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In an election campaign in which not only young liberals, but also some people who are neither young nor liberals, seem absolutely mesmerized by the skilled rhetoric of Sen. Barack Obama, facts have receded even further into the background than usual.
As the hypnotic mantra of "change" is repeated endlessly, few people even raise the question of whether what few specifics we hear represent any real change, much less a change for the better.
Raising taxes, increasing government spending and demonizing business? That is straight out of the New Deal of the 1930s.
The New Deal was new then but it is not new now. Moreover, increasing numbers of economists and historians have concluded that New Deal policies are what prolonged the Great Depression.
Putting new restrictions of international trade, in order to save American jobs? That was done by Herbert Hoover, when he signed the Hawley-Smoot tariff when the unemployment rate was 9 percent. The next year the unemployment rate was 16 percent and, before the Great Depression was over, unemployment hit 25 percent.
One of the most naive notions is that politicians are trying to solve the country’s problems, just because they say so - or say so loudly or inspiringly.
Politicians’ top priority is to solve their own problem, which is how to get elected and then re-elected. Barack Obama is a politician through and through, even though pretending that he is not is his special strategy to get elected.
Some of his more trusting followers are belatedly discovering that, as he "refines" his position on various issues, now that he has gotten their votes in the Democratic primaries and needs the votes of others in the coming general election.
Perhaps a defining moment in showing Mr. Obama’s priorities was his declaring, in answer to a question from Charles Gibson, that he was for raising the capital gains tax rate. When Mr. Gibson reminded him of the well-documented fact that lower tax rates on capital gains had produced more actual revenue collected from that tax than the higher tax rates had, Mr. Obama was unmoved.
The question of how to raise more revenue may be the economic issue but the political issue is whether socking it to "the rich" in the name of "fairness" gains more votes.
Since about half the people in the United States own stocks - either directly or because their pension funds buy stocks - socking it to people who earn capital gains is by no means socking it just to "the rich." But, again, that is one of the many facts that don’t matter politically.
What matters politically is the image of coming out on the side of "the people" against "the privileged."
If you are a nurse or mechanic who will be depending on your pension to take care of you when you retire - as Social Security is unlikely to do - you may not think of yourself as one of the privileged. But unless you connect the dots between capital gains tax rates and your retirement income, you may fall under the spell of the well-honed Obama rhetoric.
Mr. Obama is for higher minimum wage rates. Does anyone care what actually happens in countries with higher minimum wage rates? Of course not.
Economists may point to studies done in countries around the world, showing that higher minimum wage rates usually mean higher unemployment rates among lower skilled and less experienced workers.
That’s their problem. A politician’s problem is how to look like he is for "the poor" and against those who are "exploiting" them. The facts are irrelevant to maintaining that political image.
Nowhere do facts matter less than in foreign policy issues. Nothing is more popular than the notion that you can deal with dangers from other nations by talking with their leaders.
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain became enormously popular in the 1930s by sitting down and talking with Hitler, and announcing that their agreement had produced "peace in our time" - just one year before the most catastrophic war in history began.
Mr. Obama may gain similar popularity by advocating similar policies today - and his political popularity is what it’s all about. The consequences for the country come later.
Thomas Sowell is a nationally syndicated columnist.
July 18th, 2008
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This piece was written by commentator Mark D Tooley at Frontpage Magazine and is true.
The only problem is that he has a fact wrong. The ELCA is not a declining denomination of 4.9 million members. The ELCA is a dying denomination of 4.7 million members at latest count, with average annual net losses of 2-5 percent the last two years.
What is so annoying about preachy denominations like the ELCA- you know, the ones that tell you that you are not Christian unless you ride your bicycle everyday to work, use two squares of toilet paper for a bathroom visit, and pay more taxes and give more of your annual income "to heal the world"- is that they sit on top of huge endowment funds. The national Church of the ELCA has at least one endowment in excess of 300 million dollars. Each of it’s 65 local "synods" have their own endowments and investment accounts valued in the tens of millions of dollars each. The budget for the national Church has been over 80 million dollars annually over the last couple of decades. That is just for the operations that work out of their office in Chicago. That doesn’t count the local budgets of the Synods, which often are in excess of 10 million dollars in certain Synods for rather small offices of just a handful of staff. If you count the property and other endowments held by the ELCA, you are looking at a denomination that some estimate holds over 1 billion dollars in assets.
So the local preachers in the city trot out their gun control "ministries," their "in the city for good" promotions, and their plans to "elminate poverty" while hoarding a fortune of tax free money used only at the whims of the top echelons of leadership. They talk about racial justice, the poor Palestinians, and eliminating poverty, but gave my friend Joe Carter a can of salmon and a box of macaroni and cheese while he lay dying from Leukemia.
The problem with these self righteous ELCA leaders is that they are pharisaical in every sense of the word. I am not just talking about the hypocrisy of their political positions, but as I outlined in my book Jesus and the Culture Wars, they resemble in very chilling ways the policies, the vision, and the theology of the party of the Pharisees who cried out "Crucify Him! Crucify Him!"
My question is, how long will we let these self righteous do-gooders amass tax free fortunes while they demand higher taxes from the rest of us for government run social justice- socialist justice- programs? Would we ever need to raise taxes again if these do-gooders actually did the good they demand of the rest of us?
Isn’t it time they put their money where their mouth is, and instead of huge budgets for slick publicity and public relations campaigns they give THEIR money to the poor- for food, for new constructions homes, for health care, and for gasoline?
Of course they would scoff at the thought. So did the Pharisees.
Is God a Liberal Democrat? by Mark D Tooley
Officials of the declining 4.9 million Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) have revealed what God’s priorities are in the U.S. presidential campaign. And remarkably, the divine priorities was very akin to the Democratic Party’s priorities, if not further to the left.
Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson, with three other ELCA officials generously wrote both presidential candidates a public letter with the divine guidance. Although famed Protestant Reformer Martin Luther championed the Bible as God’s exclusive revelation, modern ELCA activists have located more useful counsel in the secular welfare state and environmental agenda.
“The Scriptures are clear about God’s concern for and solidarity with people living in poverty and on the margins of society,” the Lutherans portentously intoned in the letter. “They are equally clear that God calls us to be stewards of creation. We bring into the public square a commitment to service for the well-being of all of God’s children and a faith conviction that government is an important catalyst in God’s work of restoring peace, achieving economic justice and protecting the environment.”
Observe that the Lutherans cite government as “an important catalyst in God’s work.” In fact, their agenda implies that government is virtually God’s only instrument. The Lutherans want government to abolish poverty, prohibit war, cleanse the environment, engineer egalitarian justice globally, and seemingly usher in The Millennium through additional regulation and taxation. If government can achieve so much, who needs God, much less the church?
Traditionally, Christians have seen the universal church as God’s primary instrument for revealing Himself in the world. Christians have also traditionally attached great importance to marriage, the family, private charity, and a vast array of mediating institutions that sustain human relations and mitigate against injustice and despair. The New Testament describes the state as primarily God’s instrument for temporally punishing or deterring criminality and aggression. But the Religious Left, including the Lutheran prelates, attach messianic importance and powers to the state. Perhaps Caesar is Lord after all?
Just as revealingly, the ELCA officials, duty bound at least briefly to reference the Bible, claim the Scriptures are “clear” about how to reduce poverty and protect the environment. In fact, the Scriptures offer broad principles, not specific political prescriptions. On issues about which the Scriptures are genuinely “clear,” such as marriage and human life, the left-wing Lutherans prefer to be silent. They are more comfortable in identifying Divine Providence with the endless expansion of state power.
“The persistent poverty in America is a moral scandal and an affront to our nation,” the Lutherans bewail. They grimly paint a bleak tableau of scarcity and struggle in America, “ claiming “historically high degrees of economic inequality between the rich and poor,” while “upward economic mobility is a reality for only one-third of Americans.” Indeed, poverty is “far higher than in many other developed countries.” Working against all this misery requires “sustained commitment from our political leaders.”
How likely would the Apostles, or Luther, have viewed modern America’s lower income people, most of whom are armed with air conditioned homes, automobiles, cable television and high tech gadgetry, along with modern health care, record life spans and food stuffs from a global market, as desperately poor? Poverty is often a relative term. And by the standards of history, or most of today’s world, few in America are genuinely impoverished. Many of America’s lower income people are indeed trapped in a cycle of relative subsistence, thanks partly to government programs that punish initiative, and social pathologies that inhibit advance. Avoiding poverty in America mostly entails finishing high school, shunning drug and alcohol addictions, not having illegitimate children, and avoiding divorce. But the Religious Left, contrary to its own religious traditions, is not interested in shaping personal choices. It prefers the compulsion of state regulation and taxation.
Predictably, the Lutherans want the U.S. government to guarantee a 50 percent reduction in U.S. poverty in 10 years, provide “comprehensive health care,” i.e. socialized medicine, and create more federally subsidized low income housing. In essence, God’s plan for America is simply expanding the Great Society programs of the 1960’s, despite their 40 year track record of locking in rather than reducing poverty.
And naturally, the Lutherans discern that “global warming presents a terrible and growing threat to the future of God’s creation.” They want an 80 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The Lutherans prefer not to address how shutting down industry and restricting economic growth will affect the poor. The Lutherans also want to redirect “valuable research dollars” away from clean coal technology towards the more mythically appealing wind, sun and water energy sources. In other words, the less plausible an energy source, the more funding it deserves.
The God of the Lutherans wants liberalized immigration policies to accommodate all the millions who, unaware of how impoverished and unjust America actually is, still desire to immigrate here. And the divine plan also demands that the U.S. government expend at least $140 billion a year in foreign aid, cancel all foreign debt, increase funding for the United Nations, and advocate “fair trade” rather than free trade. Coercively redistributing old wealth, rather than encouraging creation of new wealth, is always a supreme moral imperative for unimaginative left-wing clergy.
As to war, the Lutherans confirm that “marginalization and desperation, often perpetuated by poverty and hunger,” are at the root of most conflicts. If only the U.S. Government would mail more checks to all the world’s aggrieved parties, global peace might be achieved. The ELCA prelates want more U.S. “diplomatic pressure” on the Iraqi government, increased “robust diplomacy” to create a “viable contiguous Palestinian state,” and “urgent diplomatic efforts” to establish peace in Sudan. Again, U.S. dollars are the key to success. The Lutherans do not offer specific concern about human rights or even religious liberty.
“Loving and serving our neighbors — Lutherans make a difference,” the ELCA officials modestly conclude in their letter to John McCain and Barak Obama. Cain. But their manifesto implies that the only “love” that Lutherans are exhibiting is lobbying for expanded state powers, taxation and spending, with confidence that dollars are the solution to all the world’s ills. Ostensibly, Christians traditionally understand that Mammon ultimately can solve few of mankind’s miseries, most of which are spiritual rather than material.
But officials of the shrinking ELCA, in their demands to the presidential candidates, imply they have less confidence in the Gospel than they do in the healing, wonder-working powers of Big Government.
July 14th, 2008
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This is an article I found online at World On The Web, about a certain Dr. Tiller. Tiller is a member of the ELCA, but is best known as a specialist in partial birth abortion. In fact, his clinic in Wichita Kansas, not too far from his Church, Reformation Lutheran, is the regional provider of partial birth abortion.
It doesn’t surprise me that a man who makes his living killing babies who could be born any minute would go to an ELCA Church. Neither does it surprise me that his pastor doesn’t seem to mind.
I suppose what does surprise me is that the ELCA still hasn’t figured out why people are leaving the denomination in droves. The BTK killer was an esteemed leader of his ELCA Church, as Dr. Tiller is at his. The depravity of the denomination is so deeply ingrained- the group is so immoral and antithetical to the teachings of Christ- that I wonder if anybody left has been untouched by such soiling of the soul.
From the World on the Web:
The question came up tonight: what are Christians to do with George Tiller, partial-birth abortion profiteer?
It came on the heels of a friend’s account of meeting a member in Tiller’s church, who was struck by what seemed to her the unchristian behavior of abortion protesters who came into the sanctuary during a Sunday service, chanting slogans and snapping pictures of parishioners. What should we tell this woman? That these protesters were indeed unchristian? That they were misguided, but had good cause? That they didn’t go far enough?
It’s an interesting question, though seemingly straightforward. We know Tiller is an unrepentant mass murderer, and so our Bible makes clear that he should be handed over to the Devil, as Paul might say, via excommunication. The problem, of course, is that we Protestants (he goes to a Lutheran church in Wichita) haven’t a Church from which to excommunicate Tiller, only a collection of churches, most of which recognize neither the authority nor the doctrine of the others. Thus Tiller, having finally been tossed out of his previous church, crossed town to another church just as easily as any of us finds a restaurant.
So what are we to do? Perhaps all the Bible-believing pastors and elders in the city could meet with Tiller’s pastor, and once they have her on record, they could go to the governing body above her, and so on, until they formally establish that this entire branch of Lutheranism is rotten. Then perhaps they could formally, ecumenically, excommunicate the whole lot of them. We are, after all, believers in one holy, apostolic, catholic Church, aren’t we?
Ah, but so is the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, of which Tiller’s Church, Reformation Lutheran (oh, the irony!), is a member. Very well then, but the ELCA statement on abortion, amidst tortured language that in effect admits the church elders have no dogmatic guidance to provide, offers this reasonably clear statement: “This church opposes ending intrauterine life when a fetus is developed enough to live outside a uterus with the aid of reasonable and necessary technology.”
But that is Tiller’s specialty, executing healthy infants while the tops of their heads remain in the birth canal, justified by the cavernous loophole known as the mother’s “mental well-being.” So it would seem the pastors and elders opposed to this monstrosity in their city might have a clear-cut case to make with the governing body of the ELCA: remove your pastor, for she is offering communion to this unrepentant murderer and violator of your own policy on abortion.
Or we could wait for old age to do Tiller in, and suffer less frustration. Because many pastors and elders want nothing to do with abortion politics, except insofar as they can sideswipe it from the safety of their pulpits when the mood hits. So the ELCA will feel no pressure to remove its heretical pastor, who in turn will feel no pressure to remove the murderer from the midst of her congregation. Not that a visitation from 500 Wichita pastors would be anything to the leadership of the ELCA but a badge of honor. Look at how we stand up for humanity in the face of intolerance. See how we suffer for Christ.
So what are Christians to do? Picket the church service? Distribute pictures of aborted babies, so other people’s children can have nightmares? Pray and wait?
Consider this thought experiment: Suppose 10,000 Christian men stood around Tiller’s clinic, for as long as it took, saying simply: Enough. What would the police do? Would the governor call in the National Guard? And what if another 50,000 joined them? We can get 100,000 men to come blubber all over one another at a Promise Keepers convention, so the logistics aren’t impossible. What would happen then? And what if this band of brothers, after shutting down the city of Wichita until its putatively Christian leaders took action and Tiller was bankrupted, moved on to the next killing field, and the next after that?
Perhaps the federal government would be forced to aggressively combat this peaceful resistance. Perhaps many of us would suffer. Perhaps it would divide political parties, and churches, and even families. Sound familiar?
And just maybe it would make abortion an issue we can’t avoid. For we are, most of us, waiting on someone else to do something, primarily because we are terrified of standing alone. So perhaps the question isn’t: what are Christians to do?, but rather: When will we stand up together and do it?
July 12th, 2008
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I can’t bring myself to be too serious this summer. The weather in Minnesota has been perfect. My family is having so much fun. And then there is the political climate. I can barely take it seriously anymore. It’s a tough year for conservative evangelicals- but seriously- the way the American Church has devolved is only 1-upped by the politics of hope and change.
I sure hope for a change that can bring hope in change for a new hope. For change. Hope… drewl… slobber… Am I brain dead yet?
Back in Texas, when I had to get away from the insanity of the ELCA’s , um, insanity, or get away from a person or two that gives Beelzebub a good name, my wife and I went to Sonic.
You know, Sonic? The fast food restaurant? If you don’t know Sonic, you are deprived…
So when they opened a new Sonic… the first Sonic ever in the Twin Cities Metro area, I thought I would go out on a nice ride on a lazy Summer evening with my wife to get some of that food that we have talked about often since we left Odessa, Texas. I remember joking that I would drive 2000 miles back to Odessa just to eat Sonic. I hit the road with the windows down for a little excursion through the beautiful tree and lake lined highways and streets to take my mind off of how the country and the American Church is all going to hell in a hand basket.
So I pull up to the restaurant and try to turn in when I’m stopped by a traffic cop. "The line starts around the corner," he said. Well the corner wasn’t too far, so I went up and looked at the first corner, but that wasn’t the corner the cop was talking about. I went on to the next corner, and that wasn’t it either. I got to the light, more than a quarter mile away, and it wasn’t until then that I saw where the line started. I had to turn left at the light, go about another two blocks, and there started the line…
For Sonic.
And we almost wanted some cheddar peppers, onion rings, a cherry limeade, and chili cheese dogs enough to wait in line.
I seriously considered it. I had hoped for some time that Minnesota would change and do something new and different by opening a Sonic store. Mine was a fervent hope- a changed hope for a new change for hope for today and tomorrow… drewl… slobber… frito pies
I told my wife… YES WE CAN! YES WE CAN!
And then I realized that if I actually would dare to suspend all rationality so as to wait in line for an hour and a half for some cheddar peppers, onion rings, a cherry limeade, and chili cheese dogs… like all the people around me… what is to stop me from voting for Barak Obama of the religious left? Both require the same suspension of common sense. Both require the same blatant disregard for good judgment and reasonable sense of reality.
So I backed out, pulled out of the line, and went the long way back to the highway wondering what choice would I have made if I was waiting in line at the Mobil Station instead of the Sonic Restaurant?
How much "hope we can believe in" will we have to muster up when Barak Obama of the religious left takes the reins this fall?
I suppose if so many are willing to wait so long in line for a french fry, the nation will be just fine waiting just the same for gasoline, for health care, for retirement. The lines will be longer for gay marriage licenses and parital birth abortions too- but I digress.
Seriously. It’s Summer.
July 10th, 2008
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