Why should we blame oil companies for the increased demand of a scarce commodity that’s resulted in higher gasoline prices? China and India are booming economically and cars are replacing bicycles on their roads. Meanwhile, tree hugging greenies in the U.S.A. have prevented offshore drilling, barred onshore exploration and blocked any new refineries from being built for 30 years. Did anyone expect lower prices?

Does anyone think it would be a good idea to artificially lower gas prices if there’s already not enough to go around? Can’t even a child figure out that we’d run out of gas even sooner if it’s made cheaper?

Why do you think members of the House of Representatives are two-to-one in favor of arresting illegal aliens and members of the Senate are two-to-one in favor of amnesty? Could it have anything to do with members of the House all being up for re-election this year, but only a third of members of the Senate?

Why did it take an academic study to figure out that, “cohabiting-parent families allocate their budgets differently than do married-parent families?” Should anyone be surprised that a man and woman shacking up spend more money on cigarettes and booze and less on their children’s education and health care? Nevertheless, it was a big scoop for The Journal of Marriage and Family.

Why is the Bible absent from public school classrooms, even though our forefathers were virtually unanimous that it’s the best foundation for a good education. Noah Webster said so in 1788: “Select passages of Scripture…. may be read in schools, to great advantage. In some countries the common people are not permitted to read the Bible at all. In ours, it is as common as a newspaper and in schools is read with nearly the same degree of respect…. My wish is not to see the Bible excluded from
schools but to see it used as a system of religion and morality.”

How come some people think that permitting sin to be practiced openly won’t lead to demands that even more sin be permitted? They should check out the Netherlands, where open homosexuality has been flaunted for years, and now pedophiles are registering a political party to work for lowering the legal age of sexual relations from 16 to 12, and to allow child porn and bestiality. Does anyone think the same thing can’t happen in the good ole U.S. of A., where one state and several cities already have declared homosexual marriage to be a “right.”

Why is anyone surprised that ever since mainline Christian denominations embraced a pretend, watered-down version of God, who’s not much bothered by sin, that their churches have continually shrunken? If God can’t be bothered by sin, why would any sinner bother to worship Him? They don’t have to go to church to find someone who’s not bothered by sin.

Why is it so hard to understand there’s no need to round up, arrest and deport 12 million illegal aliens? All that’s needed is to round up, arrest and imprison any CEO whose company hires them, and then turn down the illegals when they ask for handouts at the Welfare office. All 12 million of them will voluntarily go home. They’ll probably pay for their own bus tickets. Even peasants’ wages in Mexico are better than no wages in paradise.

Why does anyone give credibility to global warming scare stories when the National Center for Policy Analysis has concluded that, “the science does not support claims of drastic increases in global temperatures over the 21st century, nor does it support claims of human influence on weather events and other secondary effects of climate change.”

Even more curious is why anyone gives so-called global warming a second thought when its chief spokesman is Al Gore, who for his entire life hasn’t even been sure of who he is, let alone whether it’s getting hotter or colder outside.

What serious Christian would vote for someone who tolerates, let alone advocates, the sins of sexual deviancy or baby killing? Would a faithful Christian compromise on murder and sodomy simply to avoid being accused of being “intolerant?” Does anyone think God looks down and says, “Congratulations for tolerating baby killing and homosexual lust so that everyone can just get along!” I can’t find that verse in my Bible.

If global warming of 1% over the next century is going to destroy the planet, why aren’t we already long gone? Scientists with the multinational Arctic Coring Expedition just announced research findings. They say the Artic eons ago featured alligators, palm trees and a 74-degree Fahrenheit average temperature, practically a subtropical paradise. At least these scientists admit they don’t know what caused the ancient heat wave. But we do know it wasn’t smoke stacks, SUVs and $3 gasoline.

Has anyone stopped to ask, “Why don’t illegal aliens want to learn English?” Could it have anything to do with our willingness to print everything in foreign languages? Do you wonder what illegal aliens would do if nothing were printed in their native language?

Is anyone else fed up with being called names because you don’t want to compromise with Democrats and leftists and Rinos (Republicans in name only)? If you’re for enforcing immigration laws, you’re called a “nativist.” If you’re for requiring English to be spoken, you’re called a “racist.” If you think your money shouldn’t be spent to educate the children of people who broke into our country, you’re called a “bigot.” Shame on whom?

Does anyone realistically think that if al Qaeda had a nuclear weapon and a way to deliver it terrorists wouldn’t use it on an American city immediately? Does anyone doubt that as long as it’s easy to cross our border or enter our ports this horror is unavoidable?

Do you believe that mainstream newspaper reporters who overwhelmingly register as Democrats and underwhelmingly attend church don’t slant their “news” stories to fit the way they perceive reality? Could that be why the press touted the DaVinci Code movie as courageous and challenging, but the Passion of the Christ was regarded as if it was lewder than pornography itself?

Does anyone doubt that Iran, which is developing nuclear capability, is even more dangerous than Iraq was? Does anyone doubt that Democrats will howl even louder if we preemptively strike Iran than they howled when we attacked Iraq?

Does any Christian think his duty is simply to sit back and watch all of this nonsense unfold and pray for the rapture to rescue him before things get too bad? I can’t find that verse in my Bible either.

“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

I’m reading my granddaughter Alice in Wonderland. Maybe I should just read her the daily newspaper.

The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for informing our terrorist enemies who want to kill us that our government was listening to their cell phone calls. A prize? For aiding and abetting the enemy during wartime?

The Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting that the CIA held terrorists in “secret prisons” in Europe. The problem is, the same newspaper has since reported that Europeans investigated and found zero evidence that any secret prisons ever existed.

The U.S. Senate is cracking down on illegal immigration with a new law that will allow merely 193 million aliens into the country over the next 20 years. That should solve the problem, since we’ve had only 12 million illegals sneak into the country over the past 20 years. This way we can increase the flow by 171 million simply by making it legal. That should be a big boost to the school and health care systems, to say nothing of rush-hour traffic.

Iran, which wants to become a nuclear power, says the U.S. is the great Satan and that Israel should be wiped off the map. So we have turned the matter over to the United Nations and its courageous corps of foppish European diplomats, Third World crooks and assorted despots and dictators. If this isn’t Alice in Wonderland thinking, what is?

Everybody’s sweet-faced nice guys, Ron “Opie” Howard and Tom Hanks, have made a movie based on the idea that Jesus Christ didn’t die on the cross and rise from the grave to pay for men’s sins and save their souls, but instead snuck off with his girlfriend Mary and had babies, while the evil church covered up their escapade.

California legislators are about to pass a law that says mom and dad can’t be held up as the ideal in public school textbooks because children might conclude that homosexuals living in sin and perverts who want to “be” and dress like the opposite sex aren’t good role models. Imagine that.

Republicans want us to believe an administration and Congress that’s spent more than the Clinton Administration, and for that matter more than every other presidential administration and Congress in history, is really “conservative.”

The ACLU has announced that no one should think it’s launching a war on Christianity, despite filing lawsuits for decades from coast to coast to remove any reference to God, bar any utterance about Jesus and prohibit any instruction concerning the Lord from every public venue.

Vanity Fair’s magazine cover headline insists global warming is a worse threat than terrorism, despite the fact so-called global warming may have managed to heat the earth all of one degree Fahrenheit over the last century, and fluctuated far more radically hundreds and thousands of years ago, long before factories or SUVs.

Gasoline prices have risen to over $3 a gallon so the champions of government intervention call for doing away with “windfall profits,” even though profits are less than a dime on every gallon. They don’t seem to mind that taxes where I live are more than 60 cents on every gallon. One genius in Congress suggested a brilliant solution: add another 50 cent tax. That should fix things.

The press is outraged that the government is cross indexing millions of records of who telephoned whom in order to trace terrorists who want to kill us, even though 63 percent of Americans say they thought that it was a pretty good idea for protecting ourselves.

Democrat Party chief Howard Dean says his party has evangelical Christian values, even though they are for males committing sodomy with other males, women marrying women, men marrying men, children being raised without a mother or without a father if one of the spouses wants it that way, mothers killing their babies if they don’t wish to be bothered by them, cloning humans to destroy them and then harvest their parts, keeping cold-blooded murderers alive, enforcing “charity” by taking your money at gunpoint and giving it to someone else, trying to understand people who have sworn to kill us, keeping God out of schools where children might hear about Him and extending the rights of law-abiding citizens to law-breaking foreigners.

On second thought, I’ll keep reading my granddaughter Alice in Wonderland. She’s got a really good imagination, but this other stuff is just too hard to believe.

One of the most insidious – and in the long-term, destructive – characteristics of the Internet is its anonymity. Like all widespread sins, it’s most seductive.

Even the intelligent, fair-minded among us can be blind to the threat and its consequences. Take the example the case this week of Los Angeles Times Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, Michael Hiltzik. The Times suspended Hiltzik’s online “blog” because he violated the newspaper’s policy of posting derogatory comments under an assumed name. [source]

After a rival blogger revealed that Hiltzik had posted anonymous comments on his and other blogs, the Times writer’s reaction was to pooh-pooh the matter. [source] Hiltzik essentially dismissed the complaint against himself with the excuse that everyone does it.

Hiltzik, who already has two venues for venting his opinion (a column and a blog), apparently wanted a greater voice. And not surprisingly, what he wrote anonymously in tone and substance typically went beyond what he put his name to.

As a naïve young reporter I learned from editors at the same newspaper why bylines are placed atop articles. When I thought I was humbly protesting that I didn’t “deserve” my name appearing on a story of pedestrian quality, a wizened editor explained to me that the byline wasn’t a reward. It was to identify me; to make me accountable for what I had written. It wasn’t an, “Atta-boy.” It was, “This is who is responsible in case you have a complaint.”

Click on any blog. Visit any website. Enter any chat room. In how many cases are real names attached to the material you find there?

If the Internet is the new newspaper, the anonymity of the Internet is journalism’s version of drive-by shooting. It is graffiti, not commentary. It’s not dueling opinions. It’s sniper fire. The danger should be obvious. If not, let’s review a few of the problems:

Anonymous writers escape responsibility for what they write. As a result, they are more inclined to say things they can’t prove. Anonymous writers who besmirch others deny the person being written about an opportunity to know his accuser. They also deny the reader the opportunity to weigh the veracity of what was written by considering its source.

Comments online are intended to be read, and usually to persuade. Serial anonymous writers in effect stuff the ballot box by flooding discussion with what appear to be many different speakers, when in fact all those made-up names may represent only a few, or even a solitary person.

Anonymity on the Internet encourages these sins. If we are to let our “Yes, be Yes,” and our “No, be No,” it presumes that what we say is ours. Anonymous writers deny authorship of their own words right from the start.

When the speaker is anonymous, it’s no surprise that the tenor of conversation online easily ventures into ad hominem attack, becoming crude, vile, libelous and vindictive. The very same people who commit these transgressions in almost every case would no doubt refrain from saying such stuff – if they had to attach their names.

Whether there’s still time to reverse this insidious trend remains to be seen. One way is not to patronize or enable it. I receive my share of e-mail from folks taking exception to things I write, which incidentally always includes my byline. I always respond to the comments, and always sign my name when I do. When e-mail arrives clearly with a pseudonym or unsigned, my first response is to request the writer identify himself if he wants to discuss what I’ve written. After all, I identified myself. I’m pleasantly surprised that even the vilest complainers usually are willing to put a name to the follow-up e-mail.

Some might point out that anyone can make up a name. That’s true. But the essential difference here is that anonymous writers are saying from the get-go, “There are no rules, so I don’t have to identify myself and be responsible.” In contrast, people who give false names when asked to identify themselves are saying, “I acknowledge there are rules, but I’m going to break them anyway.”

In the current, prevailing Internet culture, exposing an anonymous writer’s identity exposes someone who may be cowardly, but who can claim he hasn’t broken any rules. However, exposing someone who agrees rules exist but still violates them is an entirely different matter. That person is not only cowardly, but dishonest.

Rules, as we’ve seen since Moses, don’t change people. But they do make them accountable. This is the difference between a postmodern worldview in which anything goes – including not identifying oneself – and a Christian worldview in which rules matter, and those who break them are deemed to have done something wrong.

There may be hope for reversing this Internet equivalent of drive-by shooting. The Times’ own ethical standards [source] appear to address the matter from a Christian worldview, rather than from the postmodern anything-goes approach.

In part, the Times’ policy holds that its writers, “….. are committed to informing readers as completely as possible; the use of anonymous sources compromises this important value…… When we use anonymous sources, it should be to convey important information to our readers. We should not use such sources to publish material that is trivial, obvious or self-serving…… Sources should never be permitted to use the shield of anonymity to voice speculation or to make ad hominem attacks…… Fabrication of any type is unacceptable. We do not create composite characters. We do not use pseudonyms.”

Anonymity is most insidious when used by a writer to conceal his own identity to make accusations or advance views he obviously isn’t proud or willing to associate his name with.

Mainstream journalism is fraught with credibility problems. It’s no secret that the vast majority of so-called “news” reporters and editors are left-leaning, and that what works its way into print and broadcasts is seriously tainted by a godless, secular humanism that fully embraces left-wing ideology. The Internet can be – and indeed has been – an alternative to such biased reporting. But by adopting the worst ethical transgressions of the Internet, the mainline press only aggravates its problem. It doesn’t correct it.

Case in point: Thousands of demonstrators flooded city streets this week demanding “justice” for sub rosa immigrants who illegally have snuck across the U.S. border to receive taxpayer-financed benefits like education, health care and subsidized transportation, while taking jobs and artificially driving down wages that impoverished legal residents sorely could have used. On the face of it, one might assume that a demand for “justice” would be a call for the quaint, old-fashioned notion of lawbreakers being “brought to justice,” as in arrested, tried and convicted for their crimes.

Not quite. When these demonstrators demand “justice,” what they really mean is that they demand mercy, grace and forgiveness. They aren’t asking for what they deserve, which is the definition of justice. Instead, they demand mercy, which is not getting punished as they really deserve, and grace, which is getting something good that they don’t deserve, and forgiveness, which is being absolved of all guilt for their crimes.

With such convoluted rhetoric, the merits of the issue are lost in the noise. Protesters demand what they call “justice,” but those they demand it from hear something entirely different: a demand for mercy, grace and forgiveness. How do we discuss, let alone debate, demands for “justice” when we can’t even agree on what justice is? It’s impossible when you say “potato” and I hear “pajamas.” As the song writer wrote, it’s tempting to just call the whole thing off.

You say “justice,” but mean, “getting what you want.” When I say “justice” I mean, “getting what you deserve.”

In the same way, you say “gay,” but mean, “consider me normal.” I say “homosexual,” and mean, “abnormal, unhealthy, sinful.”

You say, “a living wage,” but mean “enough money to buy what you want.” I say “minimum wage,” and mean, “pay that’s commensurate with entry-level ability and experience.”

You say, “choice,” but mean doing away with what is inconvenient. I say, “abortion,” and mean the killing of your own baby.

It’s as if we are speaking different languages. Indeed, we are. Yours is the language of entitlement. You want, therefore you demand and expect to receive. Mine is the language of standards in which your wants, and for that matter my wants, don’t dictate what you or I get.

Your language presumes that you ought to get what you want. Mine presumes that what you – or I – may want is entirely a secondary issue, subordinate to what is just, normal and moral.

Here’s the rub. Now that you have succeeded in stripping away words’ real meaning, any apparent compromise really means that you win. Any compromise simply would be yet another perversion of the words’ original meaning. A compromise on abortion would mean some babies are killed and others not. A compromise on enforcing immigration laws would mean some criminal activity is permitted and some not. A compromise on entry level wages would mean some wages are determined by supply and demand and some not. A compromise on acceptance of homosexuality as “just another lifestyle” would mean some abnormal, unhealthy, sinful behavior is endorsed, and some not. In every case compromise precludes what is just, normal and moral, no matter how flowery you make it sound. As wise men once told us, a little a little leaven leavens the whole lump.

Words matter. Or at least they used to. But today words have become pliant to the point of meaninglessness. Why? Because if you demanded what you really wanted, you know that your demand would sound patently absurd.

You would have to demand mercy, grace and forgiveness for breaking innumerable laws, denying lawful residents jobs and depressing wages. You would have to demand the right for men to engage in anal sex with other men. You would have to demand the right to be paid more than your labor is worth. You would have to demand the right to murder your own child. None of these demands put in plain language would be popular or persuasive. That’s why you have obfuscated by redefining up as down and right as wrong.

You have made great strides in perverting the English language, reshaping it like a wax nose until words take on entirely new and utterly absurd meanings.

Once upon a time, it was understood universally that murder is the intentional, wrongful killing of a person, who would not die naturally if left alone or if medically treated. But you have changed even that. Now you demand “compassion” and “dignity” and, yes again, “choice,” in order to “mercifully” euthanize people who are not dying, but whose “quality of life” doesn’t measure up to someone’s standard.

Shame on you. At least as long as that word still has meaning.