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News

Republicans introduce House and Senate bills to establish that life begins at conception

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Unborn baby scheming about House Republicans
Unborn baby scheming about pro-life Republicans

This story is from The Hill. (H/T Special Report with Bret Baier)

Full text:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) vowed Monday to leverage the “biggest and the most pro-life freshman class in memory” to institute a “permanent government-wide prohibition on taxpayer funding of abortion.”

Cantor told the tens of thousands of anti-abortion protesters in town for the annual March for Life event that the legislation faces “an uphill battle in the Senate and in the White House,” but that “the people’s House will stand unapologetically for life.”

“Now the tide has turned,” Cantor said. “Thanks to your support last November, there’s a new majority in town.”

About a dozen lawmakers addressed the crowd for the annual protest that marks the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision on abortion. Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), the co-chairman of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, was the first to speak. He vowed to press forward with his bill that establishes a permanent, government-wide prohibition on federal subsidies for abortion and for healthcare plans that cover abortion.

“We need your help in persuading the abortion president, who put abortion in ObamaCare — not withstanding a flawed executive order — to get this legislation passed,” Smith said.

That’s the House Majority Leader saying that. This is happening NOW.

And not just the House, but the Senate too! (Normally the Senate is more liberal than the House)

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said he’d introduce legislation Tuesday that establishes in law that human life begins at conception. Wicker argues that the Supreme Court did not tie the hands of Congress in its Roe vs. Wade decision, because its decision left unresolved the question of when life begins and explicitly acknowledged that if “personhood is established, the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life is then guaranteed specifically by the [14th] Amendment.”

The bill currently has five co-sponsors — Republican Sens. Richard Burr (N.C.), Mike Enzi (Wyo.), Jerry Moran (Kan.), Rand Paul (Ky.) and Roy Blunt (Mo.) — with more expected to join after the bill is formally introduced. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) introduced companion legislation in the House last week.

“We’re here today to say we’re not going to abandon the fight [against abortion],” Wicker said. “Sometimes it’s defensive in nature, and heavens knows we’ve had a lot to defend against in the last two or three years. … Tomorrow we take an offensive, and I like that a lot better.”

The neat thing about Eric Cantor is that he is JEWISH. It is so good to have Jewish pro-lifers in positions of leadership!

More pro-life Republicans

John Boehner: (Speaker of the House!)

James Langford:

Martha Roby:

Ann Marie Buerkle:

I keep telling you guys – vote Republican. Now you know why I keep telling you to vote Republican.

There are SERIOUS social conservatives in the Republican party. They are NOT just FISCAL conservatives, awesome as that may be. And NOT just FOREIGN POLICY hawks, although that is undoubtedly awesome. There are deep social conservatives in the Republican party who might even be to the right on Scott Klusendorf on abortion, and to the right of Jennifer Roback Morse on marriage. I am not kidding.

These new Republicans are not casual about social conservatism, and not even the libertarian Tea Party ones like Rand Paul. And there are SO MANY of them that JUST GOT elected in the November elections. That’s why that they can do things like this. They more of them we elect, the more we will see bills like this.

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Videos

Frank Turek on the criterion of embarrassment

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Here’s the video. (H/T Chris S.)

The criterion of embarrassment is just one of the historical criteria used to select the parts of a piece of ancient literature that is likely to be historical. Other things in the source may have happened, but we can’t know them as history. If significant parts of a text are historical, it is possible to accept it as historical until there are specific reasons to say that some part of it is NOT historical.

Here is William Lane Craig’s list of criteria for a saying or event to be historical:

  1. Historical congruence: S fits in with known historical facts concerning the context in which S is said to have occurred.
  2. Independent, early attestation: S appears in multiple sources which are near to the time at which S is alleged to have occurred and which depend neither upon each other nor a common source.
  3. Embarrassment: S is awkward or counter-productive for the persons who serve as the source of information for S.
  4. Dissimilarity: S is unlike antecedent Jewish thought-forms and/or unlike subsequent Christian thought-forms.
  5. Semitisms: traces in the narrative of Aramaic or Hebrew linguistic forms.
  6. Coherence: S is consistent with already established facts about Jesus.

The criteria is the same for liberals and conservatives although some weight one criteria more than others. E.g. – moderate liberal E.P. Sanders likes embarrassment and multiple attestation, liberals John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg like multiple attestation and early attestation, moderate Dale Allison likes embarrassment and dissimilarity, conservative N.T. Wright likes dissimilarity. Craig likes all of them and uses them all.

If you want to see these criteria used in a debate, watch this debate between William Lane Craig and James Crossley.

This is the best debate on the historical Jesus that I have ever seen.

If someone is asking you whether they should accept the Bible in all by making a faith commitment, then you tell them about the historical criteria, and you show them a debate. Show them a list of sayings or events that are considered to be indisputable. (That list is by the naturalist E. P. Sanders). And show them a fact that even William Lane Craig hesitates to defend. That way, you are not asking them to swallow a camel of inerrancy before they can read the Bible. Give them the criteria and show them how to use it. Talk about the dating of the sources. Be a scholar. Let them read the text as an interested skeptic.

News

Rachel Maddow doesn’t understand modern military weapon systems

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Rachel Maddow doesn’t think that you can shoot down incoming missiles with missiles. I am NOT KIDDING.

Watch this if you like: (warning – has really vulgar language, because they are liberals)

Or read the transcript: (H/T Newsbusters)

STEVE MOORE, WALL STREET JOURNAL: The other tragedy, David, of what’s happened in the last 20 years is the reason Reykjavik fell apart was because Reagan didn’t want to give up SDI or Star Wars. And here we are, you know, what 20 years later and we still don’t have a missile defense system in this country.

DAVID STOCKMAN: We shouldn’t.

RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC: They’ve never worked.

MOORE: I don’t want to get blown up.

MADDOW: You know what? Here’s the country, here’s the kind of thing you put over like a cake to protect the cake from flies. Missiles don’t work that way. That’s the whole idea of SDI. We’ll protect ourselves by shooting missiles at other missiles. It’s never worked in a test. We spent billions on it.

MOORE: It’s worked.

MADDOW: And anybody who understands this knows it can never work.

MOORE: If you don’t think it works, then why did the Russians not want us to do it?

MADDOW: The Russians were very happy to sign this thing.

MOORE: No they weren’t. They didn’t want us to do SDI because they knew they didn’t want us to blow up their missiles.

MADDOW: You know what? If you think you can shoot the bullet with the other bullet, you can have an awesome life in Annie Oakley’s side show, but you should not be in charge of billions of dollars of the defense budget. It’s such a hysterical fantasy. I love it.

Newsbusters writes:

It appears Maddow must have been out of the country during Desert Storm when Patriot missiles were used to take out Iraqi Scud missiles aimed at Israel and Saudi Arabia. Although their success rate was a great source of debate at the time (see the July 1996 Center for Defense Information study), no one disputes that some Scuds were indeed shot out of the air.

More importantly, at least twelve countries are currently using Patriot technology as part of their missile defense programs.

Even Japan has missile defense technology:

And India can do it, too.

You can shoot down incoming ballistic missiles from mobile launchers, fixed launchers and naval launchers. In fact, even fighters can intercept incoming ballistic missiles.

In military simulations, I’ve scrambled my F-14 Tomcat CAP to intercept vampires fired at my carrier battle group. (My CAP usually consists of 1 E-2C Hawkeye and 4 F-14D Tomcats because I really like the range on the AIM-54C Phoenix AAM).

Ships will regularly shoot down incoming SSMs. In fact, that is the whole point of the AEGIS missile defense system that is deployed on CG Ticonderoga and DDG Arleigh Burke vessels.

IN FACT, in simulations I have actually shot down vampires using this Phalanx close-in weapon system made by Raytheon. That thing is just a big machine gun used for point defense if all other missile defense systems fail.

Should we really have Democrats like Rachel Maddow in charge of national defense?

UPDATE: Here are a couple more examples I found:

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