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Televangelist Pat Robertson on Monday explained to his viewers that "sophisticated" Americans receive fewer miracles because they learned "things that says God isn’t real," like evolution.

On Monday's episode of CBN's The 700 Club, Robertson responded to a viewer who wanted to know why "amazing miracles (people raised from the dead, blind eyes open, lame people walking) happen with great frequency in places like Africa, and not here in the USA?"

"People overseas didn't go to Ivy League schools," the TV preacher said, laughing. "We're so sophisticated, we think we've got everything figured out. We know about evolution, we know about Darwin, we know about all these things that says God isn't real."

"We have been inundated with skepticism and secularism," he continued. "And overseas, they're simple, humble. You tell 'em God loves 'em and they say, 'Okay, he loves me.' You say God will do miracles and they say, 'Okay, we believe him.'"

"And that's what God's looking for. That's why they have miracles."

(h/t: Right Wing Watch)

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Fox News host Megyn Kelly on Tueday said that President Barack Obama may have "gone native" when he mocked Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney by pointing out that the U.S. military no longer used as many "horses and bayonets."

During the third 2012 presidential debate, Romney had criticized Obama because “our Navy is smaller now than any time since 1917. The Navy said they needed 313 ships to carry out their mission, we’re now down to 285."

In response, Obama promised that military spending would not be cut, adding, “I think Gov. Romney maybe hasn’t spent enough time looking at how our military works. You mentioned the Navy, for example. And that we have fewer ships that we had in 1916. Well, governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military has changed.”

During a segment on Fox News the following day, conservative strategist Michael Reagan told Kelly that the "horses and bayonets" line may have been too harsh for undecided voters.

"It showed Barack Obama, who he is: very condescending," the son of the former president explained. "You begin to see why he's accomplishing nothing in Washington, D.C., where my father was accomplishing everything in Washington, D.C. because when he spoke to you, he spoke with you. He did not speak down to you."

"Last night, no respect from the president of the United States towards Mitt Romney, a lot of presidential respect -- as if he were already the president -- from Mitt Romney to, in fact, the other," Reagan added.

"That's an interesting point, that it speaks to an ability to be bipartisan," Kelly agreed. "And whether the president has that, and whether he's been in Washington maybe too long, maybe it's gotten to him and he's sort of gone native because the guy who was going to be hope and change got to Washington, and now he sounds a lot like the people he said he was going to change."

According to Queen's Univ. of Belfast's The Imperial Archive Project, the term "going native" originally referred "to the trepidation felt by the European colonizers in Africa that they may become desecrated by being assimilated into the culture and customs of the indigenous peoples."

"In today's liberal and anti-racist society, ‘going native' is understandably considered a derogatory and offensive term," Sinead Caslin wrote for The Imperial Archive Project.

A recently as last week, Comedy Central's South Park dealt with racism in Hawaii with an episode titled "Going Native."

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms suggests that the term has a more innocent meaning: "to become like the people who have lived in a place for a long time."

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Rachel Maddow let Mitt Romney's running mate, Paul Ryan have it for showing up in the middle of all of the turmoil going on right now in the Middle East and Africa and just after the death of our ambassador in Libya, at the Values Voter Summit 2012. As she noted, if anyone wanted to know why Hillary Clinton was being attacked along with her aid Huma Abedin, look no further than the wingnuts appearing at this event.

Here's more with a rundown of that from Right Wing Watch: Who's Who at the Values Voter Summit 2012:

This weekend Republican and conservative leaders, including GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, are set to address the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C. Last year, nearly every single Republican candidate for President addressed the conference, where speakers denounced gay rights, secular government, legal abortion and the Mormon faith.

This year, Ryan will be speaking at a conference that is playing host to some of the most extreme activists in the Religious Right who have made careers demonizing gays and lesbians, attacking the freedoms of Muslim-Americans and promoting wild conspiracies about President Obama. [...]

Jerry Boykin

Family Research Council vice president and retired Army Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin sparked a controversy when, as a high-ranking official in the Bush Defense Department, he framed the War on Terror as a holy war against Islam. He has since built a career as a Religious Right speaker, specializing in anti-Muslim rhetoric and anti-Obama conspiracy theories. He:

• asserted that “Islam is evil”;
• rejects religious freedom for American Muslims, claiming that Islam “is not just a religion, it is a totalitarian way of life.”
• wants to ban mosques;
• warned Obama is using the health care reform law as a cover to establish a private army of Brownshirts loyal just to him;
• accused the Obama administration of showing “support for the infiltration of the Muslim Brotherhood into our government”;
• claimed the bailout of AIG led to the establishment of Sharia law;
• said that American Jews were misled into supporting Democrats by wrongly thinking Adolf Hitler was right-wing extremist;

Along with his role at the FRC, Boykin is also a leading member of the dominionist group The Oak Initiative. In a speech at the group’s conference last April, he declared that George Soros and the Council on Foreign Relations conspired to collapse the U.S. economy in order to help Obama get elected. [...]

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The world's most wealthy woman is warning that firms are in danger of having to abandon iron-ore mining in Australia if wages are not cut, pointing out that African miners are "willing to work for less than $2 per day."

In a video recently posted on the Sydney Mining Club website, 58-year-old Gina Rinehart -- who has amassed a $18 billion fortune through iron-ore prospecting -- said that Australia could be more competitive by emulating Africa.

"We must be realistic, not just promote class warfare," the billionaire explained. "Indeed, if we competed at the Olympic games as sluggishly as we compete economically, there would be an outcry."

"The evidence is unarguable that Australia is indeed becoming too expensive and too uncompetitive to do export- orientated business," she insisted, adding that "Africans want to work. Its workers are willing to work for less than $2 per day."

Under current exchange rates, $2 a day in Australia is worth about $2.04 in U.S. dollars.

"It's not the Australian way to toss people $2, to toss them a $2 gold coin and then ask them to work for a day," Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard told reporters on Wednesday. "We support proper Australian wages and decent working conditions for Australian people."

Rinehart came under fire last week after she wrote a column urging those "jealous" of the wealthy to "spend less time drinking or smoking and socializing, and more time working."

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In what was otherwise a really long, and fairly annoying interview with global warming denier, Sen. James Inhofe, Rachel Maddow did end up making the senator look extremely uncomfortable when she asked him about his ties to The Family and Doug Coe and and the return of the "kill the gays" bill in Uganda and whether he was for or against it.

Inhofe's first reaction was to feign indignation when Maddow brought up one of her shows from 2009 where she mentioned Sen. Inhofe and the fact that he took her out of context in his book, which was supposed to be the topic of the interview.

INHOFE: Are you saying, are you suggesting Rachel, and I want to make sure that everyone understands this, that I am for executing gays? That I somehow knew something about what their philosophy is over there and what they're doing legislatively?

I know Uganda. I know Ethiopia, I know Ghana, I know Benin. I know Africa, better than anyone else, certainly in the United States Senate. I've spent a lot of time over there. I've developed close relations over there. And when 9-11 happened, I was the only member of the Armed Services Committee who knew where Africa was and we were making a decision then to get into Africa to help train them, to resist all these things that are coming into the country and the continent, that's what I did. So I do know Africa well.

As far as Doug Coe is concerned, you know I think, when you hear about persecution for the sake of righteousness, I can't think of a better example. I wish you knew Doug Coe. I've never known anyone in my life that just loves everyone and I see him persecuted and my heart bleeds for him and I do... I am sorry that you did that.

Maddow went on to read from a New York Times article which made this claim about The Family being the inspiration for the bill:

It was in the United States, Mr. Bahati contended, that he first became close with a group of influential social conservatives, including politicians, known as The Fellowship, which would later become a base of inspiration and technical support for the anti-homosexuality bill.

Mr. Bahati said the idea for the bill first sprang from a conversation with members of The Fellowship in 2008, because it was “too late” in America to propose such legislation. Now, he said, he feels abandoned.

Inhofe's response... who's David Bahati? So right after telling Rachel Maddow just how much he knows about Africa and how much time he spends over there, he's going to pretend he doesn't know who this guy is. Riiiigghht.

Maybe Rachel Maddow will bring Jeff Sharlet back in for some fact checking on Inhofe's statement. They could probably spend the better part of a week just trying to debunk all the lies he told in the first half of the interview where they were talking about his book and global warming.

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Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum became the latest Republican presidential candidate to misspeak about Africa Tuesday.

During CNN's debate on foreign policy, Santorum said that Africa was a country, instead of a continent.

Former Bush Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who now serves as a scholar for the American Enterprise Institute, asked the candidates how their policies would promote growth in poor countries.

"Well, as the author of The Global Fund bill and the Millennium Challenge in the United States Senate, and as someone who worked with the president on [the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief] PEPFAR to deal with the issue of AIDS in Africa, I believe it's absolutely essential," Santorum replied.

"Africa was a country on the brink of complete meltdown and chaos."

But Santorum is in good company.

At a CNN debate in Las Vegas earlier this year, Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann seemed not to know that Libya was in Africa.

"Now with the president, he put us in Libya," Bachmann declared. "He is now putting us in Africa. We already were stretched too thin, and he put our special operations forces in Africa."

After the 2008 presidential election campaign, aides revealed to Fox News reporter Carl Cameron that Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin was also unaware that Africa was a continent.

She "didn't understand that Africa was a continent, rather than a series, a country just in itself," Cameron explained.

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Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul explained Wednesday that famines in Africa were a result of a lack of a "free market systems."

"All I know is if you look at history and if you compare good medical care and you compare famine, the countries that are more socialistic have more famines," Paul told CNN's T.J. Holmes. "If you look at Africa, they don't have any free market systems and property rights and they have famines and no medical care. So the freer the system, the better the health care."

Writing for the World Bank in 1996, Australian economist Martin Ravallion noted the importance of a social safety net for preventing famines.

"The literature on famines reviewed here has suggested that failures of both market and nonmarket institutions lie at the heart of famine causation; so it can be argued that famines can be ameliorated by longer-term development policies which strengthen the social and economic institutions (both governmental and non-governmental) which help protect poor people from economy-wide shocks," he wrote.

"Evidence in the famines literature and elsewhere also suggests that an effective social safety net for protecting poor households from severe shocks is consistent with longer-term goals of economic growth and environmental protection."

Holmes also gave Paul a chance to respond to a controversy that ensued after the tea party audience at Monday night's Republican presidential debate cheered the notion that an uninsured man in a coma would be left to die.

"This whole idea that they world will not provide for people if you don't depend on government -- freedom provides more prosperity and better health care than all the socialism and welfarism in the world," Paul said. "Nobody can compete with me about compassion because I know and understand how free markets and sound money and a sensible foreign policy is the most compassionate system ever known to mankind. So if you care about people you have to look to the freedom philosophy and limited government."

From Democracy Now: British Novelist John le Carré on the Iraq War, Corporate Power, the Exploitation of Africa and His New Novel, "Our Kind of Traitor":

Today, we spend the hour with world-renowned British novelist John le Carré, the pen name of David Cornwell. Le Carré’s writing career spans half a century, during which he has established himself as a master spy writer. His latest novel, his twenty-second, is entitled Our Kind of Traitor. David Cornwell worked in the British Secret Services from the late 1950s until the early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, became an international bestseller. As the Cold War ended, le Carré continued to write prolifically, shifting focus to the inequities of globalization, unchecked multinational corporate power, and the role national spy services play in protecting corporate interests. "The things that are done in the name of the shareholder are, to me, as terrifying as the things that are done—dare I say it—in the name of God," le Carré tells Democracy Now! Perhaps best known among his many post-Cold War novels is The Constant Gardener, depicting a pharmaceutical company’s exploitation of unwitting Kenyans for dangerous, sometimes fatal, drug tests. In this rare US interview, le Carré also discusses Tony Blair’s role in the Iraq war, US policy toward Iran, and international money laundering.