Don Polson has called Red Bluff home since 1988, is a past president of the Tehama County Association of Realtors, licensed since 1994. He can be reached by e-mail at donplsn@yahoo.com. ( DN- )
Sometimes columns set to run during summer traveling, written either in the rush to get on the road, or on battery powered keyboard and sent via Verizon mobile wireless, get to be the repositories for odds and ends. This is one.

Would you find it out of place, perhaps inappropriate, to find out that the President, George Bush for instance, had stated an unequivocal linkage between our form of government and our predominant religion?

Let's say that President Ronald Reagan had written a special preface for the New Testament and had it distributed to American troops.

Or if Mitt Romney told audiences that freedom of religion was of no use if you had lost your God.

Would it have been looked favorably on if President G. H. W. Bush had admonished in his inaugural address that we pray to God for help achieving His will?

What if our leaders were overwhelmingly Christian ministers and preachers? While that last question is a little tricky, it still is based on the fact that our Founders and Constitutional Framers were almost all men of the cloth. Bet you didn't know, did you?

The others all apply to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He said that Democracy and Christianity were "two phases of the same civilization." "We cannot read the history of our rise and development as a nation without reckoning with the place the Bible has occupied in shaping the advances of the Republic." FDR did indeed write a preface for an edition of the New Testament distributed to our troops, and he would probably not for one minute have questioned that they should possess and read it no matter what country they were serving in, Jewish, Christian or (pause for emphasis) Muslim. It went "As Commander-in-Chief, I take pleasure in commending the reading of the Bible to all who serve in the armed forces of the United States."

Roosevelt, on radio on the eve of the 1940 election: "Freedom of speech is of no use to a man who has nothing to say and freedom of worship is of no use to a man who has lost his God." It was FDR's final inaugural address in 1945 that contained the admonishment "So we pray to Him for the vision to see our way clearly to achievement of His will." Neither President G. nor G.H.W. Bush did this on the eve of war in the Middle East, but President Roosevelt led the nation in prayer for our armed forces on live radio on D-Day. No record if atheists and opponents tsk-tsked or spoke in discouraging tones at the time. I don't think either the elites, the media or political figures were yet brainwashed to think that such things were "an establishment of religion" but simply "the free exercise thereof." (Credit to Steven Hayward of powerlineblog.com)

In "The Administration's Press," PJ Media writer Tom Blumer made some media observations on the frequent line-crossing between reporting and editorializing that occurs with regularity in Associated Press distributed news copy. Did you know that the wire service's journalists are members of the "News Media Guild" a "militant subset of the Communications Workers of America?

The AP became unionized in the wake of a 1937 Supreme Court decision."

Concern by dissenting justices focused on how, for the First Amendment's freedom of the press to work properly, news organizations should be free from all government interference, "in this case, at the hands of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's ruthlessly aggressive National Labor Relations Board." Forming unions, the justices stated, would compromise the ability of a media outlet to "preserve its news service free from color, bias, or distortion."

Last year, AP reporters constantly insisted "that (WI. Governor Scott) Walker was 'eliminating' and 'stripping' public-sector collective bargaining rights" and engaged in an "assault on the public employee unions." Later, when GOP Congressman Paul Ryan presented his budget, "the Guild's web site ran an appalling cartoon suggesting that Ryan's real goal was 'to euthanize the elderly, and then process them into tasty snack crackers.'"

The AP reported tirelessly and glowingly on the Occupy Wall Street movement, all but ignoring "the movement's crimes, violence, sexual assaults, filth, and unreimbursed costs to taxpayers." The seven reporters assigned to the largely defunct movement's six-month anniversary still managed to avoid mentioning Occupy's "myriad documented offenses."

Examples from March and April: The AP repeatedly minimized the potential jobs from the Keystone pipeline, ignoring pipeline supporters estimates of at least 2,500 direct and between tens and hundreds of thousands of indirect jobs. A reporter did allow that it could be "over 1,000 jobs." Well, it could be "over a dozen," I guess.

That farcical Obama budget that Congress unanimously rejected? The 414 to 0 vote was buried by AP in the fifth paragraph. AP editorialized that it was "overwhelmingly rejected" by a "GOP-run Congress" in order "to embarrass Democrats."

Over the course of one day's reporting on a consumer confidence report from the Conference Board, it was characterized as "falls" to "dips slightly" to "roughly flat" to "a rosy outlook." It fell from 71.6 to 70.2.

AP's "Outgoing CEO Dean Singleton's introduction of President Obama at the wire service's annual luncheon on April 3 was so disgracefully obsequious that, according the Charles Hurt at the Washington Times, "it was more like he proposed to him.'" Other examples abound but you get the idea.

----

Don Polson has called Red Bluff home since 1988, is a past president of the Tehama County Association of Realtors, licensed from 1994-2010. He can be reached by e-mail at donplsn@yahoo.com