I’m back, but there’s gonna be one change—from now on, you can keep up with all my crackpot right-wing ideas at Calvin’s Right Track!

People who get tagged need to write a blog stating 6 weird things about themselves as well as state this rule clearly. In the end of the post, you need to choose 6 people to be tagged and list their names and links. Don't forget to leave a comment that says you are tagged in their comments and tell them to read your blog.

Well, I’ve got time for six self-points of interest:

1.) I’ve seen Weird Al Yankovic in concert twice (by the way, he’s touring again this summer, including 3 Wisconsin stops). (Get it? Weird?)

2.) In between my senior year and my move to Hillsdale in the fall, I’ve been doing janitorial & housekeeping work at a local business, where cleaning toilets might in fact better prepare me to clean out the intellectual & moral sewer that is liberalism than higher education will.

3.) I like ketchup, but not tomatoes.

4.) For a friend’s psychology project, I played a crazy old man in a cult-classic, pulse-pounding thriller entitled “Silence of the Cows.”

5.) I’m a member of a small minority that actually liked Jar Jar Binks.

6.) I’m a member of another minority (among the young, at least) that has no presence on Myspace or Facebook, and has no intention of starting any.

On another note, I know that my blogging’s been light lately, especially considering a couple major stories that have fired up the media. The reason is that I’ve been meaning to do a little behind-the-scenes work on the blog first, including a name change, so Ann Coulter’s CPAC snafu couldn’t have come at a worse time (I finally decided to make the changes now due to some technical annoyances that need solving). A brief summary of my opinion of the matter: Ann deserves criticism for it, it was stupid and pointless, but many on the Right are overreacting. As you’ll see in my article, I criticize the joke, but still maintain that Ann Coulter is a superb author and fearless pundit. Changing Coulter Nation’s name is not an attempt to distance myself from her (in fact, it’s tempting to leave the name in place solely as a sign of protest)—actually, I’ve never felt 100% right running my own blog using the name & popularity of another pundit. So when I come back, I guess I’ll just have to maintain my Coulter support by regularly citing her work.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see ya soon with coverage of Coultergate, the Libby verdict, recent Iraq opinions in the Reporter, and more!

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In his documentary, the former Vice President calls on Americans to conserve energy by reducing electricity consumption at home.

The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh—more than 20 times the national average.

Last August alone, Gore burned through 22,619 kWh—guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year. As a result of his energy consumption, Gore’s average monthly electric bill topped $1,359.

Since the release of An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s energy consumption has increased from an average of 16,200 kWh per month in 2005, to 18,400 kWh per month in 2006.

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Yeah, I know about Al’s carbon credits. Bah.

This week Hurricane Coulter touched down on the subject, as does Human Events. Dennis Prager’s blog has been keeping track of increasing scientific dissent from global warming, too.

Most notably, Sen. James Inhofe recently took the Left to task on everything from the phony scientific consensus to junk facts to the ever-alternating hysterias between warming and cooling. Ouch.

JERUSALEM (AP) -- Archaeologists and clergymen in the Holy Land derided claims in a new documentary produced by James Cameron that contradict major Christian tenets, but the Oscar-winning director said the evidence was based on sound statistics.

"The Lost Tomb of Christ," which the Discovery Channel will run on March 4, argues that 10 ancient ossuaries—small caskets used to store bones—discovered in a suburb of Jerusalem in 1980 may have contained the bones of Jesus and his family, according to a press release issued by the Discovery Channel.

One of the caskets even bears the title, "Judah, son of Jesus," hinting that Jesus may have had a son, according to the documentary. And the very fact that Jesus had an ossuary would contradict the Christian belief that he was resurrected and ascended to heaven.

Cameron told NBC'S "Today" show that statisticians found "in the range of a couple of million to one in favor of it being them." Simcha Jacobovici, the Toronto filmmaker who directed the documentary, said the implications "are huge."

Ooh, “statisticians!”

"But they're not necessarily the implications people think they are. For example, some believers are going to say, well this challenges the resurrection. I don't know why, if Jesus rose from one tomb, he couldn't have risen from the other tomb," Jacobovici told "Today."

Most Christians believe Jesus' body spent three days at the site of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem's Old City. The burial site identified in Cameron's documentary is in a southern Jerusalem neighborhood nowhere near the church.

In 1996, when the British Broadcasting Corp. aired a short documentary on the same subject, archaeologists challenged the claims. Amos Kloner, the first archaeologist to examine the site, said the idea fails to hold up by archaeological standards but makes for profitable television.

"They just want to get money for it," Kloner said.

Y’know, if you’re making an earth-shattering documentary, shouldn’t you offer something, oh, I don’t know…new? I guess it’s Hollywood’s way of recycling.

Cameron said his critics should withhold comment until they see his film.

"I'm not a theologist. I'm not an archaeologist. [I just play one on TV.] I'm a documentary film maker," he said.

The film's claims, however, have raised the ire of Christian leaders in the Holy Land.

"The historical, religious and archaeological evidence show that the place where Christ was buried is the Church of the Resurrection," said Attallah Hana, a Greek Orthodox clergyman in Jerusalem. The documentary, he said, "contradicts the religious principles and the historic and spiritual principles that we hold tightly to."

Stephen Pfann, a biblical scholar at the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem who was interviewed in the documentary, said the film's hypothesis holds little weight.

"I don't think that Christians are going to buy into this," Pfann said. "But skeptics, in general, would like to see something that pokes holes into the story that so many people hold dear."

"How possible is it?" Pfann said. "On a scale of one through 10—10 being completely possible—it’s probably a one, maybe a one and a half."

Pfann is even unsure that the name "Jesus" on the caskets was read correctly. He thinks it's more likely the name "Hanun." Ancient Semitic script is notoriously difficult to decipher.

So the name might not even BE “Jesus”? I wonder if the statisticians bothered to take a crack at the name “Hanun.”

Kloner also said the filmmakers' assertions are false.

"It was an ordinary middle-class Jerusalem burial cave," Kloner said. "The names on the caskets are the most common names found among Jews at the time."

Archaeologists also balk at the filmmaker's claim that the James Ossuary—the center of a famous antiquities fraud in Israel—might have originated from the same cave. In 2005, Israel charged five suspects with forgery in connection with the infamous bone box.

"I don't think the James Ossuary came from the same cave," said Dan Bahat, an archaeologist at Bar-Ilan University. "If it were found there, the man who made the forgery would have taken something better. He would have taken Jesus."

None of the experts interviewed by The Associated Press had seen the whole documentary.

A typical commentary from the mainstream media:

“The conduct of the republican party in this nomination is a remarkable indication of small intellect, growing smaller. They pass over...statesmen and able men, and they take up a fourth rate lecturer, who cannot speak good grammar.”

Except…the subject is not George W. Bush.

It’s Abraham Lincoln.

I tend to think the Bush-Lincoln comparisons are sometimes too dismissive of the mistakes the Bush Administration has made, but it still kinda makes you wonder….

“The Bush critics' position is that we must believe without reservation or criticism any intelligence that can be used to argue against military action and that we should never believe any intelligence, however plausible, that can be used to argue for it. That's not very intelligent.”

(Hat tip: Michelle Malkin)

Y'know, if the feds were to find $90,000 in your freezer, I'd kinda like to keep you away from the House Homeland Security Committee.

But maybe that's just me.

It’s no secret that bigots of all stripes have plenty of myths and lies at their disposal, and hateful vermin eager to spread them are all too common on the Internet. Lately I was reminded of one of the lies peddled by the secular Left: the supposed Christian faith and/or motives of Adolf Hitler. As one of my ex-teachers put it, “It was a Christian who killed six million Jews.”

With any myth, the adherents fall into two categories: sincere folks who have been misled, and bigots (Christophobes, in this case) who know better or don’t care what the truth is.

The “Christian Hitler” myth relies on several facts:

Exhibit A: Hitler was born and raised in a Catholic home.

This in and of itself is insignificant (as they say, you can’t choose your parents). Are we to believe that it was impressions of, say, the Gospels that young Adolf took with him all the way to the Chancellorship? Not exactly. In Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1961, abridged paperback), historian Alan Bullock reveals Hitler’s true feelings toward the Church:

* * *

“Hitler had been brought up as a Catholic and was impressed by the organization and power of the Church…It was ‘the great position’ of the Church that he respected; towards its teachings he showed the sharpest hostility. In Hitler’s eyes, Christianity was a religion fit only for slaves; he detested its ethics in particular. Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest. ‘Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure.’… Once the war was over, he promised himself, he would root out and destroy the influence of the Christian Churches, but until then he would be circumspect.” (p. 219, emphasis added)

* * *

Exhibit B: Hitler made several ostensibly pro-Christian statements, such as the following collected by American Atheists:

- "I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Almighty Creator. By fighting the Jews, I am doing the Lord's work."—Mein Kampf

- "I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so."—to General Gerhardt Engel

Another example:

- “My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders…I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator.”—Mein Kampf

If Hitler despised Christianity, then why praise it? Simple: Hitler was a politician. Early in his career he observed several mistakes on the part of the Austrian Nationalist Party. Bullock writes: “Finally, they made the mistake of attacking the Catholic Church and split their forces instead of concentrating them,” leading the future Fuhrer to conclude: “The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category” (p. 19). Hitler saw how an early inspiration, Karl Lueger of Austria, had also learned this lesson:

* * *

“[I]nstead of quarreling with the Church, Lueger made it his ally and used to the full the traditional loyalty to crown and altar. In a sentence which again points toward his later career, Hitler remarks: ‘He was quick to adopt all available means for winning the support of long-established institutions, so as to be able to derive the greatest possible advantage for his movement from those old sources of power.’” (p. 19-20)

* * *

“So Hitler…lied?” Now there’s a shocker. The manipulative dictator took on a populist persona for the maximum political gain. “From political considerations he restrained his anti-clericalism, seeing clearly the dangers of strengthening the Church by persecution.” (p. 219)

(It wouldn’t be the only time Hitler misrepresented himself for political expediency—Bullock writes that “Hitler attempted to represent himself in Mein Kampf as the child of poverty and privation. In fact, his father had a perfectly adequate pension and gave the boy a chance of a good education…[in] 1903 Alois Hitler [his father] died, but his widow continued to draw a pension and was not left in need.”) (p. 4)

Hitler’s Table Talk, a book full of the Fuhrer’s private conversations spanning 1941-’44 (recorded by Hitler lackey Martin Bormann), reveals an Adolf Hitler whose Christophobia rivaled his anti-Semitism:

- “National Socialism and religion cannot exist together.... The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity.... Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things.” (p. 6-7)

- “The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death.... When understanding of the universe has become widespread... Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.... Christianity has reached the peak of absurdity.... And that's why someday its structure will collapse.... ...the only way to get rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little.... Christianity the liar.... We'll see to it that the Churches cannot spread abroad teachings in conflict with the interests of the State.” (p. 49-52)

- “Christianity is an invention of sick brains: one could imagine nothing more senseless, nor any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery.... .... When all is said, we have no reason to wish that the Italians and Spaniards should free themselves from the drug of Christianity. Let's be the only people who are immunised against the disease.” (p. 118-119)

Two of Hitler’s other intimates recall similar statements. Albert Speer recalls that Hitler said: “You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?" (p. 96) In 1939, Josef Goebbels noted that "The Führer is deeply religious, but deeply anti-Christian. He regards Christianity as a symptom of decay." (p. 252-253)

Proponents of the “Christian Hitler” myth question the credibility and/or significance of Table Talk. quotes. For instance, Jim Walker of NoBeliefs.com (which I’m suuure is impartial & open-minded) argues that “Not once does Hitler denounce his own Christianity nor does he speak against Jesus. On the contrary, the Table-Talk has Hitler speaking admirably about Jesus.” He offers this Hitler quote:

* * *

“Originally, Christianity was merely an incarnation of Bolshevism, the destroyer.... The decisive falsification of Jesus' doctrine was the work of St. Paul. He gave himself to this work... for the purposes of personal exploitation.... Didn't the world see, carried on right into the Middle Ages, the same old system of martyrs, tortures, faggots? Of old, it was in the name of Christianity. Today, it's in the name of Bolshevism. Yesterday the instigator was Saul: the instigator today, Mardochai. Saul was changed into St. Paul, and Mardochai into Karl Marx. By exterminating this pest, we shall do humanity a service of which our soldiers can have no idea.”

* * *

For the sake of argument, let’s concede (for the time being) that Hitler was a sincere disciple of the “real” Jesus. Hitler condemns St. Paul for supposedly twisting Christ’s work into something unrecognizable. Think about this: Paul lived in the first century AD. If Hitler did believe in the “true,” pre-Paul Christianity, then he endorsed/advocated a religion that, in effect, never existed. In this respect, Hitler was certainly closer to Dan Brown than Jerry Falwell! (No, I don’t mean to suggest that Brown is Nazi-esque.) Rather than supporting the “Christian Hitler” myth, this line of thinking actually supports Bullock’s portrait of a dictator “mak[ing] different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category” in order “to derive the greatest possible advantage for his movement from those old sources of power.” Anybody remember the word “triangulation?”

(Walker’s second-strongest argument is that the virulently anti-Catholic Bormann attempted to present his particular bigotry as the Fuhrer’s. Are we to seriously believe that anti-Semitism was the only bigotry Hitler and those surrounding him shared? Or that Hitler’s worshippers and henchmen would dare to distort the words and beliefs of their glorious Fuhrer? An odd assumption, to say the least.)

Furthermore, let’s go back to another of the pro-“Christian Hitler” quotes above:

* * *

“My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders…”

* * *

Do you realize how significant it is to reject Christ as a sufferer? To any Christian believer, His suffering, death & resurrection are the very essence of Christianity—if He did not die for us, then He could hardly be considered a “Savior” at all. Again we see that, if anything, Hitler embraced a Christianity that most Christians throughout history would never recognize.

How do we determine which quotes more accurately portray Hitler’s faith? As they say, actions speak louder than words. In The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, William L. Shirer tells us how the Third Reich planned to realize Hitler’s promise to rid Germany of Christianity (1960 paperback, page 240):

* * *

“[Few German people] paused to reflect that under the leadership of [Alfred] Rosenberg, Bormann and [Heinrich] Himmler, who were backed by Hitler, the Nazi regime intended eventually to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists. As Bormann, one of the men closest to Hitler, said publicly in 1941, ‘National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable.’

“What the Hitler government envisioned for Germany was clearly set out in a thirty-point program for the ‘National Reich Church’ drawn up during the war by Rosenberg, an outspoken pagan, who among his older offices held that of ‘the Fuehrer’s Delegate for the Entire Intellectual and Philosophical Education and Instruction for the National Socialist Party.’ A few of its thirty articles convey the essentials:

“1. The National Reich Church of Germany categorically claims the exclusive right and the exclusive power to control all churches within the borders of the Reich: it declares these to be national churches of the German Reich.

“5. The National Church is determined to exterminate irrevocably…the strange and foreign Christian faiths imported into Germany in the ill-omened year 800.

“7. The National Church has no scribes, pastors, chaplains or priests, but National Reich orators are to speak in them.

“13. The National Church demands immediate cessation of the publishing and dissemination of the Bible in Germany…

“14. The National Church declares that to it, and therefore to the German nation, it has been decided that the Fuehrer’s Mein Kampf is the greatest of all documents. It…not only contains the greatest but it embodies the purest and truest ethics for the present and future life of our nation.

“18. The National Church will clear away from its altars all crucifixes, Bibles and pictures of saints.

“19. On the altars there must be nothing but Mein Kampf (to the German nation and therefore to God the most sacred book) and to the left of the altar a sword.

“30. On the day of its foundation, the Christian Cross must be removed from all churches, cathedrals and chapels…and it must be superseded by the only unconquerable symbol, the swastika.

* * *

(Another piece of this puzzle, the Vatican’s conduct during World War II, is a matter on which I am not well-versed enough to definitively comment, but I still would like to direct your attention to the following: “60 Minutes and the Vatican Hater” by Brent Bozell and The Myth of Hitler’s Pope by Rabbi David Dalin.)

Was Adolf Hitler an atheist? Bullock writes in no uncertain terms that he truly believed in nothing but himself, not even God. While Hitler’s sincerity should always be suspect, it would be wrong to dismiss entirely his conception of a “fighter Jesus.”

Have religious forces been guilty of evils throughout history? Certainly; as we speak the free world faces the barbarism of Islamofascism. Have Christian forces been guilty of evils? Virtually no believer denies this (although there is reason to believe that the conventional understandings of the Crusades and even the Inquisition are not as clear-cut as “Christians went crazy & killed people who rejected Jesus”).

But if believers can allow for this much, then atheists ought to be honest enough to concede that Hitler’s obscene, deranged Franken-Christianity isn’t comparable to any mainstream understanding of Christianity…certainly not the Christianity that led our Founding Fathers to fight to establish the most free and enlightened nation in history.

Could Americans Elect an Atheist President?

Michael Medved, Feb. 15

With Mitt Romney’s announcement of candidacy, political commentators focus on public reluctance to elect a Mormon as President. A stunning 66% told the Gallup Poll the nation “wasn’t ready” for a Mormon President, but even more – a startling 84% - said we’re not prepared to elect an atheist. The Romney campaign will no doubt correct many myths about Mormonism, but the public’s reluctance to support an atheist actually makes sense. The Declaration of Independence makes clear that our inalienable rights come from God – we are “endowed by our Creator” – so that anyone who openly denies God’s existence is likely to take the more conventional (and dangerous) view that rights are a gift from government, not the Deity. "The government giveth, the government taketh away..."-- the peril in this approach is too obvious to require explanation.

Similarly, any atheist would be far less willing to affirm absolutes, and far more likely to embrace moral relativism – a real problem in leading a country that’s currently threatened by absolute evil, and requires clear distinctions between timeless right and wrong. Without God, morality becomes negotiable and malleable, and defending God-given rights (for instance) becomes much less imperative.

Finally, Americans love their God-based holidays (Thanksgiving and Christmas, in particular) and the President traditionally issues deeply religious proclamations on these occasions. This tradition goes all the way back to President Washington; even President Jefferson, a religious non-conformist, convened and attended Christian Sunday services at the Capitol building. With an announced atheist as President, these reverent public occasions could hardly go forward without risk of embarrassing hypocrisy.

These regular ceremonies may seem insignificant but, like "Under God" in the Pledge or "In God We Trust" on the currency, they help reinforce the idea that we are a religious people. Many people of faith consider it profoundly important that the nation move in a more worshipful and spiritual direction; prominent atheists consider it similarly important that the society at large (and the government in particular) move away from ancient "superstitions."

A reverent Mormon in the White House would encourage religiosity in general, as would an observant Jew, or devout Evangelical, or committed Catholic. When the First Family espouses religious faith (as all First Families have, to a greater or lesser extent) it helps make religiosity look normal. In the same way, a proclaimed atheist in the White House would "normalize" a point of view now espoused by only a small minority of our fellow citizens. Those who believe that America benefits when more people deny God and dismiss religiosity could enthusiastically support an atheist President, of course; the rest of us, who believe that Judeo-Christian faith plays a positive role in this culture, could not and should not support a candidate who openly denies the existence of God.

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Does this mean religious conservatives want some sort of legal barrier keeping atheists from the White House?  Not at all.  Does it mean atheists are bad people?  As I've said before, of course not.  But it's wholly appropriate for Americans to expect their leaders to appreciate the central concept upon which this nation was founded. 

So let me get this straight: we've got bitter debates today over the direction of American security regarding Iraq, and Hannity & Colmes' top story is still Anna Nicole Smith?!

No wonder so many Americans don't take the war seriously....