Two of our authors are recommending that everyone go out and buy Danish cheese -- and Legos.

Why?

Because the entire nation of Denmark is being boycotted (and worse) by the Islamic world, on account of some anti-Mohamed cartoons that were published in a Danish newspaper. You can see the actual cartoons on Michelle Malkin's blog.

They look remarkably mild to me, but then I'm an American Christian used to seeing and hearing nasty attacks on my religion. Which (the Christian faith, that is) requires me to love my enemies and pray for those who persecute me.

There's continuing coverage of the controversy on the Dhimmi Watch blog of Robert Spencer, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam.

-- Elizabeth Kantor, Managing Editor

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Read the Alito Blog on Human Events Online for coverage of Senator Kerry's actions in re. the Alito nomination, definitive proof he's still very much Unfit for Command.

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Go here and click on the photo of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science near the bottom righthand corner to see a short clip of Tom Bethell making some politically incorrect points on FOX.

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According to this snarky article in the New York Times earlier this week, President Bush is reading Mao: The Unknown Story.

The Times implies that there's something a bit naive about buying into the book's portrait of Mao as an evil dictator. Whereas you might argue that it's more naive -- and more dangerous -- for the Times to go on compounding the error they made in the early 20th century, when they studiously ignored Stalin's Terror and the famine in the Ukraine, of being too sophisticated to take notice of this kind of evil. Link to this post

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Bioevolution author Michael Fumento is the most recent of a handful of conservative writers who've lost their syndicated columns because of ethics charges. Here's his defense of his actions. And some evidence that flimsy ethics charges are the new technique for shutting conservative colunnists up.

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"Foreign Leaders Shocked at Hamas Win" screams the headline of this AP story currently linked at the top of the Drudge Report.

Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam author Robert Spencer isn't shocked. And if "foreign leaders" had been reading Spencer's Jihad Watch, they wouldn't be, either.

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Patrick Lee and Robert George answer Peter Singer's pro-cloning and anti-embryo arguments on NRO today.

Singer, one of the lefties whose hypocrisy is exposed in Do As I Say, Not as I Do, is the Princeton professor famous for thinking that our right to life depends not on the fact that we're human beings, but on qualities like consciousness and intelligence -- things a mature chimpanzee has more of than a disabled infant.

(Come to think of it, maybe Senate judiciary committee members should have accused Alito of harboring pro-euthanasia, pro-infanticide, and anti-human-life beliefs, instead of racist ones. After all, while Alito may have been briefly associated with Concerned Alumni of Princeton, there's a heck of a lot more evidence that he had a long-lasting and substantial relationship with Princeton University, from which he actually holds a degree -- and look what they teach there.)

Singer has apparently taken up the argument that Ronald Bailey of Reason magazine has been making for several years now, that because cloning makes every cell in our bodies a potential human being, human embryos are no more valuable than skin cells.

Lee and George explain -- among other things -- the crucial difference between the kind of "potential" an embryo (or a 10-year old, for that matter) has to become a full-grown human being and the kind of "potential" a skin cell has to be turned into an individual by evil scientists (my term, not theirs, for folks like South Korea's Dr. Hwang).

Conservatives simply cannot afford to ignore these bioethical issues -- which is why we carry several informative titles on them.

We conservatives do our best to protect our families from the filth in the popular culture -- we can filter internet access, not buy into cable, throw away our TVs. We can take our kids out of corrupting public schools and teach them at home. But there's no alternative to the medical system. If we get sick, we go to the same hospitals as everybody else, and the increasingly post-Christian medical ethics of the 21st century are going to affect our lives, too. You can't homeschool your heart attack.

Elizabeth Kantor, Managing Editor

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Unhinged author Michelle Malkin weighs in on the Haleigh Poutre case on Human Events Online today.

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Haleigh Poutre, whose case has been compared to that of Terri Schiavo, was taken off a respirator, only to surprise doctors and Massachusetts Deparment of Social Services officials today by breathing on her own. (Hat tip to Diogenes.)

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Robert Spencer, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam, comments on what Osama bin Laden's truce offer may mean here.

Disinformation author Rich Miniter will appear on MSNBC's Scarborough Country tonight at 10 Eastern Time to discuss the bin Laden audiotape.

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Today is Benjamin Franklin's 300th birthday, and there are all various celebratory articles around the web, several of them quoting Franklin descendent and editor Mark Skousen, whose The Compleated Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin officially publishes today.

Click through to these articles to read about the scientific and political genius who played a crucial role in the founding of our nation.

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South Park Conservatives author Brian Anderson has a lengthy, informative, and frightening piece in the Winter 2006 City Journal on how the Left is attempting an end run around the 1st Amendment in order to to silence conservative media outlets -- and conservative bloggers.

Here's a horrifying thought:

Kerry might be president of the U.S., assuming that CBS News had gotten away with its last-minute falsehood about President Bush’s military service that the diligent bloggers at PowerLine, LittleGreenFootballs, and other sites swiftly debunked.

Are the hundreds of political blogs that have sprouted over the last few years -- twenty-first-century versions of the Revolutionary era’s political pamphlets -- "press," and thus exempt from FEC regulations? Liberal reform groups like Democracy 21 say no. "We do not believe anyone described as a 'blogger' is by definition entitled to the benefit of the press exemption," they collectively sniffed in a brief to the FEC. "While some bloggers may provide a function very similar to more classical media activities, and thus could reasonably be said to fall within the exemption, others surely do not." The key test, the groups claimed, should be whether the blogger is performing a "legitimate press function."

Somehow I can't see our founding fathers buying into the idea that it was a legitimate government function to decide that some citizens who write and publish political reporting and advocacy are outside the protection of the 1st Amendment.

Read the whole article.

-- Elizabeth Kantor, Managing Editor

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Drudge links to more evidence we're living in a brave new world:

British scientists are seeking permission to create hybrid embryos in the lab by fusing human cells with rabbit eggs.

My favorite part of the article is the fact that one of the experts they interview on the ethics of this hybrid rabbit-human experimentation is a guy who injects human DNA into frog eggs in his own experiments.

Want to guess whether he finds the rabbit-human experiments ethically troubling?

No, wait a minute, my even more favorite part is this statement by Professor Chris Shaw, the neurologist who's proposing the rabbit-human hybrid experiments:

The embryos could not legally be implanted into a woman's womb and the stem cells would not be safe to implant because they would be rejected by the immune system. "They will never grow beyond the 200-cell stage and they will have no human features," said Prof Shaw.

No human features?

This is a dishonest, sophistical argument, depending on the ambiguity of the word "features." No 200-cell blastocyst of any species has a nose or eyebrows or ears. The rabbit-human embryos Professor Shaw wants to create certainly won't have those features. But then neither does any 100% human embryo conceived the ordinary way and growing inside his mother's body have any such features at that age. What "features" it does have -- its genetic and physical structure -- are going to be practically identical to the "human features" of a human embryo at that same stage of development.

-- Elizabeth Kantor, Managing Editor

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Ed Meese, Reagan's attorney general and the editor of The Heritage Guide to the Constitution, will appear this evening on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews at 5:20 Eastern time to discuss the Alito hearings and other legal issues in the news.

Tom Bethell, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, will be on FOX News's DAYSIDE tomorrow, Friday, January 13th, at 1P.M. Eastern Time, discussing how liberals continue to perpetuate various scientific myths.

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Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), who was mocked pitilessly by the Left for doing a crossword puzzle during the Roberts hearings has been photographed with The Heritage Guide to the Constitution at the Alito hearings today.

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Three different articles (including one by me) on the Marxists at the Modern Language Association Convention -- the big annual English professors' meeting -- this year. English departments are just about the only place this side of North Korea where you can find genuine Marxists these days. (The fall of the Berlin wall tended to take the heart out of them, for some reason.) Read all about them.

-- Elizabeth Kantor, Managing Editor

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Here is a very long and truly fantastic article by Mark Steyn on the troubles of the West. Steyn points out how the anemic culture of Europe, and of our blue states, doesn't have it in itself to resist the Islamist assault that's already being made on the West. Here's Steyn explaining that we're overlooking the really significant kind of "globalization":

What's the better bet? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers and pop songs or a globalization that exports the fiercest aspects of its culture? When it comes to forecasting the future, the birthrate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2006, it's hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026 (or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger Management and Queer Studies degrees). And the hard data on babies around the Western world is that they're running out a lot faster than the oil is.

So why is it that the only thing Western society has to offer the world is cheeseburgers and pop songs (and pornography)?

Or even freedom and democracy? Great as they are, they can't compete head-to-head with Islam as an explanation of the meaning of life.

It's beginning to look as if the only long-range solution to our urgent practical problem -- the Muslims' birth rate is several times as high as ours, and Islam teaches them that they ought to conquer and rule us -- is what those of us who claim we're serious about being Christians should have been doing all along: preaching the gospel.

It'd be great if we in the West started having decent numbers of children again, but it's worth remembering what Tertullian said: "Christians are made, not born."

C.S. Lewis warned against trying to use Christianity in pursuit of any other end. But look at it the other way around -- if we don't do what we're supposed to (in this case, love Christ and our fellow human beings enough to spread the gospel) then it's natural that things are not going to go all that well for us.

It's very difficult to see how we can effectivly evangelize the Muslim world. It doesn't seem like a job for George W. Bush or the U.S. Marines. And most Muslim countries tend not to welcome Christian missionaries, to put it mildly.

But I'm afraid we'd better think of something. Start with the Muslims in the United States, maybe, and hope to get some kind of domino effect going? Send missionaries to the countries that aren't officially Islamic but where there are large Muslim populations? (France?) Lobby our government to take a short term risk (going for a long term gain) and push the Muslim countries allied with us a little harder on the religious liberty issue? Pray about it harder?

Unless, that is, we want our children and grandchildren to be evangelizing the Muslims the way the Romans evangelized the Germanic barbarians -- suffering through conquest, rape, and pillage with faith, patience, and even charity for their conquerors.

Here's one practical thing you can do to get started thinking about the possibilities: Read any of these books on Islam, to learn more about it, or this one by a man who actually was a missionary among Muslims.

-- Elizabeth Kantor, Managing Editor

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Do read Kate O'Beirne, author of the just-released Women Who Make the World Worse, on one feminist who admits that she wants women to have what she wants for them, not what they want, today on NRO.

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The Alito hearings -- and abortion -- are all over the web today.

The Heritage Guide to the Constitution is the place to go for Constitutional arguments against Roe v. Wade and its progeny.

But sometimes the best answers to the other side are from common sense.

Take this reporting in an AP story being linked by Drudge today:

After Pennsylvania's first abortion restrictions took effect in the early 1980s, the number of abortions in the state declined sharply -- while rising nationwide. In the 1990s, the nation's abortion rate dropped as states began following Pennsylvania's lead.

"We were light years ahead of everybody else," said former state Rep. Stephen Freind, the architect of virtually all of Pennsylvania's abortion restrictions.

A 2004 study commissioned by the conservative Heritage Foundation found that abortion restrictions -- including parental involvement, informed consent, a ban on the type of late-term abortion known as partial-birth abortion, and a ban on Medicaid funding of abortion -- all helped reduce the number of abortions.

Abortion-rights activists cite other factors for the nationwide drop in abortions, including a decline in the number of unwanted pregnancies.

Why is the decline in "unwanted pregnancies" an "other" factor? The fact that there are fewer girls and women pregnant when they don't want to have babies might have quite a lot to do with the fact that abortions are more difficult to get. To give just one example: If you were a 15-year-old living in a state where you knew your parents would have to be informed of your pregnancy before you could have an abortion, mightn't that knowlege discourage you from risking getting pregnant in the first place?

-- Elizabeth Kantor, Managing Editor

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