President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared on Thursday that Iran was the world's "number one" power, as he launched a bitter new assault on domestic critics he accused of siding with the enemy.
"Everybody has understood that Iran is the number one power in the world," Ahmadinejad said in a speech to families who lost loved ones in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.
"Today the name of Iran means a firm punch in the teeth of the powerful and it puts them in their place," he added in the address broadcast live on state television.
Ahmadinejad's comments come amid renewed Western efforts on the UN Security Council to agree a third package of sanctions against Tehran over its refusal to suspend sensitive nuclear activities.
They also came a day after former top nuclear negotiator Hassan Rowhani launched an unprecedented attack on Ahmadinejad's foreign policy, accusing him of using "coarse slogans and grandstanding".
"You can see how some people here... try to materialise the plans of the enemies and by showing that Iran is small and the enemy is big," added Ahmadinejad.
"These are the people who put the enemies of humanity in the place of God," said the deeply religious president.
He also ...   more »

By Spengler
"Cherchez la femme," advised Alexander Dumas in: "When you want to uncover an unspecified secret, look for the woman." In the case of Barack Obama, we have two: his late mother, the went-native anthropologist Ann Dunham, and his rancorous wife Michelle. Obama's women reveal his secret: he hates America.
We know less about Senator Obama than about any prospective president in American history. His uplifting rhetoric is empty, as Hillary Clinton helplessly protests. His career bears no trace of his own character, not an article for the Harvard Law Review he
edited, or a single piece of legislation. He appears to be an empty vessel filled with the wishful thinking of those around him. But there is a real Barack Obama. No man - least of all one abandoned in infancy by his father - can conceal the imprint of an impassioned mother, or the influence of a brilliant wife.
America is not the embodiment of hope, but the abandonment of one kind of hope in return for another. America is the spirit of creative destruction, selecting immigrants willing to turn their back on the tragedy of their own failing culture in return for a new start. Its ...   more »

Seventy-four year old Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan has joined the chorus of those who speak of Obama in messianic terms.  Farrakhan did not specifically endorse Obama but in a rambling address in front of over 20,000 people, oddly enough in celebration of “Saviour”s Day,” he called Obama, “the hope of the entire world that America will change and be made better.” 
He also compared Obama to Fard Muhammad saying, “A black man with a white mother became a savior to us.  A black man with a white mother could turn out to be one who can lift America from her fall.”  Farrakhan’s comments come just one week after Hollywood icon Halle Berry, speaking of Obama said she would, “Do whatever he says do.”  She continued, “I’ll collect paper cups off the ground to make his pathway clear.” 
And it isn’t just the privileged and powerful that are measuring Obama for a celestial throne.  If you Google Obama’s name you will find a plethora of websites that range from questioning the possibility of his messiahship to outright pronouncements that he is a saviour.  One site (obamamessiah.blogspot.com) even offers pictures of Obama that appear to show light emanating from his ...   more »

Issue of Farrakhan 'endorsement' of Obama doesn't deserve answer
A spokeswoman for the president has evaded a question from Les Kinsolving, WND's correspondent at the White House, about Nation of Islam chief Louis Farrakhan's praise for Sen. Barack Obama, a Democratic presidential hopeful, at a Muslim religious event.
"I think we're just going to steer clear of that one," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said. "Move on to your next question; hurry up."
"Do you want to evade that?" asked Kinsolving.
"I do. So go on to your next one," Perino said. 
Kinsolving had sparked the evasion with this question:
"The AP reports from Chicago that 20,000 people attending the Nation of Islam's Savior's Day spent nearly two hours hearing Louis Farrakhan spend most of his speech praising Sen. Obama as 'the hope of the entire world who can lift America from her fall.' And my question. Does the president believe that any religious organization's tax exemption should allow such endorsement of any political candidate?"
Under the Johnson Amendment, pastors and leaders of tax-exempt 501(c)3 religious organizations in the United States, such as the Nation of Islam, are prohibited for actually endorsing or condemning an individual candidate, although they are ...   more »

PROTESTANTS are on the verge of becoming a minority in the United States, a country they helped to found, as immigration reshapes the religious landscape and people change creed or drop religion altogether.
"The number of Americans who report that they are members of Protestant denominations now stands at barely 51 per cent," compared to nearly two-thirds of the population in the 1960s, the first US Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life said.
"The proportion of the population that is Protestant has declined markedly in recent decades, while the proportion of the population that is not affiliated with any particular religion has increased significantly,'' the survey, which interviewed 35,000 adult Americans, showed.
The declining share of the US religious market that is held by Protestantism would likely impact on US culture and politics, John Greene, a senior fellow at Pew, told reporters.
Immigration has helped Roman Catholicism hold steady in its share of the US religious market, despite the faith having one of the highest attrition rates among adherents.
Around one-third of the survey respondents who said they were raised Catholic no longer describe themselves as Catholic.
But Catholics still make up around 25 ...   more »