Free Republic

It’s been a momentous couple of weeks at the Supreme Court. As usual, they saved the big cases for the end. This year the big three were Bruen (gun rights), Dobbs (abortion rights) and West Virginia (administrative regulation of CO2). All three cases were decided 6-3 along ideological lines. These cases involved the most basic issues of what the Constitution is and how it is to be interpreted. On those issues there is virtually no hope of one side ever convincing anyone from the other side. There just are two fundamentally irreconcilable visions of how this should work. The two...

Thomas Sowell is an icon. And, now, he has a biographer. While Sowell himself has written, by my count, 43 books, Jason Riley’s 2021 Maverick seems remarkably to be the first-ever major press biography of the heterodox African-American giant. Riley’s book sums up most of the key themes of Sowell’s thought, including the Anointed and Constrained visions of human behavior, the fact that the plain existence of racism does not explain most differences in group performance, and the idea of quantitative culturalism as an alternative to both “critical race theory” and genetic determinism. Sowell’s biographer also sums up two factual...

The belief that President Donald Trump, as well as presidents in general, were “anointed by God” has increased considerably among church attendees, according to a recent report.Among white Protestants who attended church once a week or more, belief that Trump was anointed by God had increased from 29.6% last year to 49.5% this year, according to a report titled “Trump the Anointed?” that was published by Religion in Public.Researchers Paul A. Djupe of Denison University and Ryan P. Burge of Eastern Illinois University compared survey data from May 2019 among white Protestants to a survey they conducted in March of...

More churchgoers now believe President Trump is anointed by God as he heads into the 2020 election, according to two professors who study religion and politics. In a "Religion in Public" blog post on Monday titled "Trump The Anointed?" Ryan Burge, assistant professor of political science and graduate coordinator at Eastern Illinois University, and Paul Djupe, an associate professor of political science at Denison University in Ohio, called it a "phenomenon that is sweeping American religion."

Power of the Holy Spirit

Peter Waldron, a staffer involved in Michele Bachmann’s faith outreach, has compared Texas Governor Rick Perry to Old Testament King Saul and Bachmann to King David. On his Facebook page the day after Bachmann’s straw poll victory in Iowa on Saturday, Waldron wrote, "From afar and in prayer I see a Saul and David scenario between Perry and Bachmann. One looks everything like a king while the other is anointed." Waldron later told his followers that Bachmann "fights with the anointing of God upon her." The visibility of veteran GOP political organizer Waldron has risen a good bit since The...

In ‘The Vision of the Anointed’(p.254), Thomas Sowell powerfully observes that the msnufacture of the lowly pencil is vastly beyond the capability of a single person. There are those who select, harvest and prepare the wood; those who find, extract, and prepare the graphite; those who shape and assemble the parts; those who package, transport, sell, etc. Each works within a limited “circle of knowledge.” The sum of these circles cannot possibly be invested in a single individual; further, the participants must must all work, autonomously, and voluntarily as a team. They probably work within a web of trusting relationships...

A first time gesture for a presidential inauguration continues to set Obama's election apart. *In a first for presidential inaugurations, Congressman Paul Broun of Georgia joined Reverend Rob Schenck of Faith and Action and others. Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition, both based in Washington, DC, in a prayer service inside the US Capitol that included anointing the doorway President-Elect Barack Obama will pass through on his way to the platform to be sworn in as the 44th president of the United States on January 20. "Anointing with oil is a rich tradition both in the Bible and in the...

I need help. I want to put together a nice consolidated packet of the major problems with Obama. I'm looking for information on his ties with all his questionable friends and illegal activities. His statements on abortion and infanticide and hs comments about Christians and his questionable ties to his cousin in Africa. I would especially like to find any audio, video, or transcripts of him calling himself the "Anointed," or "Chosen One". I realize I could do searches, but I am hoping that someone out there can make my work real easy. Yea it may seem I'm lazy, but...

“Baptized with Sinners, Anointed for Service, Manifested as God’s Son” (Matthew 3:13-17)On this first Sunday after the Epiphany, the Gospel reading every year is the account of the Baptism of Our Lord, that great event when our Lord Jesus Christ was baptized in the Jordan River by John the Baptist. Heaven was opened. The Spirit of God descended on Jesus like a dove. And the Father’s voice came from heaven, saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” Today I want to say three things about this baptism, three things on which your very salvation depends:...

Sudenly, there is an explosion of media about the dark side of liberalism, exposing their down-the-nose, arrogant elitism and worse. The American Conservative magazine today exposes the elitism of liberals: "Babbittry is the idea that the average Joe lives within the passionless routine of marriage, the tyranny of consumerism, and the regimentation of small-town civic life. Babbittry judges Joe to live in a benighted, blinkered spiritual state, a gay-bashing, beer-drinking redneck whose Taliban tendencies want to ban dancing, rock-and-roll, and R-rated movies. People who don’t live in New York, Hollywood, or divide their time between Virginia, Hyannis Port, or Nantucket...

The Clintons decided that the Democratic primary campaign was getting out of hand. Howard Dean was getting all the buzz and too much of the passionate left's money. Word was out that Dean as nominee, owing Clintonites nothing, would quickly dump Terry McAuliffe, through whom Bill and Hillary maintain control of the Democratic National Committee. That's when word was leaked of the former president's observation at an intimate dinner party at the Clinton Chappaqua, N.Y., estate that "there are two stars in the Democratic Party — Hillary and Wes Clark." Meanwhile, the four-star general that Clinton fired for being a...