Martin Luther King a Republican?

I am not a Republican, but this article from Human Events underscores what many of us have known all along: The Republican Party is the victim of false propaganda and doesn't know how to fight it.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=16500

Excerpt:

Democrats have been running our inner-cities for the past 30 to 40 years, and blacks are still complaining about the same problems. More than $7 trillion dollars have been spent on poverty programs since Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty with little, if any, impact on poverty. Diabolically, every election cycle, Democrats blame Republicans for the deplorable conditions in the inner-cities, then incite blacks to cast a protest vote against Republicans.

Partners With God? Really?

Barack Obama: "We are God's partners in matters of life and death."

The Apostle Paul: For he is God's servant to do you good.

So -- is he a partner or a servant?

Every generation or so the American people need to take a draught to the dregs of leftist government so that they can long for the return of liberty.

Jerusalem and Babylon

America is a strange mix of Jerusalem and Babylon. So states the late Richard John Neuhaus in his book American Babylon: Notes for a Christian Exile. While acknowledging the religiously aware nature of the nation’s founding and of its citizens, he reminds us that “America is Babylon not by comparison with other societies but by comparison with the radically new order sought by all who know love’s grief in refusing to settle for a community of less than truth and justice compromised.”

This, our union, is less perfect than the more perfect one that the Constitution evisions, and hence the people of God are in a foreign land. But if exiles we are, then what is our role as the people of God in a foreign land?

In about 600 B.C. Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, removed the people of God from their own land and transported them to a literal land of exile. The prophet Jeremiah, still in Jerusalem, gave a bit of advice in the form of a “thus saith the Lord.”: Build houses, start families, create businesses. You are going to be in a strange land for a long time. Most of all, “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf; for in its welfare you will have welfare.” (Jeremiah 29:7 NASB)

If in fact we are pilgrims and sojourners on the earth, exiles in the American Babylon, Jeremiah’s message to his exiled people a good message for us as well. The city’s prosperity is our prosperity. The city’s peace is our peace. Its welfare is our welfare. As citizens of both the higher kingdom and the earthly one we must do whatever we can to make this Babylon a better place for all who inhabit it so that it can be a batter place for us too.

This comports well with the New Testament admonition to be salt and light to the world. It also brings into a clearer picture Jesus’ statement that we should render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s. We might argue about what is Caesar’s and what is God’s – that at the core defines much of the political discourse in the American Babylon today -- but it does give us the freedom, indeed, the obligation to participate in the life of the city, provided we remember that our true citizenship is in the New Jerusalem and that we conduct ourselves accordingly.

That’s why becoming involved in town hall events to strive for the welfare of the city is lawful, assuming we conduct ourselves lawfully. It’s why standing for the values of Jerusalem and working for the welfare of city is consistent with who we should be. It means easing the path for others, being generous to a fault, ministering to the needy, and conducting with a kindness and openness that will reflect the life of Christ.

It means standing for justice for the weak and helpless even when the political winds blow otherwise and doing what we must to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity by not selling our inheritance for the short term economic gain for a few.

In short it’s completely acceptable for people of faith to have our voices heard on the public square to defend our values in this American Babylon, for exiles are to work for the welfare of the city.

Building Wealth the New Deal Way

A few weeks ago I took some vacation time to visit family in New York. On the way home we took a side trip to the village of Reynoldsville, PA. Most people have never heard of that little berg. Two reasons it’s special to me: 1) It’s a close neighbor to the weather capital of the world, Punxatawney, PA, and 2) It’s the place my father was born and grew up.

We took a side trip this year to this little town snuggled in the Allegheny Mountains to visit my two aunts who still live there. I mostly listened and sometimes talked to my very sharp 92 year old aunt and to the baby of the family who’s age she doesn’t want anyone to know.. I was reminded once again that the house on Broadway, where they still live, once had a yard that was planted almost property line to property line with vegetables instead of grass. And it had to be that way because a widowed, illiterate father of eight had to try to feed his very hungry family somehow during the Great Depression.

I heard stories of hunger that most Americans these days can’t fathom, real hunger that reached millions of real people.

I had recently finished reading a new book about the Great Depression. Author Amity Schlaes’ recent work The Forgotten Man is a new view of that horrendous period. The Roosevelt Administration had the notion that prices of food weren’t high enough, and that one of the solutions to the Depression would be to raise prices, and to raise prices, farmers were encouraged to reduce food production and even destroy foodstuffs. This at the very time my father and his three brothers and four sisters were scraping the larder for a few calories a day. [See The Forgotten Man, pages 159-160].

The New Deal was evidently based on the obscene idea that the way to increase wealth is to destroy assets, while a family – and many families around the country – clung to survival by a few vegetables from the family garden plot.

Let’s fast forward 75 years to 2009, and we see the same faulty economic theory at work. The Obama “Administration” buys perfectly serviceable cars and, instead of making them available to poor families, they are turned into scrap and sold to the Chinese. This wonderful strategy has the secondary effect of increasing the price of the remaining used cars on the market, thereby making them even less affordable to those with lower incomes.

This has stimulated the assembly lines for new cars, which makes the government-owned auto companies happy, but apparently it’s making Korean and Japanese car makers even happier, if recent sales figures are any indication.

Once again we see in action the insane theory that destroying assets produces wealth. Someone needs to tell those people on the other side of the Potomac that to produce wealth, a nation needs to make stuff, mine stuff, drill for stuff, and grow stuff. Don’t inhibit those activities, but encourage them. Don’t try producing wealth by creating artificial shortages and manufactured demand.

Order Amity Schlaes' book on Amazon.com.

Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling

Here's a shocker for you. First, helping India build nuclear power plants. The Russians anbd Chinese are drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Senator Kerry says Iran is free to develop nuclear power plants "for peaceful purposes". Now this from the Wall Street Journal.

Financing Brazil?

Surely there is a spirit of insanity in Washington. Let's call it Potomac Fever.

Town Hall with Senator McCaskill's Staffers

I went to a town hall meeting sponsored by McCaskill’s office on Monday night. McCaskill was not there - some of her office people conducted it, and no, I don’t believe they get it.

When the meeting started (I would estimate a crowd of 500 crammed into a small branch public library), they didn’t even have a microphone. They had to scramble for the library’s very inefficient one, explaining they were only expecting 20 people. (Surely, the Senator herself must have known better. I can’t speak for her office staff).

Initially they weren’t even going to have a town hall meeting, but only allow people to approach the aides one at a time to register their questions, which would then be passed on to “Claire”. The people would have nothing to do with that set-up and essentially told them (loudly) “we were promised a town hall meeting and we are going to have a town hall meeting”, and it would be up to them if they wanted to participate in it.

I didn’t count the questions nor write them all down, but it was evident that the real issue here is frustration and fear, mixed with anger. That is something that doesn’t need to be explained – many of you have the same emotions. Granted, many of the questions (and comments I heard from the people standing around me) are misunderstandings, but on the other hand many were incisive, well thought out, and well-reasoned. The aides only had talking points for answers, which of course added to the frustration and anger.

The politicians really don’t understand why people are frustrated. Their constituents really don’t like elitism, they don’t want government to be God, they are scared to death of deficits and loss of sovereignty to foreign creditors (which came up as one of the questions), and they don’t want healthcare to be run like the post office (which Mr. Obama actually compared his plan to recently). In short, people are worried for their kids (passing on the blessings of liberty to the next generation) and for their elderly parents (the govt. has no business being involved in end of life counseling).

Clearly the people in the meeting were a politically unpolished mix of white collar and blue collar types, but that’s really the whole point. They are tired of being called unpatriotic astro-turfers. They are tired of being condescended to by the people who are supposed to be working for them. And now, finally, they are willing to stand up and be counted to protect their liberties.

Personally, I am of a mixed mind on what is going on. The poor McCaskill staffer had to endure a battering for 1-1/2 hours, and handled it much better than I would have. She did not deserve to be put in front of a crowd like this when it is her boss that the people wanted to confront. The Senator should not have thrown her under the bus like that.

But still, what is happening now parallels something I was involved in (and others on this forum have been too) in the mid-1990s. This town hall meeting and the underlying debate about the powers that be and the people has an uncanny feel for my last years in the big corporate churches. We have arrogant leadership who put on a show of listening but who already had their minds made up. We have leadership who, if they think it’s good for you, will attempt to do it to you. We have double-talk and new-speak with the thought that they can actually blow it by us. We have leaders who want to control information (“don’t listen to so-and-so” type of comments), and people who know how to get the information anyway.

This comment says it all: “You work for us. We don’t work for you.”

Things are getting interesting, and frankly, the establishment needs to be very concerned. These people are not going away because it’s not really about healthcare. It’s about a whole lot more. This is big. Really big.

Too Many Have To's, Not Enough Get To's

Life comes at us. We have jobs to work, kids to chauffer, lawns to mow, meetings to attend, laundry to do, meals to prepare, crises to handle, appointments to keep, and obligations to fulfill. If your life looks like mine, you’ll have lots of Have To’s and not enough Get To’s.

It's unhealthy having too many Have To’s, but the demands of daily living can often leave us feeling guilty about leaving some of those duties undone and escaping to a personal refuge for a short spell.

But taking a break even when the workload is full of Have To’s is in tune with what Jesus did. We see a number of instances where Jesus boards a boat and tries to sail to the other side of the lake to escape the crowds for a spell. Other times he would travel to Gentile areas looking for a place where the presence a Jewish prophet would elicit little more than a yawn. And Jesus took these breaks while there were still a load of Have To’s on his agenda.

I am now well into the second half of life, and I am still surrounded by Have To’s. That will never end. But it’s well to remember that much of our joy in life comes from the Get To’s. Some of those Have To’s become Get To’s, and it’s wonderful when they do, but it’s good mental health to eat dessert first every now and then. Drop the vacuum cleaner while dust remains and opt for a walk in the park. Leave the dishes in the sink for a few hours and go the movies. Take a break. The world will keep spinning while you're away.

References:

John 6:16-22
Mark 7:24

Peggy Noonan: You Are Terrifying Us

Noonan's Friday Wall Street Journal Column is worth a read. Excerpt:

What the town-hall meetings represent is a feeling of rebellion, an uprising against change they do not believe in. And the Democratic response has been stunningly crude and aggressive. It has been to attack. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, accused the people at the meetings of “carrying swastikas and symbols like that.” (Apparently one protester held a hand-lettered sign with a “no” slash over a swastika.) But they are not Nazis, they’re Americans. Some of them looked like they’d actually spent some time fighting Nazis.

My High School is a Wal-Mart Parking Lot

So I visited my hometown and discovered that both elementary schools I attended and my high school are closed. I know times change, but to see a Wal-Mart parking lot where classrooms once buzzed and, worse, the Wal-Mart store itself engulfing the ballfield where I used to boot groundballs on a regular basis – well, do I need to say more?

I happen to like Wal-Mart in spite of all the propaganda floating around attempting to discredit them because of their non-union culture. Wal-Mart provides low prices to financially struggling families and acceptable employment to people between jobs or on their first jobs.

But a Wal-Mart where I once blew a game with an errant throw? Please don’t wipe my memories away!

***

Back in 1969 my high school that is now occupied by the Wal-Mart parking lot heavily promoted an all-school event to arouse awareness of what was a very real problem in the environment I endured in my youth.

The infamous Love Canal was just a few miles from that high school. A few blocks in a different direction (upwind from us) chemical plants spewed every noxious fume known to man, not just soot, which was bad enough on the lungs, but other unknown rot and corrosives that could eat the paint off cars.

I used to cross on foot industrial slag heaps walking to school, not to mention the continual stream of effluent that those factories released into the Great Lakes.

Given all this, I absolutely had to lend whatever help I could to the Earth Day efforts. It was my duty to help clean up the mess in that industrial town, not to mention to help prevent the next ice age.

We have come a long way since then. Lake Erie once again has fish. The Cuyahoga River no longer catches fire. Cars produce just a fraction of the pollutants they once did.

Time to cheer, right?

Well, not exactly. We have now “discovered” that carbon dioxide is a threat to human existence! Who knew that saving the world from a new ice age would hasten the age of global warming? Now we’re all going to fry!

We have come a long way from the days of sulfuric acid and lead emissions to fretting over cow flatulence and sheep belches. I would find this to be funny, but the policy implications of the life altering effects of cow manure remind me that the spirit of insanity is alive and well.

Congress' Healthcare Bill at its Core

The economics of the healthcare bill being considered in Congress are really quite simple. We have about 350 million people living in the U.S. Less than 50 million are without healthcare insurance. Notice that not having insurance does not mean not having healthcare – only that they don’t have insurance, a distinction often lost in the chatter.

Still, it does mean that 45 – 50 million uninsured utilize healthcare services less than the insured. This point is critical to understanding the economics of healthcare.

If those 45 – 50 million are brought fully into the system, including the 12 – 20 million who are here illegally, they will utilize more services. We can argue whether that’s a good result or not, but in any case it means greater demand for medical services without a countervailing increase in the capacity of the system to handle them. You can’t expand facilities and qualified staff that quickly, especially if one of the stated goals of reform is to squeeze costs.

So at the time the proposed system is piling on new demand, they are at the same time demanding “concessions” from the providers.

A rudimentary understanding of supply and demand, clearly surpassing that of policymakers, should at least hint that those “savings” and “cost cutting measures” have to come from somewhere. Increasing demand while deceasing supply must cause a shortage, and that’s exactly what leads to a temptation to ration.

If you were a government actuary and someone asked you to determine where the bulk of healthcare costs accrue and therefore where the bulk of cost savings might be, you would cite studies that indicate the greatest expenditures occur at the beginning and end of life. Therefore major cost savings can come from working both ends of life’s spectrum. And it’s relatively easy to control costs at both ends – if the people charged with controlling costs have the power to control treatment protocols.

At the beginning of life preemies can wrack up tens of thousands of dollars in treatments. Genetic and birth defects also can burden the system for decades just by virtue of having those babies born alive. More abortions can lower the burden of healthcare expenses for individuals who will never be able to contribute enough to the system to eventually pay for the costs society incurs as a whole. Babies like Trig Palin, if terminated in utero, would provide three benefits to society. First, medical costs would be reduced drastically. Secondly, society would be spared the discomfort of such people appearing in public. Finally, the left would rejoice having one less Palin that needs kicking around, and that alone would make them deliriously happy.

On the other end of life, what business does your 80 year old grandmother have burdening the system with knee replacement surgery when she has already lived past her normal life expectancy? And your 78 year old uncle with cancer? Pain management with hallucinogenic drugs and a room at the pink mansion on the hill a la Brave New World would certainly be an economically viable alternative for him and other useless eaters who can no longer contribute to the political economy.

The logic might strike some as bizarre, but it is the logical end of utilitarian logic.

End of life questions are difficult ones, and they will be no less difficult whether free markets or government mandate is the controlling force. But isn’t it more humane for such discussions to be made by the individual’s family, doctor, and spiritual counsel rather than giving that power of life and death to the federal government? If those guys can’t manage a cash for clunkers program, why would you trust them with your life?

Tribute to Leanna

This is from my friend Jim O'Brien, pastor of the Church of God Cincinnati.

August 1, 2009

Hi Friend,

To paraphrase King Solomon, there are two things too wonderful for me. One is watching a child grow up to accept adult responsibilities. The second is witnessing the change in a person who has been enticed along a destructive path, change directions and become fervent in the faith. Sometimes both of these factors come together in a single individual.

When I first met Leanna Hollon she was an animated three year old with auburn colored curly locks. She went through grade school, the years of braces, the friends at camp, to become a lady of beauty. There were the inevitable teen years when she made some wrong choices. There was the time during her senior year in high school when she crawled on the bed next to her mom for a talk. “Mom, I’ve got something to tell you,” she said. Somehow mom sensed what was coming and gave voice to her fears. Leanna was pregnant.

Leanna made the decision to remove herself from the destructive influence that was causing so much damage. It wasn’t easy. How many times every day must a person say “no” to himself before self-control is achieved? But she made the break. It was clean and it was permanent. She graduated from high school and Conner was born. She took to motherhood like she was made for it. I think she was. She was diligent, hard-working and self sacrificing. She worked to support herself while family, friends and the congregation gave emotional support. God was turning a trial into a great blessing.

And then Leanna made the most important decision any human being can ever make. She made a covenant with God to repent and live by faith in Jesus Christ. She was always at church, frequently singing a selection of Special Music that reflected her commitment to faith.

Then she met Kevin, who teaches young children and had a natural affinity for Conner. He and Leanna seemed ideally suited for each other. They dated and Kevin proposed. She accepted and he visited her in Cincinnati. He stayed with Leanna’s parents while she maintained her house a few miles away. A late December wedding was planned. An engagement party was scheduled for Saturday night.

But plans changed. Thursday morning they were leaving her parents home for an appointment with the engagement photographer. In their excitement neither noticed the traffic as they pulled onto the road and into the path of an SUV. Leanna was killed almost instantly.

Wise old King Solomon could express amazement over the wonders and mystery of the way an eagle can catch an updraft and soar through the air, or the way a ship moves across the sea (Proverbs 30:19). As marvelous as it is nothing in creation compares with the spirit in man. The ability of a human being for self-examination is beyond comprehension. God seems to have given man the ability to put his heart on a table and dissect it like a surgeon with a scalpel. It is this characteristic that separates men from animals. In fact the Apostle Paul tells us “Let a man examine himself. And so let him eat of that bread and drink of that cup.” (1 Corinthians 11:28)

Age, station in life, race or sex; all are irrelevant. The person who can see himself as he is and make course corrections has found the secret of life. Not only is it true success, it is the requirement for every person who wishes to be in the Kingdom of God.

Leanna, it was a privilege to know you. The resurrection is a split second away.

Until next time,

Jim O’Brien

Obama's Science Adviser Endorsed Giving Trees Legal Standing to Sue in Court

I'm not making this up.

Excerpt:

Stone admits in the article that it may seem improbable to give legal rights to nonhuman objects, but likened it to finally giving rights to black Americans.

If I were a black man, I would find this insulting.

Read the entire article here: Rights to Trees