<p>Week 33, 2012</p>
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<div><a href="http://morningstarministries.org/biographies/rick-joyner" title="Rick Joyner is the founder and executive director of MorningStar Ministries and Heritage International Ministries and is the Senior Pastor of MorningStar Fellowship Church. He is the author of more than forty books, including The Final Quest, A Prophetic History, and Church History. He is also the president of The Oak Initiative, an interdenominational movement that is mobilizing thousands of Christians to be engaged in the great issues of our times, being the salt and light that they are called to be. Rick and his wife, Julie, have five children: Anna, Aaryn, Amber, Ben, and Sam." rel="tag"><img src="images/stories/r_joyner_85px.jpg" border="0" alt="Rick Joyner - Morningstar Ministries" hspace="7" align="left" />Rick Joyner</a></div>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">If you are a student of history, you see how civilization fluctuates between extremes just like people do. The story of our U.S. government is fairly consistent, moving politically from the left and then back to the right. This is not necessarily a bad thing—an eagle needs both a left wing and a right wing to fly. Even so, if you are trending in one direction, moving to the left a little more each time than you do to the right, you will end up turning left overall. The same is true if you trend to the right.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">If you put the United States on a 1 to 10 scale politically with 1 being extreme left and 10 being extreme right, we are about a 6 as a nation. This is why you often hear that we are a center-right nation. This is remarkable with about 85% of the media and 80% of educators being left-center or even further left. After we have been pushed hard to the left such as we have been recently, expect a hard push back to the right. When these trends become more and more extreme, they create very serious dangers, some of which we must understand to understand the times.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">About 30% of the people identify themselves as liberal or progressives in America, and about the same percentage identify themselves as conservatives. Usually, political battles are for the 40% in the middle. That middle can drift just a little in either direction and affect its outcome. Barack Obama won the election by about 6% of the vote, which means that if there had been just a 3% swing in the other direction, he would have lost. If you follow the public opinion polls during election cycles, you will quickly learn that a swing that small can happen in a day.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Other signs can be illuminating barometers of where a nation is. When the Cordoba Mosque was seeking support for building near the site of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack, 70% of Americans stated opposition to it. When the charges of Islamaphobia were spewed out by the media, the percentage opposing did not cave to the accusation, but rose further to 73% or 74%. This would be remarkable on any issue, indicating that the entire center and some of the hard core left even opposed it. Why?</p>
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