[I am working on a project that may become a book on the most influential evangelicals leaders of our generation, since 1976, and the impact they’ve had on the church and their times. I will introduce them briefly on this blog from time to time. Who should be on this list?]

#36  Ralph Reed. Political muscle  b.1961 

 Ralph Reed is “perhaps the finest political operative of his generation,”[1] and has certainly been the most bare-knuckled evangelical political brawler of the last 20 years. As executive director of the Christian Coalition (1989-1997), he built one of nation’s most effective grassroots organizations and played a pivotal role in the election of the first Republican Congress in 40 years. Under his leadership, the organization grew from 2,000 over 2 million members and supporters in 3,000 local chapters.

Reed’s departure from the Coalition to form his own consulting firm in Atlanta provided a vivid demonstration of the importance of leadership.  The group was never the same, and today it is a shell of the organization it was in its heyday. Reed went on to have a successful career as a political consultant to both corporations and candidates. He headed George W. Bush’s southern campaign and transformed the Georgia Republican Party, building first-time Republican majorities in the State House and capturing the Governor’s Mansion and both U.S. Senate seats. 

Reed made a run for public office, but he found that his work as a political operative and consultant involved associations and tactics that didn’t bode well as a candidate. As one of the toughest of the modern political players, the ugly and risky strategies he used in high-profile political races did not look statesmanlike (or of a high ethical standard) in the bright light of a candidacy, and he was soundly defeated in the Georgia Republican primary for Lt. Governor in 2006.

This surprised observers who had seen nothing but success from the the young wunderkind:

Many thought “the young man who at 33 graced Time magazine’s cover in 1995 as “The Right Hand of God” might appear there again, perhaps a decade from now, taking the oath of office on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. Instead, there was Reed, just 45 but with crow’s-feet carved gently into his temples, offering a meager group of supporters a curt concession speech in a hotel ballroom in Buckhead. He had lost the primary to a little-known state senator named Casey Cagle in a 12-point landslide, Reed’s once invincible lead in the polls and fund raising eroded by a year of steady revelations about his ties to the convicted former G.O.P. superlobbyist Jack Abramoff. In the political vernacular that Reed loves to employ, he was waxed.”[2]

Nonetheless, Reed remains one of the brightest and most sought-after political consultants in the nation and is extending his public voice through The Faith and Freedom Coalition advocacy group, which he started in 2009. He also published an insightful political thriller called Dark Horse that demonstrated Reed’s knowledge of both national politics and Christian conservatives. 

[2] http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1218060,00.html

 [I am working on a project that may become a book on the most influential evangelicals leaders of our generation, since 1976, and the impact they’ve had on the church and their times. I will introduce them briefly on this blog from time to time. Who should be on this list?]

37.  Richard Cizik. Renegade  b.1951 

After nearly five years of tweaking conservative evangelical leadership on a variety of issues, but most pointedly global warming, from his post as the vice president and chief Washington lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals, Richard Cizik finally accomplished what his persistent Christian adversaries could not. He self-destructed on a national radio program, stepping beyond NAE dogma not on an environmental issue, but on same-sex unions. After a run as one of the most-quoted evangelicals, occasionally taken to the woodshed by his NAE bosses but frequently glorified in mainstream media, Rich Cizik was fired by the association and found himself in the evangelical wilderness, with invitations and job offers only from his secular admirers and the most progressive evangelical allies.

 Cizik has been an honest and valuable voice for evangelicals for nearly 30 years, twisting the arms of politicians on issues important to the movement, such as abortion, pornography, religious freedom, AIDS, and—more recently— human trafficking, global poverty, climate change, and torture. The issues that gripped him broadened over the years, and while he remained theologically conservative and pro-life, the matters that began to stir his passions shifted from the historic issues of the culture wars to the causes usually championed by the evangelical left and progressives generally. 

 Cizik is described as one of the “new breed of evangelicals,” a label made popular by the New York Times[1] to give sashay to evangelicals who began to add their voices to those of progressives on topics such as the environment. He was on the point for this new part of the movement, but he outran his cover and left himself vulnerable to his adversarial brethren. Although evangelicals have been embracing many new missions, they aren’t moving as fast as Cizik or as far to the left.

 I’ve seen all of this happening while working at Rich’s side in the evangelical environmental movement, and as our public relations firm, Rooftop, represented him and the NAE government affairs office in the final years of his tenure. I have found Rich to be devout, earnest, ambitious, and slightly reckless.

 Cizik can easily be seen as one strand of a thread extending from the generation’s beginnings, in the tradition of Francis Schaeffer and Carl Henry–evangelicals who were strictly orthodox, but advocated a broad engagement with the world. “I’m not some upstart who’s trying to conjure up a new vision,” Cizik said. “This goes back a long way.”[2] His errors are tactical rather than theological.

More than anything, Cizik has been driven by this moral necessity for Christians to fight climate change.

He thought little about climate change until 2002, when he attended a conference on the subject and heard a leading British climate scientist, Sir John Houghton, a prominent evangelical. “Sir John made clear that you could believe in the science and remain a faithful biblical Christian. All I can say is that my heart was changed. For years I’d thought, ‘Well, one side says this, the other side says that. There’s no reason to get involved.’ But the science has become too compelling. I could no longer sit on the sidelines. I didn’t want to be like the evangelicals who avoided getting involved during the civil rights movement and in the process discredited the gospel and themselves.

“As a biblical Christian,” Cizik said, “I agree with St. Francis that every square inch on Earth belongs to Christ. If we don’t pay attention to global climate change, it’s pretty obvious that tens and or even hundreds of millions of people are going to die. If you have a major sea-level rise, then Bangladesh becomes uninhabitable. Where do you put its 100 million people? Do you put them in India? In China? They’d have no place to go.”[3]

In 2006, Cizik was part of a group that organized the Evangelical Climate Initiative[4], a major statement from 86 key evangelical leaders that described climate change as an urgent moral issue for Christians and called for the government to act on it. Cizik was part of the group of four people who planned ECI and made waves with its launch. (I was part of that group and served as campaign director for two years.) The real mastermind of the initiative, though, was Jim Ball, who for the last 15 years has been the progressive, intellectual glue for environmental work among evangelicals (now climate director for the Evangelical Environmental Network). It is Ball who mentored Cizik and taught him most of what he knows about both the science and the biblical basis for climate work. Ball, however, is a far more cautious operator, and while cheering Cizik’s progress on environmental issues, constantly counseled him to be more careful about his public statements on climate change as an NAE spokesman.

That counsel, as well as similar advice he received from Rooftop and others, went unheeded. 

It is a shame that Cizik is currently too toxic to have influence among mainstream evangelicals, for his instincts and convictions are important among a profusion of concerns. That may change as he continues to work within his new organization: The New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, and as the disagreements on some issues begin to lose their edge. Also, while some of Cizik’s most virulent critics are in the final years of active ministry, he is a relatively youthful 58.

[2] Newsweek. January 28, 2010  http://www.newsweek.com/id/232669

[3] http://www.grist.org/article/2010-04-27-jesus-climate-change-journey-of-evangelical-leader-rich-cizik/

[4] http://christiansandclimate.org/

 [I am working on a project that may become a book on the most influential evangelicals leaders of our generation, since 1976, and the impact they’ve had on the church and their times. I will introduce them briefly on this blog from time to time. Who should be on this list?]

#33.  Richard Land. Lobbyist  b.1946 

 Conservative evangelicals are inclined to oppose East coast elite, Washington insider, Princeton-Oxford educated, career lobbyists. That is unless he’s their lobbyist.

Enter Richard Land, the chief Washington lobbyist of the Southern Baptist Convention and a key part of the fixed conservative set in the culture wars.  Land has presented what he sees as Southern Baptist interests to policymakers and media for more than 20 years. Land is clear where the bulk of Southern Baptists will come down on most issues. But except for the convention resolution process once a year, there is really no mechanism for Land and the SBC agency he heads, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC)—the official policy voice of the SBC—to derive the SBC position. Land often develops his own position and builds support from key players in the denomination. He knows well what will sell in the SBC, which helps him steer clear of positions that would attract the ire of Baptists across the country.

Land is a formidable public spokesman and culture warrior. “People think they’re going to be dealing with some bootstrap preacher,” said Larry Eskridge, a the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College. “But he can match pedigree and training with the best of them.”[1]

He helped stop the 16-million-member SBC’s  slide to the left in 1979, and he has a hand in most of its key policies, from its 1995 apology for having supported slavery, to its 1998 statement that wives should submit to the leadership of their devout husbands.

While most ERLC positions are predictable—most recently its stubborn opposition to even nuanced climate change legislation—Land does occasionally surprise.

In 1994, he was a signer of the Evangelicals and Catholics Together document,  not a popular expression of ecumenism in the SBC.

 In 2010, Land announced the denomination’s support for establishing a path to U.S. citizenship for illegal immigrants. Land said that after borders are secure, there needs to be a way for them to pay back taxes, take a civics course and get in line with others seeking legal status. Similar to many ERLC positions, the reasoning on immigration is both spiritual and political.

The spiritual: “It is love your neighbor, do unto others. This is a kingdom issue. They are disproportionately suffering because they are forced to remain in the shadows because of their illegal status.”

The political: “Hispanics are hard-wired to be social conservatives unless we drive them away. They are family oriented, religiously oriented and pro-marriage, pro-life … tailor-made to be social conservatives.”[2]

 Land’s positions are not always the winning ones within the convention. In 2010, he took a hard line on responses to the Gulf oil spill; one writer called him the “drummer in the right-wing parade of blame” of the the environmental movement and the Obama administration, while treating British Petroleum gently.[3] A more balanced resolution for SBC action passed overwhelmingly at the 2010 convention and although Land later expressed his support, he privately sought to undermine it at the committee level.

 Land, who Time magazine called “God’s Lobbyist,” exercises great power because of his intellect and persuasive skills, but also because of his ability to choose his tactics as a SBC powerhouse—either leading (in times when he has deep personal convictions) or following (when he can claim to be only a spokesman for the denomination).

 He’s done both with great effectiveness in a generation of public evangelical engagement in the halls of power.

[2] Tennessean.com, June 8, 2010

[3] http://baptistplanet.wordpress.com/2010/06/12/richard-lands-misanalysis-of-the-deepwater-horizon-catastrophe/

Well, some of us tried to warn our fellow Americans about Obama’s lack of experience.

“Barack Obama’s incompetence, if indeed he is incompetent, results directly from a flawed political and media process that allowed such a candidate to go forward. It’s a failure of quality control. It’s an indictment of the gatekeepers and of the media in particular. They didn’t look the gift horse in the mouth and now it turns out he’s wearing dentures. It wasn’t President Obama’s fault that he aspired to a job he had no preparation for: a man’s entitled to try for as much as he can get … will you give a billion dollars, please … but only a fool would let him. And the fools in this case would do well not to ask for him to try harder. At some point the only way they can redeem themselves is to stop digging and realize that they, not he, are to blame for this fix.”

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I suppose, then, we should re-write our founding documents?

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The Voyage of the Dawn Treader – the trailer is out.

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From the common sense department:

Women in always-intact marriages who worship at least weekly are more likely to have had fewer lifetime sexual partners than those in other family structures who never worship.

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Good guy wins another one. Let’s see, another attempted robbery, and another store-owner dispatching the would-be robber. And, again, this one is in Chicago, which means that the individual who engaged in self-defense could face prosecution. As they say, “better to be tried by 12, than carried by 6.”

A couple of encouraging pieces recently regarding the abortion issue in American and the world.  First, Ramesh Ponnuru notes that 2010 looks to be the Year of the Pro-Life Woman.  Having little to show for itself in Washington, DC, the pro-life movement is getting some allies.

Two pro-life women won Republican nominations for the Senate this week. A Tea Party favorite, Sharron Angle, and the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina are running for the Senate from Nevada and California, respectively.

A third pro-life woman, Susana Martinez, became the party’s nominee for governor of New Mexico, and a fourth, Nikki Haley, a South Carolina state legislator, is expected to be a gubernatorial nominee in her state. If they win their primaries, Kelly Ayotte, the former attorney general of New Hampshire, and Jane Norton, the former lieutenant governor of Colorado, will also be pro-life Senate candidates in November.

None of these candidates is a single-issue pro-lifer. But these women have not been shy about discussing the issue, either. Neither Ms. Fiorina nor Ms. Haley would have been likely to get Ms. Palin’s endorsement — valuable in a Republican primary — without firmly opposing abortion. Likewise, Ms. Angle would not have been able to unite populist conservatives and beat the party establishment’s candidate had she been pro-choice.

Why this is happening is seemingly paradoxical, but read the whole thing for his excellent analysis.

In other news, the United Nations is having trouble forcing the issue overseas.  Seems its reasons for funding abortions worldwide has fallen apart under scrutiny\.

Deep divisions with top United Nations (UN) officials and abortion activists on one side and maternal health researchers on the other became public this week during the Women Deliver 2 conference in Washington DC.
The dispute threatens to derail hopes of raising $30B for family planning at international development conferences in the coming months. These include the Group of Eight summit this month and the UN High Level Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Review in September.

The medical journal The Lancet published a study in April refuting UN research claiming 500,000+ annual maternal deaths has remained unchanged for decades. The new study put the figure at 342,900 with 60,000 of those from HIV/AIDS, and said the number has been declining since 1980.

[…]

Scientists flatly refused to back up the 20 year-old claim by UN agencies and activists that family planning improves maternal health. The Guttmacher Institute’s president, Sharon Camp, asked Murray whether his study’s finding linking declining global fertility rates to better maternal health supports the idea that more family planning will reduce maternal deaths. Murray replied that "there is no scientific way to prove that."

Scientists also undercut UN staff’s use of the world’s slow progress toward MDG 5 as a basis for urgent pleas for family planning funds. Boerma and Murray both said that its aim of reducing maternal deaths 75% by 2015 was unrealistic since it was not based upon "historical trends." The world would need an 8% annual drop, whereas 4% has been the best so far.

Downplaying the remarks, Guttmacher’s Camp defended a joint Guttmacher-UNFPA report which was based on the now discredited UN figures, and which calls for a doubling of family planning funds in order to reduce maternal deaths by 70%. Camp did not explain why the same amount of funding would be required for a smaller overall reduction.

Leftists have so much pull at the UN, and hence big (really big) government solutions have been all the rage.  It’s just that their appeal to science has pretty much failed.  Of course, that doesn’t mean they’ll stop pushing their agenda, but it’s interesting to hear this from liberals who accuse conservatives of being anti-science.

Back in the day, at my blog New Covenant, I would periodically run a set of posts highlighting various current events or issues at hand, known as Rusty Nails. Similar to Mark’s Things Heard and Doug’s Friday Link Wrap-Up, I’ll be starting up a Stones Cry Out version of Rusty Nails.

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I’m looking through you. So, Sir Paul is happy to have a President who knows what a library is? Has Sir Paul become a U.S. citizen or is he simply giving us some unsolicited opinion? Anyway, maybe our current President knows what a library is, but he also thought:  we have 58 states, Switzerland has its own language, England and the U.K. are interchangeable, the word “Orion” is pronounced “Ore-EEon”, the U.S. constitution was written 22 centuries ago, the word “corpsman” is pronounced “corpse-man”, and… Please, Paul, stick to singing.

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Why do I need to learn math, after all, I’ll NEVER use it! Maybe. Or maybe not. It seems that 20% of borrowers with poor math skills experienced foreclosure, while only 5% of those with strong math skills did.

The inability to perform simple mathematical calculations is likely to negatively impact a borrower’s ability to manage a household budget. In addition, such an inability may adversely affect the borrower’s ability to choose the appropriate type of mortgage given his or her current financial status and expected future financial situation. Both of these scenarios would likely put a borrower at risk of falling behind on his or her mortgage.

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Well, then, take a numeracy quiz. Better yet, have your children take the quiz.

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What happens when the populace has more guns? 14,000,000 guns sold in the U.S. in 2009.

I may start doing this more often.  I collect links during the week, some I comment on here, and some just languish in Google Bookmarks.  But instead of a daily report of links like my co-blogger Mark, I’m going to save it all until the end of the week.  This installment will be a bit longer than others since I’ve got some aging links here that really want to see the light of day.  So here they are, usually, but not always, in reverse chronological order:

Coattails?  What coattails? “Some Democrats on the campaign trail have hit upon a winning campaign tactic: Run against President Obama and his agenda — especially the health care overhaul.”

Seeking asylum in the US for … homeschooling persecution? “A German Christian family received asylum in Tennessee after being severely penalized for illegally homeschooling their children in Germany.”  I’ve covered this particular situation before; here, here, here, here, here and here.

California, parts of which are boycotting Arizona for it’s new immigration law, which just enforce existing federal law, should take a look at it’s own lawbooks first.  They might find something familiar.

The economic meltdown in Greece should be a wake-up call to politicians of both parties in the US.  Otherwise, it may turn out to be, rather, a coming attraction.

ObamaCare(tm) is predicted to increase the crowding in our hospitals’ emergency rooms.  “Some Democrats agree with this assessment. Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) suspects the fallout that occurred in Massachusetts’ emergency rooms could happen nationwide after health reform kicks in.”  But he still voted for this snake oil anyway.

“Economic Woes Threaten Chavez’s Socialist Vision” Only on NPR would this be news.  For the rest of this, it’s a redundancy.

Comedy Central stands on the bedrock of free speech and will mock anyone, just as long as there’s no chance of getting beheaded for it.  “The show in development, “JC,” is a half-hour about Christ wanting to escape the shadow of his “powerful but apathetic father” and live a regular life in New York.”

Green energy falling by the wayside in Europe.  Seems the massive subsidies for this alleged cost-saving energy are too much for governments going through financial troubles.  Should we (will we) take note?

From Chuck Asay (click for a larger version):

A bit of selective outrage.

It has been noted on the left that it is counted as a political victory in taking Mr Murtha’s vacated seat, e.g., here. The right has noted that this victory in a state with a hotly contested Democratic primary and no such race on the other side with the winning candidate being a Democrat who campaigned taking a hard line against Obamacare, against abortion, and for gun rights. Well, if you want to call that a victory on the left, more power to y’all. If more Democrats pushed for smaller government, against abortion, and for gun rights … there’d be less obstructionism by the GOP in Congress too.

Arlen Specter joins 3 other high-profile politicians who, having been campaigned for by President Barack Obama, lost their race.  Erick Erickson has a summary of yesterday’s primary results in which Rand Paul, who associated himself with the Tea Party, handily beat Trey Grayson. 

Jay Cost at RealClearPolitics notes, however, that as much as the current administration would like to classify it as such, this is not as simple as a general anti-incumbent movement.

But how many Republican incumbents are in severe jeopardy of losing their seat in Congress to a Democratic challenger?

I count one: Joseph Cao of New Orleans.

Meanwhile, I count more than 20 Democrats in the House and Senate who are in severe jeopardy. Lower the threshold from "severe" to "serious" jeopardy, and I count maybe four Republicans and more than 50 Democrats.

The White House is absolutely, positively correct that there is a divide between America and Washington – but what they fail to appreciate (or, more likely, they appreciate it but want to fake-out the press) is that Washington, D.C. now belongs to Barack Obama.

Cost is zeroing in on ousting an incumbent from one party with a challenger of the other.  He’s not considering situations like Bob Bennett’s, where he lost his primary bid earlier this month (a distant third) to another Tea Partier.  But even this plays into Cost’s contention.  Bennett wasn’t ousted simply because he was an incumbent.  The Tea Party is an ideological movement, and Republicans in Utah spoke loudly that they want their representatives to demonstrate conservative principles.  Reaching across the aisle, as good as that can be, should not trump principles.  The Republican Party has lost touch with its base, trying to show how much they can be just like Democrats, too.  (See the spending habits of George W. Bush and the Republican Congress for examples.) 

The election of Scott Brown and these primaries were the warm-up acts, I believe, of a rejection of Barack Obama’s policies.  The November elections will be the main event.  It’s still 6 months until then, but it appears that the ideas of the Tea Party are resonating with Americans, and they’re not showing any sign of going away.

Today we find the announcement that Mr Obama and the White House are launching a commission to figure out what happened in the oil spill.

I predict the same thing will happen as is occurring with the financial crash … more Democrat stupidity is what will happen. And no. I don’t expect that “if this was a GOP President and Congress” there would be any lack of GOP stupidity. But … today we have a Democratic President and Congress so they own the stupidness (which isn’t a word … stupid mess?)

What is occurring with the financial crash you ask that is evidence of Democrat stupidity in action? A commission was launched to study the causes of the financial meltdown. And the report on the findings of that commission is due in three months. Yet today and not in three months time the Democrats are rushing to put in place 1,400 pages “redefining” and restructuring how banking is done in the country … before the results of the study are out.

So here’s my prediction. That similarly there will be an exhaustive and complete restructuring of the oil industry and how it operates pushed through with great fanfare. Well in advance and like the financial package completely and obviously ignoring the results of the commission and any study launched with much fanfare.

Now the argument that the politically charged studies of this nature produce no meaningful results likely has merit. I think that argument is can find a lot of good historical backing and that later careful studies done show that those initial high stakes commissions produce results which are worse than a random stab at the cause or answer. But … if that is the case, then the news about this new commission is just yet another great big waste of taxpayer money. If we had a press corps with cojones, there’d be hard questions asked about the nature and expected effectiveness of such a commission which highlights the failures of the same in the past and pointing out essentially that “isn’t this commission just a way of pretending you’re doing something useful when you aren’t?”

It is not necessary for the beltway buffoons to be experts in oil drilling. It is in fact impossible for them to do so, they lack the time, the resources, and any incentive to do so. What would be good is for the beltway to get a clue about regulation. Regulators work when they have an personal stake and an incentive in regulating well. Oil drilling safety regulators would far better being beholden to insurers and not the platform operators. In the financial world, there is much noise about the problems with bond/security ratings companies getting their money from the bond issuers themselves. The (wrong) government solution is to have the government pay for (or in essence do) the ratings themselves. But that is just skewed in a different (and wrong) direction. It will cause bond ratings to skew for political purposes which are just as inaccurate. Inaccurate ratings are the problem. The solution of “who should” pay for the ratings is the same as the answer to the question “who most clearly depends on accurate ratings?” That is the same agent that should be paying for the ratings. In coal mines, the canaries might be said to be the ones wanting to be hiring the safety commission. In general the person or agents that have the most at stake, who depend the most keenly and sharply on regulation to get it right should be paying and funding said regulation (it should be noted that this is a quite different group from those who directly oppose the activity in question).

When Barack Obama was campaigning for President, I wondered if the views of a candidate’s pastor were fair game for scrutiny as part of looking at the complete candidate.  A commenter told me, "Absolutely."  Then candidate Obama distanced himself from that same pastor, and later cut ties with him.  (That same commenter then told me that, since the pastor wasn’t running, his views were a "distraction".  Convenient.)

Today, that same pastor is whining about how he got thrown under the bus, allegedly "literally".

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s controversial former pastor, said in a letter obtained by The Associated Press that he is "toxic" to the Obama administration and that the president "threw me under the bus."

In his strongest language to date about the administration’s 2-year-old rift with the Chicago pastor, Wright told a group raising money for African relief that his pleas to release frozen funds for use in earthquake-ravaged Haiti would likely be ignored.

"No one in the Obama administration will respond to me, listen to me, talk to me or read anything that I write to them. I am ‘toxic’ in terms of the Obama administration," Wright wrote the president of Africa 6000 International earlier this year.

"I am ‘radioactive,’ Sir. When Obama threw me under the bus, he threw me under the bus literally!" he wrote. "Any advice that I offer is going to be taken as something to be avoided. Please understand that!"

(Hat tip: Bruce McQuain at Q&O)

I await the video showing that our President literally threw anyone under a bus before I believe the Reverend’s words in that regard.  In the meantime, his rantings serve to remind us that Obama will throw anyone, figuratively, under the bus, even after a close association of 20 years, if it will serve his purposes.  That’s the kind of guy we have as President.

Cities across the United States are officially boycotting the state of Arizona. Presumably because of its recently enacted state law, which enforces Federal law regarding alien status in our country. In Berkeley, a group of UC Berkeley students engaged in a hunger strike, ostensibly to force university administration to sanction illegal activity with the confines of the campus. It is, indeed, interesting to note this excerpt from the post,

Their initial protest target was Arizona’s new immigration law, which requires police to stop and question anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally.

No, the AZ law does not require police to stop anyone they suspect is here illegally. Consider this audio clip of an Arizona sheriff, regarding high speed pursuits during the past month.

The new AZ law is widely supported throughout the country, so one has to wonder why so many city governments are shoving their liberal views down the throats of their constituents?

Rest assured, politics is at play here. Is it no wonder, then, that we have Nancy Pelosi instructing clergy what to tell their congregants?

So. Ms Kagan. Anybody find any links to online articles authored by her? It is said by her defenders that she’s a brilliant academic, whatever that means. Publish or perish means there should be scads of articles and books by her if she was as claimed a brilliant academic. No book at Amazon, except a $45 tribute essay contribution in honor of some Harvard dude. And I’m guessing this book isn’t hers. Finally there is this at Amazon as well … out of print and no reviews. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t publish in journals not available on-line. So … anything?

Do legal professors not publish? What is the point of being in the Academy if you don’t publish? I don’t get it.

Look to be a brilliant academic you have to make a mark. To make a mark you have to publish important works which make a visible impact on our profession. I see no evidence that is the case for Ms Kagan. Perchance this is more of this retconning thing in which brilliant academic is recast to mean something entirely different. Perhaps it now is to mean an academic liked by Mr Obama who just happens to be another ‘brilliant academic’ who lacks any actual substantive academic record.