Christian News – The Christian Post | Survey: Born Again Christians Made Major Impact on Bush’s Re-election

The survey, which involved interviewing 1004 adults over the phone, reported that born again Christians supported President George W. Bush by a 62% to 38% margin. Non-born again voters were more likely to support Senator John Kerry than Bush, 59 to 39 percent.

Although the born again population constitutes just 38% of the national population, the survey said, it represented 53% of the vote cast in the election. The survey suggested that if the born again public had shown up proportional to its population size, Senator Kerry would have won the election by the same three-point margin of victory enjoyed by Mr. Bush.

Evangelical Christians also helped re-elect Bush, constituting 11% of the voters and chose President Bush by an 85% to 15% margin, shows the survey.

Do these statistics say that “born-again” and “Evangelical” are not the same thing? And there are more “born-again”? mjh

Christian News – The Christian Post | Pro-life Group Disagrees with Gonzales as AG

Judie Brown, president of American Life League, said, “President Bush appears to be doing all that he can to downright ignore pro-life principles. There can be no other explanation for his recommendation of Alberto Gonzales as attorney general. Gonzales has a record, and that record is crystal clear. …

“Gonzales’ rulings implied he does not view abortion as a heinous crime,” commented Brown. “Choosing not to rule against abortion, in any situation, is the epitome of denying justice for an entire segment of the American population — preborn babies in the womb.”

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | TV and Radio | War film axed by 66 US stations

Nearly one-third of US TV stations affiliated to the ABC network dropped Oscar-winning film Saving Private Ryan for fear of facing indecency fines.

Sixty-six of ABC’s 225 affiliated stations decided not to air the film, which opens with a gritty depiction of D-Day and includes profanity.

The decision follows a recent crackdown by watchdogs.

Stations fearing punishment — welcome to America. mjh

ABQjournal: Report Attacks Maintenance of National Parks By Adam Rankin, Journal Staff Writer

A new study on the status of maintenance work at the country’s national parks finds that funding under the Bush administration falls short of the need, despite promises that the work will get done by 2009.

The new Colorado College report, “Deferred Maintenance and the Health of our National Parks,” challenges the administration’s pledge that it will catch up on maintenance work.

CNN.com – Ashcroft: ‘Activist’ judges can put nation’s security at risk – Nov 12, 2004

Without referring to specific adverse rulings on the treatment of detainees or enemy combatants, Ashcroft blasted “activist” judges for encroaching on the powers that he insists belong solely to the president in wartime.

“The danger I see here is that intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas can put at risk the very security of our nation in a time of war,” Ashcroft said. …

“Ideologically driven courts have disregarded and dismissed the president’s evaluations of foreign policy concerns, in favor of theories generated by academic elites, foreign bodies and judicial imagination,” Ashcroft said.

Wampum: Liberal Federal Judges?

The conservative argument that the Federal Judiciary is controlled by liberals may have been true at one time but is clearly not the case today. That point can be demonstrated in three ways. First, the numbers show that it is Republican Presidents, not Democrats who, by and large, have shaped the current Federal Judiciary.

Of the nine current members of the Supreme Court, seven were appointed by Republicans. In the last thirty-five years (since 1969) there have been thirteen appointments to the Supreme Court. Republican Presidents have made eleven of those appointments while Democratic Presidents have made two.

At the Circuit Court of Appeals level, the pattern remains the same. Since 1969, Republican Presidents have appointed 211 Judges to the Circuit Courts. Democrats have appointed 122. Since 1969, Republican Presidents have appointed 813 trial Judges to the District Court bench while Democrats have made 508 such appointments.

If the Federal Judiciary is comprised of a bunch of liberal activists, it is the GOP who put them there.

[original links from dangerousmeta!]

Ashcroft and After

Ashcroft, in the end, can’t properly be called a conservative at all; rather, he used his job to expand executive branch authority, the power of police agencies to monitor citizens without judicial oversight and the intrusion of government into private lives. Ashcroft treated criticism and dissent as treason, ethnicity as grounds for suspicion and Congressional and judicial oversight as inconvenient obstacles. No wonder that finally even a conservative attack dog like Congressman Bob Barr soured on Ashcroft justice; no wonder that even the Rehnquist Supreme Court slapped down the Administration’s Guantánamo detention policies, declaring that even a state of war is not “a blank check.”

President Bush’s selection of White House counsel Alberto Gonzales to succeed Ashcroft shows that Bush has no intention of changing the tenor or the policies of the Justice Department. It was Gonzales who laid the legal groundwork for torture at Abu Ghraib with a memo claiming that detainees in the “war on terror” were not covered by the Geneva Conventions–which he described as “quaint.” And it was Gonzales who urged the President to deny prisoner-of-war status to the detainees at Guantánamo, leaving them unprotected from coercive interrogation and endless imprisonment. With those two policies alone, it can fairly be said that he played a central role in blackening America’s image throughout the world. Gonzales also played a major role in selecting extremist judicial nominees, consistently pushed the limits of executive privilege and publicly defended the Administration’s policy of detaining terrorism suspects without access to lawyers or the courts.

The confirmation of Gonzales will be a test not only of Bush’s intentions but of the fault lines within the GOP Senate majority; and a test, too, of the durability of the right-left civil liberties coalition that emerged in opposition to Ashcroft’s abuse of the law. The temptation may be to heave a sigh of relief that Ashcroft is gone, and to view Gonzales as an improvement. That would be a crucial error. Gonzeles’s nomination should provoke the first in a series of battles over civil rights, the Supreme Court and the Constitution itself.