It has been a long time since Randall Terry, the founder of the notorious anti-abortion group, Operation Rescue, has been anything more than a gnat on the political landscape. Where once he commanded an army of anti-abortion activists, a series of financial missteps, and personal indiscretions, including his being censured by his church, the Landmark Church of Binghamton, New York, "for a pattern of sinful relationships and conversations with both single and married women," according to a Washington Post report nearly twelve years ago, had relegated him to the outer Mongolia of the radical right.

These days, however, Terry is planning to change all that by playing an active, and he knows disturbingly provocative, role in this year's Super Bowl festivities.

While Terry won't be singing with Madonna at halftime, he intends to raise his voice, and profile, by paying for graphic anti-abortion commercials that must be shown in a number of television markets airing the Super Bowl.

Of the three billionaires - Sheldon Adelson, Jon Huntsman, Sr. and Foster Friess -- that Politico's Ken Vogel wrote about recently in a piece titled "3 billionaires who'll drag out the race," we probably know the least about Rick Santorum's pal, Foster Friess, who by all accounts has nothing to do with the ice-cream franchise, but had a lot to do with keeping the former Pennsylvania Senator's campaign afloat as the Republican Party's presidential sweepstakes played out in South Carolina.

Foster Friess is "a major financial backer of a super PAC supporting Rick Santorum called the Red, White and Blue Fund," Politico reported. "'I guess if Newt's got $5 million, it makes sense that ... [Santorum] should have a little bit,' said Friess, who has known Santorum since the 1990s and shares his conservative views on social and foreign policy issues."

From the nightmare in Norway, to the addled End Times predictions of Harold Camping; from class warfare in Wisconsin, to the rise of the Occupy Movement; from the shrinking Black population in New Orleans, to the anti-abortion extremism of Bleeding Kansas; from the American Legislative Exchange Council's increasing political influence, to several Republican Party presidential candidates getting the call to run from God; from Gingrich's bloviating, to Perry's "oops," to Romney's predatory capitalism; from the death of "compassionate conservatism" in the U.S., to the rise of class warfare in Canada; from Apple's shameful supply chain of poison and pollution, to Hobby Lobby's evangelical empire, these were some of the stories covered in 2011.

Finally, a late summer's visit to San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art taught me a lesson about history.

Mitt Romney's razor-thin victory in the Iowa caucuses was accomplished in large part the old fashioned way; sporting a huge bankroll, Team Romney blanketed the state with negative TV ads and eviscerated the campaign of perhaps his most formidable rival, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

John Terrence "Terry" Dolan would have been proud.

Before the Super PAC fundraising groups, before Karl Rove, before Frank Luntz's linguistic somersaults, before the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, before Fox News, and even before the closeted Senator Larry Craig's wandering bathroom leg and Ted Haggard's drug and sex scandal, there was John Terrence "Terry" Dolan.

Twenty-five years ago, Dolan died of AIDS. If you don't recognize the name, that's probably because you probably weren't sniffing around the entrails of the Republican Party's political machine during the late 1970s and early-to-mid 1980s.

His public confession on Dr. James Dobson's radio program nearly five years ago, the speech at the graduation ceremony of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, his much publicized conversion to Catholicism, his insistence on writing, making films and speechifying about the threat of a secularized America, may all have contributed to re-branding Newt Gingrich, from womanizing miscreant to redeemed sinner, in the eyes of the Religious Right.

Now, the personal endorsement of his run for the Republican Party's presidential nomination by the Rev. Donald Wildmon, the founder and chairman emeritus of the Tupelo, Mississippi-based American Family Association -- one of the most powerful Religious Right organizations in the country -- and the founder of American Family Radio, may indicate that the disgraced former Speaker of the House's long hard slog through the minefields of the Religious Right may be over.

Yesterday, Politico reported that Sheldon Adelson is considering bankrolling the campaign of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to the tune of 20 million dollars. Some portion of the money would be earmarked for a Gingrich counter-attack against "a weeklong anti-Gingrich on-air assault that is already taking a toll on his front-runner status in the Hawkeye State, according to private and public polling," Politico pointed out.

Adelson is one of the richest men in the world. He has made a boatload of money from an assortment of gambling enterprises.

If the Politico report turns out to be correct, will Religious Right leaders - many of whom vehemently oppose gambling -- sit quietly by while Gingrich, who has been courting conservative evangelical voters in Iowa and elsewhere, replenishes his campaign war chest with funds from Adelson's gambling empire?

Judge Roy Moore is most famous for refusing to remove a massive Ten Commandments installation from an Alabama courthouse, a refusal that got him - as the Donald might say - fired. Newt Gingrich is renowned for breaking who knows how many of the Ten Commandments.

This year, Moore is running to regain his spot on the Alabama Supreme Court, while Newt is running to run the entire country.

If as Sammy Cahn wrote, and Frank Sinatra sang, "Love is lovelier the second time around," Gingrich may have a royal opportunity to show some 2011/2012 love for Moore.

To paraphrase a popular English proverb, and please excuse the simultaneous bastardization of the title of a Billy Ocean song: "When the going gets tough, the tough gets gosh darned desperate."

Although Texas Governor Rick Perry has a predilection for delivering evil pronouncements at the drop of his multi-gallon hat, desperation is the mother of re-invention. While it's not quite yet Hail Mary time, Perry's recent television advertisement -- now running in Iowa - is clearly a desperate ploy; an attempt to garner attention when the spotlight is more clearly focused on Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney.

Given the nature of its message, however, some might characterize it as a "cry for help."

(As of 7:34 A.M. Pacific Coast Time, Rick Perry's homophobic & hateful television ad titled "Strong" had been viewed more than 2,700,000 times -- with 10,081 likes and 419,902 dislikes.)

The Republican Jewish Coalition hosted a presidential-candidates forum on Wednesday, December 7 at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, D.C.

Guess which candidate wasn't invited?

Michelle Bachmann and her apocalyptic religious views that leaves Jews stranded in a desert wasteland? Wrong, she was there. Mitt Romney and John Huntsman of the Mormon crew that has fancied converting to Mormonism Jews that were killed in the Holocaust in order to swell their numbers in Heaven? Wrong, they were there.  The uninhibited-unexpurgated Herman Cain? He was invited and he accepted, but since ... uh, you know what, he didn't appear. Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum? Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

The only top-tier GOP presidential candidate not invited to participate in the daylong festivities is Texas Congressman Ron Paul.

In 1960, the Master Plan for Higher Education in California, affirmed a nearly half-century-old policy that tuition-free higher education was in the best interests of the state of California. After a recent demonstration at the University of California, Berkeley, in which one of the grievances raised by students was the rapidly rising costs of a university education, a UC spokesperson suggested that members of the Board of Regents who are well-connected and have the ability to raise large sums of money from well-heeled donors, could raise donations to benefit low-income students.

Charity, the UC spokesperson seemed to suggest, was the way to help low-income students.

What has any of this to do with developments in Canada?

A series of moves being advocated by Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in large part motivated by his conservative religious beliefs, could spell the beginning of the end for Canada's much-vaunted social safety net.

Champion the Vote, a project of United In Purpose, a Silicon Valley-based conservative group dedicated to registering millions of Christian voters in time for the 2012 elections, has produced a new video that features a number of religious right notables, but only one Republican Party presidential hopeful: Newt Gingrich.

Is Gingrich on his way to getting the Christian conservative stamp of approval?

"While conventional wisdom holds that Texas Governor Rick Perry is the candidate of choice for the hard evangelical right and the increasingly influential but poorly understood New Apostolic Reformation, some new evidence indicates otherwise," Talk2Action co-founder Bruce Wilson recently told me in an email. In fact, says Wilson, evangelicals may be lining up behind Gingrich, who has risen rapidly and is now number one or two in most polls.

Mark Burnett is the creator of such television programs as Survivor, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, Shark Tank, Oprah's All-Stars, Martha Stewart, The Contender, On the Lot (a collaboration with Stephen Spielberg), The Restaurant, Rock Star, Combat Missions, My Dad Is Better Than Your Dad, Bully Beatdown, Starmaker, Expedition Africa, Toughest Cowboy, Wedding Day and How'd You Get So Rich?

Now, he appears to have signed a deal with the charismatic televangelist Joel Osteen, for a new reality television show starting sometime next year.