The Thanksgiving Family Forum, a discussion of what is known in modern culture as “social issues” by the GOP presidential candidates. It was held yesterday at the First Federated Church, Des Moines, Iowa. It was moderated by Frank Luntz. Most of the GOP candidates were there to participate in this forum that was very different than all the conventional debates we’ve seen so far, and they talked about what George Washington called the “indispensable supports” of our political prosperity. The issues discussed here make this forum quite likely the most important one you can view leading up to the 2012 election.

These were the most read and commented-on articles at Dakota Voice over the past week, including: Homosexual Activists Seek to Force Values on Businesses; Sandusky, the Homosexual Pedophile Monster; The Occupy Wall Street Devolution; You Don’t Even Have to Ask; Video: GOP Foreign Policy Debate; MSNBC ‘Journalist’ Attacks Gun Rights Using Strawman; Rep and Retired LTC Allen West on Waterboarding; Sending South Dakota ex-convicts back to prison is expensive; OWS Leftists Scare, Intimidate Children, Parents on the Way to School: and more!

Now this is the kind of cuts we need to get America back on track fiscally! We’re currently $15 TRILLION in debt. We have an annual deficit of about $1.5 TRILLION, so do the math: in 10 years, unless the economy comes back strong, we’ll have accrued another $15 trillion in debt.This means that cuts of anything less than about $10 trillion over 10 years are a drop in the bucket, a complete waste of everyone’s time. And the “supercommittee” is wringing it’s hands over cutting $1.2 trillion over 10 years? What planet are they on???

As ObamaCare heads toward the Supreme Court, is it not sad that most basic violations of individual liberty are not intuitively obvious to so many citizens and members of Congress? It’s obvious what’s wrong today. We’ve either forgotten what being American means, or we no longer care.

Eric Stanley of the Alliance Defense Fund was on Wallbuilders Live yesterday, discussing the Pulpit Initiative. This effort started in 2007 by the Alliance Defense Fund to challenge the unconstitutional tax code provision fostered in 1954 by then Senator Lyndon Johnson to silence his nonprofit political enemies. This year, 539 pastors participated, and next year even more are expected to come on board.

On Nov. 16, the national debt surpassed $15 trillion for the first time in U.S. history to $15.026 trillion. And at its current trajectory, it will pass 100 percent of the $15.198 trillion Gross Domestic Product by the end of the year, if not early in 2012. Government borrowing becomes a drain on economic output.

When I first heard about this, with few details, I thought, “Surely it wasn’t as bad as some people are making it sound. Surely even these idiot Marxist occupationists wouldn’t go out of their way to scare kids.” I don’t often underestimate the viciousness of the Left, but apparently I did here. A bunch of little grade-school kids walking to school had to walk through a screaming, kicking pack of Occupy Wall Street protesters. The kids and their parents had to have police help them through the area, and even then it was pretty wild.

I see some Obama buddies are throwing in behind the Marxist Occupy Wall Street movement. Marxist preacher and Obama faith council member Jim Wallis, as well as Obama terrorist pal Bill Ayers have been out lending aid to the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Left owns this movement, and it will be a millstone around their neck as we move into the 2012 election year.

Well isn’t that special. The Marxist occupationist movement is only a couple of months old, and already they’re in the grips of their own internal class warfare. As we learn from these interviews below, the home Occupy Wall Street gang has divided along class lines. The college yuppie privileged Marxists live in one part and, as this fellow in a mohawk tells us, “try to rule the park from.”

You will find few people who have been more opposed to President Obama’s Marxist policies than me. But I would never even remotely come close to sanctioning, agreeing with or sympathizing with someone who fired a weapon at the White House or its occupant. Yet it appears one of the Occupy DC Marxists fired a shot at the White House, and a Marxist at the Occupy San Diego called for a “moment of silence, in solidarity” for the shooter.

Anti-tax increase advocates were alarmed on Nov. 2 when 40 House Republicans signed a letter indicating they were open to new revenues as part of a package expected from the so-called congressional Supercommittee. “To succeed, all options for mandatory and discretionary spending and revenues must be on the table,” the letter stated. So will the Supercommittee sell out the American economy and the American people with tax increases to feed the ravenous appetite of this out-of-control government?

I recently received a letter from a woman complaining of Medicare Part D and its required penalties for late enrollers. After many years as a medical bill troubleshooter, personally, I have concluded that the Medicare system never was established to help senior citizens. Instead, I believe that it was established to enrich government contractors–including government employees.

You really have to love these Marxist occupationists. To heck with the U.S. Constitution. To heck with property rights. To heck with the Ten Commandments (“You shall not steal”). To heck with any sort of morality. To heck with any sort of freedom. Just have the government seize all housing and “redistribute” it.

Here’s some more of that famous love, compassion and tolerance from the Left. A conservative woman went to Occupy Portland to see for herself if things were really as bad as she’d heard. She was verbally attacked, called names, threatened, and told she had no right to be there in this public place. A man was even caught on video telling her he hopes she gets hit in the head with a tear gas canister so he can laugh at her.

Marybeth Hicks, author of Don’t Let the Kids Drink the Kool-aid, says that she makes the statement that conservatives and Christians have pretty much lost the culture war for the hearts and minds of our children. But wars that once appeared lost can flare up anew, and the tables can turn. Do Christians who understand and appreciate our moral heritage in America have the determination to regain what we’ve forfeited in the last 50 years?

While the Supreme Court decides the fate of Obamacare, there is no pause in the bureaucratic battle over Obamacare’s implementation. Since the passage of Obamacare a year and a half ago, there have been over 50 regulations. The regulatory documents that make up these regulations contain, by our count, 1,568,482 words. To put that into context, as massive as Obamacare was, its two statutes together consist of only 425,116 words.

You really have to ask yourself if MSNBC infobabe Alex Wagner in this video is for real. She shows contempt for the Second Amendment right of Americans to keep and bear arms, and when confronted with evidence of the counterproductive futility of gun control laws, she resorts to setting up strawmen and consulting foreigners.

The National Nurses United Union, allied with the AFL-CIO, paid for and paid nurses to come from all over the country to Occupy DC. Some of them were even government workers, doing this on the taxpayer’s dime. Must be nice to have paid protesters for your protest event–especially when you’re bellyaching about how you aren’t making enough money, how bad the economy is, how those evil rich people are oppressing you, blah blah blah.

It is a sad testament to the character of the Penn State organization and its students that the main concern expressed in the immediate aftermath of these revelations has been the fate of Coach Paterno’s football legacy. It has been said that America’s universities represent the future of our society. If that’s true, and if Penn State is representative of other universities, then may God help us all.

Homosexual activists in Iowa who want to force a Christian businesswoman to affirm their counterfeiting of marriage. Two lesbians want to call their union “marriage” and insist that a Christian baker make a wedding cake for them. This is another clear illustration that the homosexual agenda is not about tolerance, but about forcing people and society in general to affirm their unhealthy and immoral sexual behaviors.

The astonishing news in the past couple of weeks out of State College, Pennsylvania has left America reeling. It is not so much that a monster like former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky would do the atrocious things he reportedly did to at least 8 boys, but that it appears a massive cover-up allowed him to continue his detestable treatment of those poor kids who were under his “care.”

Retired Lt. Col. Allen West, now U.S. Representatiave from Florida Allen West, provides some important and much-needed perspective on the perennial liberal angst over waterboarding. He points out that President Obama is the beneficiary of information obtained through waterboarding, that terrorists have chosen to operate outside the normal protections of the Geneva Conventions, many of our own servicemen are waterboarded…and waterboarding just isn’t torture.

I have been writing my weekly commentaries for nearly ten years now and I remain amazed and humbled by the scope and audience the Lord has granted. However, for those of you who have been following my ministry for at least the last couple of years, you know that I have recently added a new ministry direction. I will henceforth soften my self-imposed commitment to publishing an article each and every week.

President Obama and other Leftists have made us laugh with their faux comparisons between the patriotic Tea Party movement and the anti-American Occupy Wall Street movement. There simply is no legitimate comparison.The vast difference has led the Media Research Center to put together a list of questions that might naturally come to mind for an Occupy Wall Street protestor, but you’d never have to ask a Tea Partier.

The person who titled this video hit the nail on the head. The Occupy Wall Street movement isn’t best described as a revolution (though it definitely has some of those characteristics). It is best described as devolution. It is a huge step back from the prosperity and advancements of the American Revolution and the principles that drove that revolution, backward into a mob of ignorance and lawlessness. The last time we saw a step backward that was as big as these Marxists want, we saw the advancements and learning of the Roman Empire fall at the hands of barbarians into 1,000 years of the Dark Ages.