Mark Levin
Levin speaks at an Americans for Prosperity conference in 2011
Birth name	Mark Reed Levin
Born	(1957-09-21) September 21, 1957 (age 54) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Show	The Mark Levin Show
Station(s)	WABC
Network	Cumulus Media Networks
Time slot	6-9 p.m. EST
Style	Talk radio
Country	United States
Website	marklevinshow.com

Mark Reed Levin (born September 21, 1957) is a lawyer, author and the host of American syndicated radio show The Mark Levin Show. Levin served in the administration of President Ronald Reagan and was a chief of staff for Attorney General Edwin Meese. He is president of the Landmark Legal Foundation, has authored bestselling books and contributes commentary to various media outlets such as National Review Online.^[1]

Biography[link]

Mark Reed Levin was born to a Jewish family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and grew up in Cheltenham Township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Cheltenham High School after three years.^[2][3] After high school, Levin enrolled at Temple University Ambler including summer classes and graduated in 1977 at age 19, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.^[4] He also earned a juris doctorate from Temple University Beasley School of Law in 1980.^[5]

Beginning in 1981, Levin served as advisor to several members of President Ronald Reagan's cabinet, eventually becoming Associate Director of Presidential Personnel and ultimately Chief of Staff to Attorney General Edwin Meese; Levin also served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education, and Deputy Solicitor of the U.S. Department of the Interior.

He practiced law in the private sector and is president of Landmark Legal Foundation, a public interest law firm founded in 1976 and based in Leesburg, Virginia.

Levin is married to Kendall Levin.^[6] They have two children, Lauren (born 1988) and Chase (born 1991).^[7]

Levin has participated in Freedom Concerts, an annual benefit concert to aid families of fallen soldiers, and he uses his radio program to promote same.^[8][9] Levin is also involved with Troopathon, a charity which sends care packages to soldiers serving overseas.^[10]

In 2001, the American Conservative Union awarded Levin its Ronald Reagan Award.^[11]

Radio broadcasting[link]

Levin began his broadcast career as a guest on conservative talk radio programs. For many years he was a frequent contributor of legal opinions to The Rush Limbaugh Show, where Limbaugh referred to him on-air as "F. Lee Levin," a tongue-in-cheek reference to the famous defense attorney F. Lee Bailey. He was also a contributor to The Sean Hannity Show and eventually got a radio slot of his own on WABC, following Sean Hannity's program. Hannity has nicknamed Mark Levin "The Great One".^[12] Levin and Hannity remain frequent contributors to each other's programs.

Writer[link]

[edit] Men In Black: How The Supreme Court is Destroying America

Levin authored the 2005 book Men In Black: How The Supreme Court Is Destroying America, in which he advanced his thesis that activist judges on the Supreme Court (from all parts of the political spectrum) have "legislated from the bench." In her review of Men in Black, Slate magazine's legal correspondent and journalist Dahlia Lithwick wrote that "no serious scholar of the court or the Constitution, on the ideological left or right, is going to waste their time engaging Levin's arguments once they've read this book."^[13] In contrast, a review in the Defense Counsel Journal described Men in Black as "a forceful indictment of what Levin identifies as an increasingly 'activist' court for amending our national Constitution in the guise of construing it."^[14]

[edit] Rescuing Sprite: A Dog Lover's Story of Joy and Anguish

In 2007, Levin released a book about his dogs, Pepsi and Sprite. Specifically, the book was about Sprite, a Spaniel mix that his wife and son persuaded him to adopt from the local shelter in 2004. The book was titled Rescuing Sprite: A Dog Lover's Story of Joy and Anguish. Rescuing Sprite chronicles Sprite’s health deterioration in 2006 and how Levin and his family dealt with their loss.

[edit] Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto

Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto was released on March 24, 2009, and became a No. 1 New York Times best seller for eleven of twelve weeks,^[15] as well as No. 1 on Nielsen's BookScan.^[16] It comes in at No. 2 on Amazon.com's list of bestselling books of 2009.^[17] The book includes discussion of a variety of issues that, according to Levin, need to be addressed in the United States. Liberty and Tyranny has sold over one million copies according to Threshold Editions, the book's publisher.^[18] Former federal prosecutor and fellow National Review Online author Andrew C. McCarthy wrote of Liberty and Tyranny in The New Criterion:

We are in the high tide of America’s Leftist ascendancy: the Obama evisceration of individual freedom and installation of authoritarian collectivism—at warp speed, driven by an ambition that would have made Woodrow Wilson and FDR blush. Against this tidal wave, Levin offers not so much a defense as a plan of attack, a clarion call to roll back the seas of Change.^[19]

Taking a contrary view, Steve Almond of Salon wrote that

... the tantalizing beauty of a Mark Levin text resides precisely in this ability to attribute any crisis of State to its nefarious indulgences. The current economic meltdown, for instance, should not be blamed on the psychotic greed of Wall Street, but on the State's deranged need to throw money at the poor and undeserving.^[20]

[edit] Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America

Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America was released January 17, 2012. Amazon's publication notes describe this book as exploring "the psychology, motivations, and history of the utopian movement, its architects, and its modern day disciples – and how the individual and American society are being devoured by it."^[21]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Mark Levin Show, The Official Mark Levin Website
• marklevinshow Twitter feed
• Mark Levin on Facebook
• The Official Mark Levin Show Audio Rewind
• Landmark Legal Foundation
• Mark Levin is on the air from NationalReview.com
• C-SPAN Q&A interview with Levin, October 19, 2008

Ben Carson
Carson being announced as a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House on June 20, 2008.
Born	Benjamin Solomon Carson (1951-09-18) September 18, 1951 (age 60) Detroit, Michigan, United States
Nationality	American
Fields	Neurosurgery, psychiatry
Institutions	Johns Hopkins Hospital
Alma mater	Yale University University of Michigan Medical School
Known for	Pediatric neurosurgery
Notable awards	Presidential Medal of Freedom (2008)

Benjamin Solomon "Ben" Carson, Sr., (born September 18, 1951) is an American neurosurgeon and the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States, by President George W. Bush in 2008.

Early life[link]

Carson was born in Detroit, Michigan and was raised by his single mother, Sonya Carson. He struggled academically throughout elementary school, but started to excel in middle school and throughout high school. After graduating with honors from his high school, he attended Yale University, where he earned a degree in Psychology. He chose to go to Yale because in College Bowl, an old TV program, he saw Yale compete against and defeat many other colleges in knowledge, including Harvard. Carson wanted to participate in College Bowl, but the program was discontinued. From Yale, he attended University of Michigan Medical School.

Career[link]

Carson's eye-hand coordination and three-dimensional reasoning skills made him a gifted surgeon.^[1] After medical school he became a neurosurgery resident at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Starting off as an adult neurosurgeon Carson became more interested in pediatrics. With children he believed that "what you see is what you get,^[2] ... when they’re in pain they clearly show it with a frown on their face or when they are happy they show it by smiling brightly." Since then he has been the head of the pediatric neurosurgeon department.^[3]

At age 33, he became the hospital's youngest major division director, as Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery. Carson's other surgical innovations have included the first intrauterine procedure to relieve pressure on the brain of a hydrocephalic fetal twin, and a hemispherectomy, in which a young girl suffering from uncontrollable seizures had one half of her brain removed.

In 1987, Carson made medical history by being the first surgeon to successfully separate siamese twins (the Binder twins) conjoined at the back of the head (craniopagus twins). The 70-member surgical team, led by Carson, worked for 22 hours. At the end, the twins were successfully separated and can now survive independently. Carson recalls:

I looked at that situation. I said, ‘Why is it that this is such a disaster?’ and it was because they would always exsanguinate. They would bleed to death, and I said, ‘There's got to be a way around that. These are modern times.’ This was back in 1987. I was talking to a friend of mine, who was a cardiothoracic surgeon, who was the chief of the division, and I said, ‘You guys operate on the heart in babies, how do you keep them from exsanguinating’ and he says, ‘Well, we put them in hypothermic arrest.’ I said, ‘Is there any reason that -- if we were doing a set of Siamese twins that were joined at the head -- that we couldn't put them into hypothermic arrest, at the appropriate time, when we're likely to lose a lot of blood?’ and he said, ‘No way .’ I said, ‘Wow, this is great.’ Then I said, ‘Why am I putting my time into this? I'm not going to see any Siamese twins.’ So I kind of forgot about it, and lo and behold, two months later, along came these doctors from Germany, presenting this case of Siamese twins. And, I was asked for my opinion, and I then began to explain the techniques that should be used, and how we would incorporate hypothermic arrest, and everybody said ‘Wow! That sounds like it might work.’ And, my colleagues and I, a few of us went over to Germany. We looked at the twins. We actually put in scalp expanders, and five months later we brought them over and did the operation, and lo and behold, it worked.^[4]

Awards and honors[link]

Carson has received numerous honors and many awards over the years, including over 61 honorary doctorate degrees. He was also a member of the American Academy of Achievement, the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society, the Yale Corporation (the governing body of Yale University), and other prestigious organizations. He sits on many boards including the Board of Directors of Kellogg Company, Costco Wholesale Corporation, and America's Promise. He was also the president and co-founder of the Carson Scholars Fund, which recognizes young people of all backgrounds for exceptional academic and humanitarian accomplishments. In 2007, Carson was inducted into the Indiana Wesleyan University Society of World Changers and received an honorary doctorate while speaking at the university. He returned to IWU the following year when his friend, Tony Dungy, was also inducted into the society.^[5] On June 19, 2008, Carson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush. He is a recipient of the Ford's Theatre Lincoln Medal and the William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership, and was elected to the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the United States National Academy of Sciences.

Publications and appearances[link]

Carson has written four bestselling books published by Zondervan, an international Christian media and publishing company: Gifted Hands, The Big Picture, Take the Risk, and Think Big. The first book is an autobiography and two are about his personal philosophies of success that incorporate hard work and a faith in God; Carson is a Seventh-day Adventist. In a debate with Richard Dawkins, Francis Collins, and Daniel Dennett, Carson stated he doesn't believe in evolution: "I don't believe in evolution...evolution says that because there are these similarities, even though we can't specifically connect them, it proves that this is what happened."^[6]

A video documentary about Carson's life titled Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story was released by Zondervan in 1992. Subsequently in 2009, a separate television movie with the same title premiered on TNT on February 7, 2009, with Academy Award winner Cuba Gooding Jr. in the lead role and Kimberly Elise portraying his mother.^[7]

Personal life[link]

In June 2002 Carson was forced to cut back on his public appearances when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, but the cancer was caught in time. He still operates on more than 300 children a year, but has been trying to shorten his days: prior to his cancer he used to work from 7:00 in the morning until 8:00 at night.^[8]

Carson married Candy Rustin, whom he met at Yale in 1975; she holds a M.B.A. degree and is an accomplished musician, and both are members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Appearance in Popular Culture[link]

In The Wire season 4 episode Corner Boys, upon being asked where he sees himself in ten years, Calvin responds that he "want[s] to be a pediatric neurosurgeon like that one nigga," referring to Carson, who had been prominent in local and national news in the period during which the episode was written.

Publications[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Ben Carson

• (2009) Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story, Zondervan Publishing. ISBN 0-310-21469-6
• (2008) Take The Risk, Zondervan Publishing. ISBN 0-310-25973-8
• (2000) The Big Picture, Zondervan Publishing. ISBN 0-310-23834-X
• (1996) Think Big, Zondervan Publishing. ISBN 0-310-21459-9
• (1990) Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story, Review & Herald Pub., ISBN 0-8280-0669-5

References[link]

External links[link]

• Ben Carson interviewed on Conversations from Penn State
• Everyday Matters Magazine Interview with Dr. Ben Carson
• Home Page of the Carson Scholars Fund
• Dr. Ben Carson M.D.
• Benjamin Carson receives a Presidential Medal
• Dr. Benjamin Carson - Pediatric Neurosurgery
• There Is No Job More Important Than Parenting: NPR Interview With Dr. Benjamin Carson
• Dr. Ben Carson: The Gifted Hands Interview with Kam Williams