I read in a recent issue of the Washington Post that the newspaper’s future is being firmly staked on going “populist.” (I scan the Post, dear reader, so you don’t have to.) The column ran on the editorial page of the capital’s hometown paper, so it must be important. The writer was Patrick Pexton. I’ve never heard of this estimable fellow before, but Mr. Pexton is identified as the Ombudsman for the Post.

Now, an Ombudsman is someone hired by a newspaper to keep it fair, balanced, and not easily swayed. Ombudsman is a Swedish word, imported into our country by those dear Social Democrats who flock to book-signings by Garrison Keillor and who like to think of themselves as populists, not liberals. They think that taxing the people to keep NPR on the air is just another example of good government. Ombudsmen are people who cheer when they see you putting out your re-cycling bin. Shoveling public monies for their pet projects is something they regard as populist, a shovel-ready project if ever there was one.

I was intrigued by the idea of the Washington Post going populist. Does that mean that former Post editor Ben Bradlee will hold his 91^st birthday party in, say, Williamsburg or Annapolis, instead of where he held his 90^th—in the plus chic Ile de Re, off France’s Atlantic coast? (What, Ben, has Martha’s Vineyard become passé?)

Continue reading »

Comments: - |

Once again, theMSM—mainstream media—is giving us an anniversary better left unnoted. This time, they’re telling us that on this day 45 years ago, a lone shooter climbed up into the Tower at the University of Texas in Austin and began randomly shooting at students and visitors to that beautiful campus.

This is exactly what our friends in theMSMshould not do. They should know this by now. Do we want more mass murders, like the recent bloody episode inNorway? Then go ahead and put the killers’ pictures on the covers of news magazines, publicize their names and their bloody deeds, show photos of their victims, provide timelines, print graphics of their bullets’ trajectories, and always, always show the grieving family members of their victims.

But if we want to stop this madness, we should listen to researchers who have studied suicide and mass killings. They know that contagion and suggestibility play a real role in sparking these events. They know, for instance, that when a single car accident claims the life of a famous movie actor or singer, there is a measurable increase in “copy cat” deaths that may well be hidden suicides.

Continue reading »

Comments: - |

…or flat-screen, or big screen — whichever size screen your television happens to be! After spending the week with over 500 pastors for FRC’s Watchmen on the Wall conference in D.C., appearances on Fox News and Fox Business, Tony has a busy upcoming Memorial Day week — here are some upcoming TV appearances:

Life Today with James Robison

Find station listings here:

Monday, May 30
Tony Perkins
Freedom and Religion
The president of the Family Research Council lays out remedies for our spiritual and a moral crisis.

Thursday, June 2
Tony Perkins & Jacob Aranza
God’s Kingdom in You
The president of the Family Research Council and a longtime church pastor encourage believers to be involved in every sphere of life.

Watch Tony’s May 26 Fox News segment below:

Comments: 1 |

There are some things in life you just can’t avoid.  Death and taxes come to mind, of course, and the seeming inevitability of the Cubs’ ultimate collapse.

There are others.  One of them is the inescapable reality that abortion involves not a collation of tissue but the destruction of a person, a human being.

This is not just a theological assertion or philosophical rumination: We know from medical science that from conception, the unborn child has the entire DNA of a fully mature adult.  What changes at time of birth is not the humanness of the child but his or her place of residence: For nine months, the womb was home; for the remainder of a person’s life, it is the world around us.

Even the mass media cannot help itself.  In ordinary stories, the personhood of the child pops up in the simple reportage of stories of the day.  However much the pro-abortion movement has sought to shape the language of popular culture and public education, the fact that the little ones in the womb are, in fact, people, keeps intruding itself into public discourse.  For example (bold and italics are mine):

• On Monday of this week, the ABC affiliate in Minneapolis-St. Paul noted that a “grand jury has returned an indictment charging a Buffalo man with three counts of vehicular homicide after a multi-vehicle crash in Lakeville killing two people and an unborn child.”
• On April 28, the Montgomery (AL) Advertiser had this headline: “Family grieves loss of woman, her unborn child.”
• In Bowling Green, Kentucky, the CBS affiliate told us late last month that a “Kentucky state investigator testified Tuesday that Kathy Michelle Coy, the woman accused of killing a pregnant mother and stealing her baby.”
• Yesterday, the Today Show news site reported, “Mom recounts saving unborn child from shooting spree.”
• Also yesterday, the Chicago Tribune, one of the nation’s largest papers, informed us that “Cook County Judge James Linn sentenced James Larry, 33, of Madison, Wis., to five natural life sentences on murder charges, two 30-year prison sentences for attempted murder charges and two 45-year prison sentences for charges of intentional homicide of an unborn child.”

These are only a few examples from just the past couple of weeks.

Seminary president Al Mohler has observed that while “The American conscience remains deeply divided over the question of abortion … the truth has a way of working itself into view.”

That view is clearly seen in every ultrasound, but is also known to the “law written on the heart” described by the Apostle Paul (Romans 2:15).  We can euphemize our language, speaking only of “fetus” and “choice.”  We can deflect the demands of intellectual honesty when confronted by medical fact and common reason.  But in the depth of our hearts and minds, we know better.  We know.

Comments: - |

I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding.

Those were President Obama’s words in an interview with editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Toledo Blade. The President was explaining his openness to a federal bailout of struggling big-city daily newspapers. For that reason, Sens. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) have introduced S. 673, their so-called “Newspaper Revitalization Act.”

These two very liberal senators should have acted even sooner. They should have sponsored the Manual Typewriter Preservation Act. You see, the computer revolution put great pressure on Royal, Underwood, and Olivetti. Those companies represented thousands of jobs. We can’t just let the free market run rampant. Save typewriter ribbons! Save white-out! Save carbon paper! There’s no telling how much damage these new-fangled computers might do.

Continue reading »

Comments: 2 |