Well, the 700 Club will be airing a long and friendly interview with Hillary tonight in which she talks about her faith.

That’s how scary.

There is an article in the most recent issue of Foriegn Policy magazine (subscription req.) that is at once chilling, heartbreaking and maddening.

“A World Enslaved” by author/journalist Benjamin Skinner tells us, “There are now more slaves on the planet than at any time in human history.” Ponder that for a moment.

If the typical American is aware at all of the 21st Century slave trade, it is in reference to Sudan, where the Arab/Islamic fundamentalist government there has been taking slaves from the predominantly black/Christian South for a couple of decades now.

But as Skinner points out:

Few in the developed world have a grasp of the enormity of modern-day slavery. Fewer still are doing anything to combat it . . .even the quiet and diligent work of some within the U.S. State Department, which credibly claims to have secured more than 100 antitrafficking laws and more than 10,000 trafficking convictions worldwide, has resulted in no measurable decline in the number of slaves worldwide.

The article notes that a huge segment of slaves at this moment are women and children. And that their primary tasks involve sex and domestic labor.

Skinner describes how he flew to Haiti and secretly recorded a negotiation with a man on a street corner to purchase a 10-year-old girl. And you can hear his recording of a negotiation in a Romanian brothel for the acquisition of a handicapped, suicidal young girl in trade for a used car—here.

It’s breathtaking to contemplate that nearly 300 years after the nations of Western Civilization began progressively outlawing slavery and nearly 150 years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation—we are currently witnesses to unprecedented levels of human bondage and suffering around the world.

Of course, there is a very logical reason for this horror. Wherever the slave trade thrives, you’ll find one of three elements in place culturally. 1. Fundamentalist Islam; 2. Communist Totalitarianism/Marxism; or 3. Post-Communist Atheism.

Muslim Africa, China, North Korea, Russia and the client states of the former Soviet Union, and Marxist Haiti—these are the dark and hopeless spots on the planet where slavery is resurgent. Not coincidentally, they are some of the least Christian places on earth.

What few history textbooks dare to acknowledge anymore is that the anti-slavery impulse was essentially a Christian one. Three centuries ago, wherever Christianity permeated the culture, abolitionist feeling grew.

The fires of the anti-slavery movement were kindled and stoked from the pulpits of British and American churches.

Thus, it stands to reason that the spots where slavery is once again tolerated are those places where Christianity’s light shines least and dimmest.

The founder of the historic Christian faith launched His movement by declaring that he had come to “proclaim liberty to the captives.” Perhaps it’s time for those of us who claim His name to launch a new abolitionist movement.

And just maybe our smug new militant atheists like Bill Maher and Sam Harris might pause in their crusade to extinguish Christianity’s influence in our culture long enough to wonder what old evils might awaken in our own land once they’ve succeeded.

{E. Benjamin Skinner’s FP article was adapted from his new book, A Crime So Monstrous: Face to Face with Modern-Day Slavery}

Rob Long is a comedy writer who started out as a writer on Cheers and who is now, among many other things, an occasional contributor for National Review (wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more).

Rob has a great media-oriented blog where he recently mentioned a new project he’s working on—something called “Loopy.”

Four improv comics get one look at some film footage and then have to dub new dialogue for it. It’s pretty hilarious.

Here’s a sample. The “China Town” bit is especially tasty. (warning:  A wee bit of salty language.)

Way back here I made a wise-acre remark about how George Lucas had ruined the Star Wars prequels. Well, while I was perusing movie posters after the post below, I came across this poster for a movie coming “Winter 2009”. . .

It’s for a documentary called “The People vs George Lucas.” I’m guessing it’s a film in which people get to share on camera how deeply betrayed they feel by Jar Jar Binks.

Here’s the official site for the movie.

. . . here’s something cool.

The “Movie Poster Addict” website has a display of the the promotional posters for each of the last 79 “Best Picture” winners. What a contrast to today’s marketing. I love the slogan for the Frank Capra film above: “You’ll love them all for giving you the swellest time you’ve ever had!”

I was curious as to how many of the previous 79 winners I’ve actually seen. I counted 65. I was much less likely to have seen the very recent ones than the very old ones.

How about you?

Media bias for one thing. Check this out.

1. In the post below I mentioned Michelle Obama’s hyperbolic warning that under an MesmerO administration, we’ll all be required to “shed our cynicism.” (The phrase triggers an image of a bunch of snakes molting their skins.)

Today Mark Steyn mentions that the whole concept of compulsory cynicism shedding reminds him of this old Dilbert cartoon:

 

(click to enlarge)

2. I predicted way back in this post that as soon as it was clear that John McCain had the Republican nomination sewn up, the mainstream media which has been so friendly to him would turn on him with a vengeance. Of course, that happened today. Not that the development was all that hard to predict. 

It was about as risky as prognosticating that Chris Matthews will soon be an obnoxious cheerleader for the Democrats. Which leads me to my third point.

3. Because I don’t have enough to do, I’ve launched yet another blog. At www.chrismatthewsleg.com I will be chronicling the life and times of Chris Matthews’ Leg . . . what thrills it, what repulses it, and what hacks it off. (Not “hacks it off” in the literal machete-weilding sense of the term, of course.)

I don’t know how long-lived it will be but I’m having fun with it for the time being.

As Jim Geraghty reported this morning, Michelle Obama is the gift that keeps on giving. In a recent speech she gave us a glimpse of what you and I will and won’t be allowed to do under President MesmerO:

 Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

I’m sorry but I’ve come by my cynicism honestly and you can have it when you pry it from my cold dead fingers. 

To follow up on my posts below, James Lileks noted this morning that: “There is tremendous faith in his ability to just wave a love-wand and get things done. . . Perhaps they don’t mind a fellow on a white horse if he promises to nationalize the stables.”

Lileks also points out one of the upsides we conservatives can look forward to under the Dali Obama administration:

If he wins, I do look forward to dissenting; since it’s been established as the highest form of patriotism, I expect my arguments will be met with grave respect. Shhhh! He’s dissenting.

Yes, it’s going to be a glorious day.

 

I missed this Charles Krauthammer piece from a few days ago which covers a lot of the same territory as my ObaMessiah post below.

Excerpt:

Obama has an astonishingly empty paper trail. He’s going around issuing promissory notes on the future that he can’t possibly redeem. Promises to heal the world with negotiations with the likes of Iran’s President Ahmadinejad. Promises to transcend the conundrums of entitlement reform that require real and painful trade-offs and that have eluded solution for a generation. Promises to fund his other promises by a rapid withdrawal from an unpopular war — with the hope, I suppose, that the (presumed) resulting increase in American prestige would compensate for the chaos to follow.

Democrats are worried that the Obama spell will break between the time of his nomination and the time of the election, and deny them the White House. My guess is that he can maintain the spell just past Inauguration Day. After which will come the awakening. It will be rude.

Read it all!

Google has gone too far.

Yes, for years the principal partners have donated hundreds of millions to left-wing causes. Yes, they have been complicit partners in the Chinese government’s Big Brother information control regime. Yes, they have facilitated vicious “google-bombing” campaigns by liberal extremists against conservatives and Christians.

But now the guys at Google have taken the extraordinary step of “disappearing” from the Internet a journalist who had been critical of the UN.

. . .beginning Feb. 13, Google News users could no longer find new stories from the Inner City Press.

“I think they said, ‘If we can’t get this guy out of the U.N., let’s disappear him from the Internet,'” Lee said.

It began with an innocuous-sounding yet chilling form letter from Google to Lee, e-mailed on Feb. 8:

“We periodically review news sources, particularly following user complaints, to ensure Google News offers a high quality experience for our users,” it said. “When we reviewed your site we’ve found that we can no longer include it in Google News.”

As soon as he read it, Lee immediately suspected one thing: That someone at the UNDP had pressured Google into “de-listing” him from Google News — essentially preventing Inner City Press from being classified on Google News as a legitimate news source and from having its stories pop up when someone conducts a Google News search.

Here’s the whole story. 

And here are some search engine alternatives:

www.ask.com

www.yahoo.com

www.excite.com

www.dogpile.com(an aggregator of the most popular engines)

If you know of any other good ones, feel free to mention them in a comment.