Hugo Chavez continues his push to do for Venezuela what Robert Mugabe has done for Zimbabwe. Yet he remains an object of admiration among the Hollywood elite and many American Christian liberals.

Another bit of prose that ended up on the cutting room floor:

Any American who has even casually followed the news since the presidential election of 2008 can surely recite the thirty-second biography of Sarah Palin:

Grew up hunting and fishing in Wasilla, Alaska . . . co-captain on a state championship basketball team . . . Miss Congeniality in the Miss Alaska pageant . . . married handsome high school sweetheart who races snow machines . . . Mayor of Wasilla . . . youngest-ever Governor of Alaska . . . McCain’s VP nominee . . . five children, the youngest with Down’s Syndrome . . . telegenic . . . born-again Christian . . . conservative.

This Cliffs Notes-esque version of her resume is accurate but shallow. What this superficial understanding of the highlights and milestones of Sarah’s life doesn’t offer us is real insight into the questions that lie between the bullet points:

· What draws a stay-at-home mom to wade into the contentious world of local politics?

· What skills and gifts propel her rapid climb to higher offices and global visibility?

· From whence springs the drive that twice compelled her back to work, first as mayor and then as governor, within days after giving birth?

· What traits keep her in the fray after becoming the favorite mockery target of the nation’s standup comedians, fake news anchors, sketch comedy writers and left-wing bloggers; and the constant focus of vicious and bizarre conspiracy theories about her baby?

There are other questions that go beyond fascination of the People magazine variety and connect to issues that could impact the lives of every American—indeed every person on the planet. Specifically, in a season in which Sarah’s name is frequently mentioned as a contender for the presidency in 2012, we are compelled to wonder: Continue reading →

I have vivid childhood memories of my father carrying me off to bed on many weekend nights. On school nights we had to run off to bed at whatever the appointed time was for our age. But on Friday or Saturday nights or in the summer, I invariably conked out in the living room in front of the television.

At some point, I would waken a little as Dad–a lanky six-foot-two and sinewy 210 pounds–scooped me up in his arms and carried me, a limp rag doll, off to bed. Sometime shortly after my eighth birthday, that became more of a feat as we moved into the two story house out in the country that would be their home for the next 37 years.

It was not long after that move that I grew to be too heavy and those stairs too steep for Dad to provide that service any longer. But while it lasted, I loved the feeling of floating and rising up those stairs in that foggy groggy state between sleep and wakefulness.

This last Friday I scooped my father up in my arms a laid him in his new bed at the Alzheimer’s care facility that will be his home for the foreseeable future. Or at least I tried.

He has lost an astonishing number of inches from his frame, and the stresses of the battle he’s been fighting have reduced him to scarcely 150 pounds. Nevertheless, he was heavily sedated and I did not move him to his bed with the same grace and ease with which he used to do the same for me.

We are all grateful that it worked out for Dad to be in a place that is less than a 10 minute drive from Mom and the house. Will she be with him much? She is having her easy chair moved into his room tomorrow.

Hurried home that night to be ready for yesterday’s book signing event at the Mardel’s Bookstore in Hurst Texas. I was heartened and humbled by the number of friends who came out to support and well-wish, including one old buddy I haven’t seen in more than 15 years.

At church this morning I taught a class of 50 or 60 wonderfully receptive and engaged attendees on the subject of prayer.

I know every principle and precept I presented is sound and true. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but wonder, if only for a fleeting moment, if a man should be teaching others about how to get things done in prayer when he is fighting fierce battles in so many areas of his life.

But then I remembered that the Apostle Paul wrote half the New Testament from jail and that John wrote Revelation as an exiled slave in a island mining colony. And suddenly I felt like an exemplar of victorious Christian living.

I have been invited to speak this Tuesday to a small group of men from our church who are fathers of daughters and who meet together regularly to seek God’s help in that wonderful endeavor.

My advice? Love them, protect them, cover them, speak the Word over them. And by all means, carry them off to bed as long as you possibly can.

{Postcript: Dad passed quietly and peacefully fewer than 48 hours after I published the post above.}

Here’s a worthwhile piece from Powerline’s John Hindraker on the ongoing breakdown of social order south of the U.S. border. An excerpt:

The situation in Mexico is a disaster, and one that directly threatens our national security. For reasons that I don’t understand, most Americans don’t seem to care, and the Obama administration reflects that apathy. Mexico makes Iraq look like Switzerland. Iraq is, I think, important to our security, but Mexico is much more so. I don’t know what the solution is–other than the obvious, a massive application of police/military force to kill the criminals–but at a minimum, we should take notice.

(hat tip: Instapundit)

The Houston area’s Harris County is the second-most populous county in the nation. In the last election, some volunteers working at polling places started suspecting something fishy was going on. So they started digging.

What they found may have blown the cover off endemic union-enabled vote fraud across the country.

Catherine Englebrecht and friends started by searching voter registration databases for households in which six or more voters were registered. Since you have to 18-years-old to vote, six-voter households should be fairly rare. And by and large they were. Most Harris County precincts contained only 1800-2400 of such voter-rich homes. Then they found one that contained 24,000.

This is what we advanced statistical types call an anomaly.

Digging deeper, the group found that within that one precinct, there were 25,000 registrations submitted by a group calling itself “Houston Votes”–run by a former SIEU member. Oddly enough, the vast majority of those 25,000 registrations turned out to be phonier than The Situation’s tan. As a news story described it (emphasis mine):

Most of the findings focused on a group called Houston Votes, a voter registration group headed by Sean Caddle, who also worked for the Service Employees International Union before coming to Houston. Among the findings were that only 1,793 of the 25,000 registrations the group submitted appeared to be valid.

This is what we professional ethicists call cheating your rear off.

Of course, at this point, Fox News and the Washington Examiner have paid any attention to the extraordinary findings.

That’s because this is what we professional mainstream journalists call a non-story.

UPDATE: FBI investigating [SIEU’s] Stern in corruption probe

Another deleted scene from the book, The Faith and Values of Sarah Palin:

For most of us, our life memories begin with a small collection of hazy scenes from our fourth or fifth year of life. This is true for Sarah Palin, and thus her earliest memories are of Skagway. Most of those remembrances, in turn, are of the sights, sounds and smells of summer.

That summer dominates her memories isn’t surprising. Summer in Alaska’s panhandle is a natural circus for a child’s senses. Both the moose and the glaciers are calving. Family hikes along the storied Chilkoot Trail present glimpses of brown bears, foxes, and eagles on land; and of orcas, sea otters, and seals in the water below. Furthermore, summer meant a busy harbor as commercial fisherman, fishing guides, suppliers, outfitters, and steady stream of sightseers on day trips out of Juneau all moved in and out of the docks at the southwest end of town. The Palin house offered a front row seat for this daily aquatic ballet.

Chuck Heath had rented a small clapboard house on the gravel-paved corner of First and Main. This placed the Heath family at the lower, seaside edge of town, about 250 yards from the water’s edge and about 100 yards from the gravel airstrip that ran parallel to Main Street. The owner of the house, Elmer Rasmusen, was the son of Swedish missionary immigrants who found spectacular success as pioneers of banking in the Alaska territory. Elmer had grown Continue reading →

As is often the case with books (and movies) a lot of stuff got cut in the final edit. The publisher had a specific word-count target in mind so after a frenzy of writing came the frenzy of cutting.

I wrote probably 7,000 to 8.000 words that didn’t end up in the book. In order to keep that writing from going completely to waste, I thought I would post some of it here. Here’s a snippet about Sarah Palin’s early childhood.

Sarah Palin first entered Skagway, Alaska, cradled tightly in her mother’s arms. Sally Heath, her two toddlers, and her mother were each belted tightly into the seat of a World War II-vintage Grumman Goose as it bounced, lurched and shuddered its way down through a patchy layer of thick clouds toward the implausibly blue-green waters of Skagway harbor. An anxious husband and father, Chuck Heath, paced the dock below, scanning the clouds for signs of his little tribe’s approach. He had driven ahead in the family’s old Rambler, traveling by road and ferry to secure a home before the rest arrived. Finally, he sees the descending plane and knows that the pilot is scanning the harbor for a section of water free enough of fishing vessels to allow a landing.

It is early June and winter has finally and fully released its icy grip on Alaska’s southeastern coast. Stepping out of the Grumman and onto the wooden dock, Sally Heath and her entourage would have been greeted by the thick, organic smell of salt air and sea life tinged with traces of spruce, alder and wood smoke. Looking around they would have noted evergreen covered foothills Continue reading →

Here is the next installment in a series of short videos in which Stephen Mansfield and I discuss The Faith and Values of Sarah Palin. Here, we examine what Stephen and I eventually came to call my “Grand Unified Theory of Palin Hatred”:

In his youth, Chris Coons, the guy running for the Delaware Senate seat against the widely hated and mocked Christine O’Donnell once referred to himself as “a bearded Marxist.” He has since, for obvious reasons, tried to distance himself from that self-designation.

It’s understandable. Heck, even Karl Marx famously denied being a Marxist.

Today’s Marxists-at-heart usually do a pretty good job of disguising their true anti-Capitalist stripes. They build a nice veneer of words like “progressive” and “justice” and “working Americans” and “the working poor” and “corporate greed.”

But there is one piece of vocabulary, however, that gives them away every time. Anyone who in their college years has imbibed deeply of the typical university neo-Marxist, multi-culti, America-is-the-locus-of-all-evil claptrap can’t help using this word as a noun:

“Struggle.”

Marxist ideology is all about “struggle.” Not “battle.” Not “conflict.” Not “resistance.” Struggle.

Class struggle. Race struggle. Intestinal struggle. (Write or say the word a few times and it really starts looking and sounding weird, doesn’t it?)

Here are a couple of examples of this tell-tale word usage I came across just today.

I noticed an item over at the blog of Vox Day mentioning a horrifying untold story unfolding in the West Bank:

Two activists have exposed a disturbing phenomenon that they say is an open secret within the “peace camp”: female “peace” activists are routinely harassed and raped by the Arabs of Judea and Samaria with whom they have come to identify. They say the phenomenon has gotten worse lately and that many foreign women end up as wives of local Arabs against their will, but cannot escape their new homes….

Aloni-Sedovnik cites two specific cases which she has knowledge of – one is a case of rape and another is “severe sexual harassment.” The attackers in both cases, she stresses, were familiar with the victims and knew that they were “peace activists.” The rape occurred several months ago in the village of Umm Salmona, near Bethlehem. The victim, an American activist, wanted to press charges but leftist activists put pressure on her not to do so, so as not to damage the struggle against the ‘occupation.’

There is much I could say about this story, but for now just note the appearance of our special term in the last sentence of that excerpt. It is precisely the kind of language “peace activists” would use.

My radar is pretty finely attuned to the S-word coming from the mouths of liberal politicians, pundits and academics. For example, Nancy Pelosi uses it all the time.

There is a two-fer in a Q&A Speaker Pelosi did a couple of months ago with a journalism student at a Mills College. Mills is a womens’ college in California that, based upon a little time poking around in the online school newspaper, is fully marinated in the ridiculous, pretentious Women’s Studies, Postmodern, deconstructivist juices you would expect. Here the student asked Madam Speaker about the health care debate:

STUDENT: Could you speak more on why this particular struggle was so important to address at this time?

PELOSI: This particular struggle has been long overdue.

Ah, yes.

Well, I leave you with an excerpt from presidential candidate Barack Obama, speaking at a church in Atlanta on January 20, 2008:

Brothers and sisters, we cannot walk alone.
In the struggle for peace and justice, we cannot walk alone.
In the struggle for opportunity and equality, we cannot walk alone.
In the struggle to heal this nation and repair this world, we cannot walk alone.

Goodnight.

Well I spent the day yesterday yammering on Facebook and Twitter and other Intertubes about the Sarah Palin book. My apologies to everyone in my social network who grew weary of hearing about it. But it was a pretty cool day around here.

We’ve had a challenging and frequently disheartening year-and-a-half. It was great to have something to celebrate. In the spirit of celebration, Tracy brought home a couple of ribeyes and some fresh ears of corn to grill.

In our new place, the grill is actually up on a rooftop terrace, so I was up there doing my grillmaster thing when some dark, rain-filled clouds began to move in from the East. This happened just as the sun was getting ready to set in the west.

So guess what I saw from my rooftop vantage point? Yep.

Double Rainbow!

Now if the “double rainbow” meme doesn’t mean anything to you, it means you haven’t seen this video on YouTube which, as of this writing, has been viewed almost 16 million times.

Much of my caterwauling during the day had to do with letting folks know that my co-author and friend, Stephen Mansfield, would scheduled to be on Sean Hannity’s show last night.

If you were one of the ones who tuned last night, you know that it didn’t air.

That afternoon Stephen taped an interview with Sean on his set immediately after Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell taped hers. But apparently, when the editors started putting the show together, a decision was made to move the interview Stephen to another night this week. I’ll let you know when I hear which night.

In the meantime . . . DOUBLE RAINBOW!

It was a sign. A sign of good things to come. Indeed, those of us who take the Bible seriously know that it is precisely that. A covenant reminder. From a covenant-keeping God.