Columnist.
"Power of Prayer, and a president." It's not often you read that kind of headline on the front page of the Washington Post. But the story — a powerful one of crushing political defeat and personal spiritual redemption — is what commanded our attention a couple of weeks ago. The news of former President Jimmy Carter's very somber cancer diagnosis took all of Washington by surprise. Carter, at 90, seems a hardy perennial. He maintains an energetic schedule that would leave men half his age panting. We make no secret of the fact we questioned a lot of what Jimmy Carter did in the White House.
John F. Kennedy famously said: "We cannot negotiate with people who say what's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable." 50 years later, we seem not to have learned this lesson. Just several weeks ago we concluded negotiations with a bad faith partner in the form of the Islamic Republic of Iran, resulting in a nuclear agreement that has been met with skepticism by our Saudi allies and with fury by Israel.
Caroline Glick is a columnist for the Jerusalem Post. Raised in the U.S., she made Aliyah several years ago and now lives and writes in Israel. Caroline Glick spoke to a huge "Stop IRAN" rally in New York City in late July. She passionately appealed to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D) and Reps. Jerry Nadler (D) and Elliott Engel (D). She publicly demanded they oppose the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Sec. of State John Kerry. "If you are men of honor," she said, you must oppose this dangerous deal. At a time when Chuck. Schumer's office was saying the designated future leader of Senate Democrats was carefully analyzing the details of the deal, Caroline Glick boldly told him not to immerse himself in the details, but to look instead at "the big picture."
When a government agency called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is created by Congress, one would expect that a few consumers could actually receive protection, but that hasn't been the case with this agency's track record of mismanagement, inefficiency and waste. The CFPB has been operating for four years now and if it were a sports team, its coach, Richard Cordray, would certainly be looking for work.
Republican candidates for president have fittingly come to Ohio to debate, among other things, immigration policy. In late July, the United States House and Senate heard testimonies from families of Americans murdered by illegal aliens who had been shielded from deportation by sanctuary policies. The consequences of these policies hit home in Ohio just a few days later when Margaret Kostelnik was shot and killed in her home by an illegal alien who later confessed to her murder in addition to the attempted rape of a 14-year-old girl, the shooting of another woman (who thankfully survived) in front of her two young children, and for firing at police officers, all on the same day.
Finally, our distinguished president, our Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has spoken out about the infamous scandal of body parts being trafficked. "It is infuriating and I have no patience for it," President Obama said in a strong show of righteous indignation. But wait, that was in response to a question about the killing of Albino people in Africa. Of course, he is absolutely right in his visceral reaction against trafficking in body parts for pagan ritual purposes in parts of Africa. And the young African leaders — to their great credit — asked the president to lend his moral authority to their effort to stamp out this horrific practice.
President Reagan went to West Berlin in 1987 and called upon Soviet Communist ruler Mikhail Gorbachev to "Tear Down this Wall." The President was also working against a near-total blackout of Western media coverage of the Berlin Wall. As former PBS news anchor Robert MacNeil said at the Newseum in 2009, the only time mainstream reporters covered the Berlin Wall was when U.S. Presidents — JFK and Reagan — went there. Then they had to. No wonder President Reagan also endorsed Dr. Bernard Nathanson's first film of an actual abortion, *Silent Scream*. Because he believed in the power of truth, Reagan sent a copy of this powerful video to every congressional office.
President Obama's sentimental journey to East Africa should have been a harmonious one. He used the occasion of a toast to Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta to joke about his own search for his birth certificate. The usual round of VIP visits and dinners were marred, however, by this president's insistence on pushing his radical social agenda on Africans. He lectured the leaders of Kenya about election violence. Meanwhile, Mr. Obama ignored the burgeoning Planned Parenthood scandal back home in the U.S.A. While deploring violence in Kenya's elections that took 1,000 lives in 2007, the President has no remedy for the violence of Planned Parenthood — those traffickers in human flesh. Each day in America, this outfit kills 800 unborn children. And now we know they market their hearts, lungs and livers.
Planned Parenthood pays no taxes. Under President Obama, it's made more than $500 million in profits, but it claims to be a "non-profit" organization. It kills more than 800 children every day. And it has from the earliest days targeted minority women. It once had a "Negro Ministers" project designed to recruit black pastors to push first birth control and then abortion in minority neighborhoods. Now, in two startling videos, we have seen Planned Parenthood leaders engaged in a ghoulish traffic in the organs of unborn children whom they have killed. My colleague at Family Research Council, Tony Perkins, discussed this horror on his recent radio show in an interview with former Pennsylvania senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum. "Hearts, lungs, livers" are the sought-after treasures of these scavengers.
House Speaker John Boehner's statement last Thursday calling for criminal justice reform was a welcome cap to a week of bipartisan and inter-branch voices calling for reform of our federal prison system.
Edmund Burke famously said, "Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it." This could not be more relevant to the debate raging over the Iran nuclear deal.
Many of our fellow conservatives are saying that President Obama's deal with Iran is a "nuclear Munich." That is, they are comparing the Iranian settlement negotiated over these many months by Secretary John Kerry in that Austrian capital with the Munich capitulation negotiated over mere days in September, 1938, by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Chamberlain's failed appeasement of Hitler — as bad as it was — arguably is not as harmful as President Obama's Vienna concession is. This deal is worse than Chamberlain's Munich sellout because its implications are immeasurable. Once Chamberlain had given away Czechoslovakia's German-speaking Sudetenland region to the Nazi Führer, the umbrella-toting Prime Minister could at least show Hitler's signature on a joint statement. All the world could see that Hitler said he had no further territorial ambitions in Europe. Chamberlain had a measurable, comprehensible, signed on the dotted line commitment from Adolf Hitler.
Conservative leader Morton Blackwell keeps a picture of Leonardo's model of a bicycle on the wall of his Leadership Institute. It's his site gag — and a *sight* gag. Leonardo's bike is a reminder that the great conservative philosophical insight — *Ideas Have Consequences* — is true only if people act upon it. You can sketch a bicycle and perhaps even build a working model. But we know it took four hundred years for people to start riding bicycles. Progressives don't ever wait that long. They start acting upon their ideas immediately. The only trouble is: the ideas they believe in are not true.rogre Among the lies they believe, here are three of the most prominent: **Progressive Lie Number One:** We do not know when human life begins. Justice Harry Blackmun wrote this in his infamous Roe v. Wade ruling of 1973. That was a lie when he wrote it. We all knew that human life begins at conception. We had known this incontrovertible scientific truth since the 1850s. That was the reason the states were urged to bring their homicide codes into conformity with science's indisputable findings.
Kelly Shackelford's [debate](http://video.foxnews.com/v/4338849014001/impact-of-same-sex-marriage-ruling-on-religious-freedom/?#sp=show-clips) with Evan Wolfson on Fox News Sunday highlights the battle lines for religious liberty in America now that the Supreme Court has grossly overstepped its authority by declaring same-sex marriage a constitutional right. The issue is whether religious liberty extends to how you earn your living, get an education and run a business. For years to come, the fight for many Christians will be on whether their right to the free exercise of religion includes the right to earn a paycheck without violating their conscience. Televised debates need to focus on the fierce debate over whether your religious-belief rights carry over into your daily life. The Constitution does not force Christians to choose between being able to put food on the table versus being faithful to their cherished beliefs.
Do you feel like America has gone crazy? The Supreme Court's outrageous decisions in the Obamacare and same-sex marriage cases, in which the Court simply ignored the plain meanings of words and the Constitution, and thumbed its nose at the most basic facts of life, are only the latest examples of our nation turning its back on truth and common sense. Under the influence of "progressive" fanatics, we're suffering from a progressive pathology that's tearing our nation apart. In their quest to redefine "normal," they are tearing up America's morality by the roots. They're forcing America to abandon God's standards of right and wrong, and in consequence our society is becoming increasingly unmoored from reality.
Almost 30 years ago, when the US was negotiating with the Soviet Union about intermediate-range nuclear weapons, President Ronald Reagan was told that the Russians like to talk in proverbs. A writer on Russia taught him the proverb "doveryain no proveryai," which means trust but verify. It was a phrase Reagan would use many times in his dealings with Mikhail Gorbachev — and one that seems particular wise now. As I'm writing this, the US and five other nations (the permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) are engaged in nuclear talks with another adversary, Iran (towards a June 30 deadline for an agreement that will be missed). And the wisdom of the Russian proverb could not be more timely.
Like two speeding trains heading toward the same collapsed bridge, the dangers and failures of Barack Obama's foreign, economic, and social policies are heading rapidly toward implosion. Our vital security interests, our economic well-being, our religious liberties, and the very fabric of American family life are all at grave risk of becoming casualties of the extreme ideological agenda and simple incompetence of the current Administration. First, with respect to foreign policy: Watching the spread of ISIS throughout the Middle East is like watching the growth of a cancer. Yet President Obama says he still has no fully-formed strategy with which to deal with it. Instead, his focus has been on Iran, to which end he is encouraging Senate approval of a plan that would give Iran the continued capacity to produce nuclear weapons in coming years.
Last week I joined a bipartisan group of political figures and foreign policy experts in taking two steps to encourage the improvement of US policy toward Iran. The group of nearly forty prominent Americans including former senior US civilian and military officials and governors issued a policy statement urging stronger confrontation of Iran's nuclear ambitions, regional hostilities, and human rights abuses. That statement also encouraged the US government to reverse its traditional, unspoken policy of remaining at arms' length from the resistance against the Iranian theocracy. My view and that of the co-signers of the statement is that the ten-point plan of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, represents a viable alternative to an intractably hostile Iranian regime. Simply supporting that alternative and coordinating with it politically would go a long way toward safeguarding Western interests.
If you're paying attention to the Middle East today, you're paying attention to Iran. The Islamic Republic has its hand in a number of regional conflicts, in addition to its long-standing support for Middle Eastern terrorist groups. And of course this comes at a time when Iran could also be on the verge of potentially inking an agreement with six world powers that would give it relief from sanctions related to its work on nuclear weapons technology. If you are paying attention to the Middle East, and thus to Iran, it would be prudent to also pay attention to France later this week. If you keep your eyes on Paris on June 13, you will witness to a powerful demonstration of opposition to Tehran's clerical regime. The rally organized by the Iranian Diaspora in support of the opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran is enormously relevant to questions about how Western policymakers should be dealing with the Islamic Republic during this complex time.
Many of us applauded when President Bill Clinton signed the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998. That law — passed with broad bi-partisan support — established a U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) that was required to issue annual reports. The law called for the appointment of an Ambassador-at-Large in the State Department who would make religious freedom a key concern. These initiatives gave great hope to advocates of religious freedom around the world. In the nearly twenty years since that good law was passed and signed, however, the picture for religious freedom worldwide has grown far darker. Only recently, we saw twenty-one Coptic Christians paraded before cameras on a beach in Libya and then ritually beheaded by Islamist murderers aligned with ISIS.
