s...

Bill Schorr, Cagle Cartoons This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Officially adopted as the national motto of the United States in 1956, “In God We Trust” has been in official use by the government since it was first added to coinage in 1864 at the direction of Treasury Secretary Samuel Chase. Some wrongly credit Francis Scott Key with originally “coining” the phrase in 1814 in one of the verses of “The Star Spangled Banner”. In a verse not normally sung, and...

It will require this kind of balancing act for the GOP to retake the White House Shortly after midnight exactly one year from this Sunday the first voters will go to the polls in two tiny New Hampshire towns to vote in a presidential election that will be singularly significant in defining the course of American politics in the years to come. Before the sun sets in Hawaii on November 6, 2012, 130 million...

this from the South Bend Trib. the only newspaper within a many mile area from my small hometown population 600. Harry Houdini was like a folk hero where I grew up… and every year on Halloween, people waited til near midnight to tell the story, not of his life… but of his life after. You decide. Houdini was never convinced in his lifetime that the dead could contact the living. But he vowed to continue...

Motormouth Limbaugh Meets the Machine Gun Preacher by Michael Winship If you blinked, you might have missed a recent movie called Machine Gun Preacher. The film hasn’t burned up the box office and the title may have kept you away from your local picture palace in the mistaken belief that it was some kind of exploitation flick or the latest Quentin Tarantino exercise in post-modernism and ironic bloodbaths....

WASHINGTON — Will we soon see a distinguished-looking older man in long white robes walking among the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators in New York’s Zuccotti Park? Is Pope Benedict XVI joining the protest movement? Well, yes, and no. Yes, the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace issued a strong and thoughtful critique of the global financial system this week that paralleled...

“The bodies of Gaddafi, his son Mutassim and former Defense Minister Abu Bakr Younis had been held in cold storage in the port city of Misurata since the dictator and members of his entourage were captured near his hometown of Sirte on Thursday. Gaddafi and Mutassim were captured alive, with some injuries, but died in unclear circumstances later that day. “Libya’s interim leaders have promised...

Daryl Cagle, MSNBC.com This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

One wonders what would have happened for Cain if he made jokes about lynching black people who make no effort to work…but then later, much later, he said ‘awwwwww, that was a joke, and America needs to get a sense of humor.’ Unfortunately, Cain himself is becoming not a leader, but is seen as a reason to laugh as he blunders along trying to find his way into a presidential nomination. He had...

Call it propaganda or call it delusion, but Tehran is crowing about not only predicting Occupy Wall Street and allied groups, but says it considers itself primarily responsible for all the unrest – Eastern and Western – since the Arab Spring began. So could it be that the protests which began in New York on September 17 and have now spread across the developed world reflect a yearning to reject...

Rush Limbaugh has jumped himself: he has now jumped something bigger than a shark or a whale.

Has Washington concocted a tale of Iranian terror in order to, a) divert the anger of the American people over the behavior of government leaders and financial officials, b) ruin Iran’s reputation among neighboring states, particularly with Saudi Arabia, c) divert the Arab Spring from following the example of the Iranian Revolution and, d) help Israel out of its current isolation? According to this news...