Relevant America

State of the Union

2011-01-26T09:31:00.003-05:00

I was hopeful...this was an opportunity to hear something fresh and new from the President about working together and inspiring a new generation of prosperity in America. What I heard was more of the same. Are the liberals out of ideas, or are they just daring the other side to make the first move so they can cut them to ribbons? I think this speech was a calculated and political one, designed to continue to outline the agenda that Obama and his supporters are going to live or die rallying around. They can't outline it in any different terms, even by redefining terms from liberal to progressive and taxation to investment, the core is still the same. Government is the answer.
A philosophical difference of opinion with most of Americans, as evidenced by the recent elections, and very cleverly played. Obama and his staff figure that by doing nothing they risk less, and dare the opposition to try and climb the hill that they protect. They are counting on the Tea Party led Republicans to make the first move into the open, and that is likely what will happen. New budget proposals built around calls for "less spending" will surely be a hallmark of the new legislature, which will surely gut some programs, then be prepared for the defensive onslaught from the liberals..."Look at what they are taking away from hard working Americans!" will be the first line of every major address for the next few years, and it may well be effective.
Obama's opponents and the eventual Presidential candidate will have to be very careful trying to overcome this shift in policy from the Obama administration.
Republicans cannot be seen as the bad guys with no new ideas this time around, on top of market corrections that are bound to improve economic conditions in spite of government's best attempts to delay it. Obama is fighting a delaying action, and he will play it cool. His opponents would do well to not underestimate the impacts of acting hastily, they must maintain a clear understanding of the consequences that may result, or Obama will be able to frame his version of America to over half of the American public that now receives benefits instead of paying for them.
As we learn more about Obama, and actually gain some useful insights into this very private individual by virtue of his words and actions over the past few years, I fear that we may underestimate what he has achieved by placing more voters on the receiving side of the ledger. These next few years are critical, and it is plain to me that Obama is preparing a well thought out policy to remain in power. We are setting up an unfortunate battle between those who are voting for government to take care of them, and those who must pay for it. The numbers are almost split 50/50, due to years of manipulation that has led disadvantaged people to stop looking for ways to get ahead using their own means, and start using the means of government programs instead. Turning the tide will take just as long as it took to create the lie, along with certain fortitude and careful planning to draw the line in the sand for 2012.

Politicians Change Their Tune?

2011-01-20T10:00:00.004-05:00

It struck me this week, as the politicians and pundits tried to outmaneuver each other about who could be more "civl" in their discourse after the Giffords shootings, that we should view this as yet another attempt by the chameleons in our government to sway our opinions. Do they really think we are all that stupid?
They are all jockeying to place themselves in either the "look how civil I am" category, or the "look how brash I am because I don't care" category. You can find most politicians in the first column and the pundits in the second column, especially those that are trying to establish themselves among the "giants" of pseudo-news. I for one will stick to candidates like Mike Huckabee, who don't need to "change" anything about their behavior, because they are already civil in their discourse and have genuine plans for the safety and security of our nation.
These candidates face an uphill battle with news sources, entertainment executives and liberal leaning commentators who seemingly control every major news outlet, TV show and movie since I can remember. At least Fox news tries to be even with their commentators, enough to make us feel like we aren't being taken for a ride anyway...as I am pretty skeptical of pretty much any source of "information."
Keep this much in mind, for all of those who cried out for caution and understanding when Major Hassan shot up Ft. Hood, knowing that his Muslim name could stir a backlash across America...where were you in urging caution when the Giffords shooter had the initial impression of being a "right wing nutjob?" It goes both ways people, and now view the facts...the situation in AZ has not proven to be any more than a very disturbed man with intent to kill and emotional issues, while the Ft. Hood shooter has been identified with Muslim Jihad. Still no backlash? Still seem like fair reporting of the facts? I think not.
The lesson for me is this, don't trust reporting for accuracy, always expect an "angle" to be played...so we would do well to explore leaders that are not reported as constantly changing their spots to get our votes. Look to the character first, and how much that person "changes" to meet their expectations, instead of leading people toward their vision.

Huckabee the early leader for President in 2012?

2010-11-04T08:22:00.000-05:00

http://tinyurl.com/2g2yd6d

Christian Church visit to the White House

2010-11-04T08:20:00.002-05:00

On November 1st we heard that a Christian delegation visited the White House, the Church of the Brethren was included which is a pretty neat opportunity for such a small denomination. When I try to explain what the Church of the Brethren is to my friends, I tell them we are kind of a cross between Mennonites and Baptists (originally German Baptist Brethren so I figure they could maybe grasp that connection). The next question is “what is a Mennonite?” I guess if you aren’t part of the larger US based denominations you can get lost in the Protestant shuffle, if the church of the Brethren even qualifies as a Protestant denomination. This small group formed in the early 18th century was really after what it meant to be the church in the original sense, to follow Christ’s commands in a way that brought us back to the early church of the 1st century.
As I read the excerpt from the White House visit, I could not help but think how far we have strayed from our beginnings as a faith community. Founded as a counter-cultural response to the State Church’s control in Western Europe, our early Brethren found their way to America and “freedom” to worship as they pleased. Think of how hard it must have been; to pick up everything you owned and leave the area that your family had lived for as long as you could remember, in order to escape the oppression that existed. Just the thought of the 30-day passage in open seas would have been enough to give me pause.
The Church of the Brethren is not alone. I appreciate ecumenism in the sense that many of our faith traditions based on the saving message of Jesus Christ have common foundations. Many acknowledge that Jesus Christ as the gateway to a relationship with our heavenly Father, made possible by His sacrifice on the cross and resurrection. This sacrifice allows His “life example” the power to both show us a better way to live and provide for the erasure of our sins. When we boil down our similarities, we often find them more numerous than our differences, but these differences are often what we tend to focus on. Some of these differences are rather comical, like learning when to say the right words at the right time so you don’t look silly in a worship service. Others like how to “properly” baptize a new believer take on more weighty concern, but in the end we are all searching for the appropriate response to the gift that Christ has given to His people, the church.
The White House meeting was hailed as a “substantive” meeting that discussed issues of strengthening our country’s “fraying” safety net, extending unemployment benefits, job creation, education, Middle East peace and the travel ban with Cuba; all in a non-partisan environment. I can hail the non-partisan part, even if it sounds like the topics were not an indication. What I want to know, is what makes these Christian churches…Christian? We seem to have settled in to this mentality that our mission is to serve people’s needs, and those needs are related to physical well being only. Our churches are not competing with our spiritual adversary for souls, but with the United Way for funds. We have settled for taking care of financial hardship, basic human needs, peace between nations, improving our educational opportunities…all great and worthy things. But not the best thing.
As Jim Collins pointed out in his book, Good to Great, the enemy of great is the good that we do which distracts us from our core reason for being. The Church of Jesus Christ; whether you consider yourself Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, yes even the little Church of the Brethren group mainly in Pennsylvania and Virginia, the Church based on the Gospel message of Christ was only called to do a few specific things. Under Christ’s authority, we are called to go, make disciples, baptize and teach. In short, we are to proclaim the mystery and majesty of the faith that dares to make the outrageous claim that God came down in human form in order to walk around in our shoes, save us from our sinful ways, and be able to have a personal relationship with our Creator. When the veil was torn in the Temple in Jerusalem, we stopped looking for a God that lived there, and started looking for one that resides in our hearts.
When we take the mission of the church to mean, “feed the hungry,” we are perverting the very Gospel message we are called to preach. We are made of spirit, soul and body (1 Thess 5:23); and we ignore the needs of spirit and soul in favor of the body at our peril. Jesus said that the poor would always be with you, but you will not always have me. Just as the State Churches of Europe allowed their human interpretation of Christ’s message to manipulate the Church structure in a way far removed from Christ’s message; through involvement in political control rather than community support, participation on murderous crusades, purchase of indulgences to save family members from purgatory, I could go on and on, but we are allowing the same thing to happen to us today. It is easy to look back several hundred years and point to what the Church of that day did wrong, it is a much harder task to point to what we are doing wrong today, as we are guilty of the same human manipulation of Christ’s message.
Our message should always focus on Christ first, in telling the Gospel story to anyone that will listen and expecting a response that only God can provide, through the working of His Holy Spirit. Since we humans can’t do miracles apart from Him, we settle for the things that occupy our own feeble abilities. Our outreach to the poor should only be based on our response to Jesus Christ through His Spirit, not as an end to itself. That does not mean that we should not support the physical need we see around us, but that we should frame a response to that need based on our relationship with Christ. We have an individual spirit that reveals our conscience, which also reveals our response to the Greatest Story Ever Told. Why are we so ashamed of this story that we find it easier to do a little good with our own hands, eschewing the very great that could be done with God’s hands? I am embarrassed at our “Christian” Church leadership that settles for treating only one area of human existence with dignity, which only allows the body to be served while we ignore the spiritual connection that is possible with our Creator through Jesus Christ.
The greatest evidence of this refusal to embrace the message of Christ in our lives and in our communities, is the abdication of our responsibility to help our neighbors. That’s right, the one thing we think we are doing OK with, serving human needs, is the greatest area in which we as the Church are failing. We have abdicated our responsibility to our neighbors by allowing a government mechanism to serve those needs. Not only are we allowing basic human needs to be served absent of the saving message of Christ, we are content to structure ourselves so that our tax money goes to a central authority, then to an anonymous citizen that could be right next to you. It is certain that pooling our resources can have a multiplicative effect, but we are not even seeing a return there in a system fraught with corruption. What did we expect to happen?
It is a hard thing to identify a need with a neighbor, to take a personal interest and walk around in their shoes as Jesus did for us. It is a lot easier to text our friends about their dire circumstances and direct them to the local welfare office. It is an even harder thing to admit that we may need help, to ask our neighbors for support that may involve risking a closer relationship. It is much easier to send in an anonymous form, to receive an anonymous check in the mail. God’s way is not easy, it forces us to see things face to face, then deal with them in a very personal way. That is His way toward relationship with Him and each other, and one we have attempted to circumvent.
This is the system we helped to create, in the name of Christ, to serve those in need. What a weak and twisted structure we have built with our own hands. Our entire society is suffering, the results of this failure to embrace God’s plan that existed at the founding of our nation is now met with ballooning deficits, more people taking out of the system than paying in, and retreating neighbors that lob anger at each other instead of love. These results are just that, they are results of a broken system that human hands have tried to improve from a Godly one, yet we now only respond to the results as needing to be changed. The calls to lower the deficit, stop the spending, clean up the corruption…those calls are only addressing the results of the problem and will also fail, doomed to create an even larger rift between our people. The only true answer is falling back to God’s plan, to develop Christian communities where we have a genuine, personal care for each other that begins with our sharing a Gospel message that can save not only the human, but the spiritual side of us as well.

My Healthcare Plan

2009-11-24T09:46:00.002-05:00

Get ready, we are far from hearing the end of this debate! Talk of Trillion dollar programs, inadequate patient care and how "we" as a nation will care for those with health issues are rising to a fever pitch. Those who want to spend money on government programs to fix the problem will argue on the side of care, that millions of Americans do not have adequate health care. Those on the other side of the issue will argue about the future of our nation, and the debt we are saddling the next generation with. 2000 pages of health care, with references to addendum and appendices and research that at the very least is hard to understand and at the very worst possibly tainted. Who really knows what is going on?
I fear that we are reaching for solutions that do not address the problem. The problem to me is not adequate care, it is rising costs and allowing personal care to become a ward of the state instead of neighbors. When I hear politicians say "Millions of Americans do not have adequate Health Care," what they are really saying is that "Millions of Americans do not have adequate Health Insurance." There is a huge difference here, insurance is the mechanism to pay for this grossly overweight system of health care, but it does not affect the care that we can expect. The fact is that any person can get care for any problem at any time, whether they can afford it or not. Although emergency rooms are perhaps not the most appropriate place for every problem, they are certainly not the contributor to rising costs as have been claimed. E-room docs are efficient, the process moves far more patients than an average exam setup, and in case you have not noticed; the Emergency room doesn't have million dollar paintings and teak boardroom tables.
What I am getting at here, is that the establishment is to blame, from the hospitals to the politicians to the insurance companies. Everyone has a piece of this pie, and instead of fixing the problem of rising costs and robo-care, they are going to use their well heeled lobbyists and PR machines to convince all of us to perpetuate the problem instead of solving it! The real issue at hand is that no one knows what it costs, because the patient is not the customer. The insurance companies and the federal government are the customers, let's face it, the actual consumer is not the customer. When was the last time you took your car in to have the oil changed, did you ask how much it would cost? Did you receive an answer? The same situation is not true of any medical service that has been provided to you, you don't have a clue of the cost other than "What's my co-pay?" It is no wonder that costs are out of control, no one even knows what they are.
Now, you will claim its not the same thing, I will counter that it is exactly the same thing, and even worse. For example, do you expect your auto insurance to pay for oil changes? Of course not, no more than you expect your home insurance policy to pay for a garage addition, but we expect our health insurance to pay for routine visits and pregnancies. In my mind, that is ridiculous, on top of having no idea what that oil change or garage addition will cost before having it done. We are mired in the thought that "someone else will pay for it," not realizing that someone else IS paying for it, and the someone else is US. Part of this problem may be due to treating entitlements as a badge of honor, unlike earlier in my lifetime when they were treated with a measure of shame. Using food stamps or getting reduced cost lunches at school used to be something to hide and be embarrassed about, today kids will brag about not having to pay full price. This mindset is seeping into our entire culture, and at the root of the healthcare argument that if not checked will spend us into bankruptcy. Applied to healthcare, why not eat Twinkies for breakfast, someone else will pay for it when I need help anyway.
Providing care for those that need it is as basic a human responsibility as it gets, and one that any of us would undertake when the need is legitimate. What person would leave an accident victim on the side of the road, instead of at least stopping to see if they are OK? We feel an obligation to help the cancer victim all over America's towns, with spaghetti dinners and cans on luncheon countertops, and it feels right to help a fellow human being whether in our own town, city or across the world. It is the right thing to do. The problem with universal health care, is that it removes that personal contact and places it in the hands of a government institution. We don't need to take care of that cancer patient or accident victim, we are paying our health insurance and dialing 911 so that should take care of it. That is just wrong.
To really fix the healthcare problem, we have to fix the costs. To find an example of a health cost that is not covered by insurance, let's use corrective eye surgery. When it first came out, it cost several thousand dollars and was considered dangerous by many people. Today, this type of surgery costs only several hundred dollars and you can find a reputable doc with credentials that can tell you exactly what it will cost, how many patients have been helped and even give you referrals on the safety of the procedure! So, without the health care industry involved, we are better informed and get better care at a lower cost. For ideas about what managed government health care will look like, we need to go no further than the process of getting an H1N1 shot.
Taking care of each other does not involve spending us into oblivion, it involves creative solutions to complex problems by focusing on the core issues. Covering major catastrophe like cancer is the goal of most Americans, not having their family suffer or going bankrupt if they end up with some terrible disease. So let's cover everyone with a basic policy that has a very high deductible, say $25,000, that will reduce the approximately $12,000 annual cost per person to around $3000. Give every US citizen (everyone, even the 11 million that are not covered under the current proposed plan that spends over a Trillion dollars) an Health Savings Account (HSA) account that is not taxed, can be used for regular care, that can roll over into the next year and be funded by the employer, citizen, support group or government. Most HSA expenses over a year would total around $4000, so we are already ahead by $5000 per person. The balance of any costs between $4000 and the $25,000 deductible would be covered by the individual, local support, the government depending on the economic condition or a government borrowing mechanism that would allow individuals to borrow against he future value of their HSA. This would also work with Social Security, but that is another story. When a patient goes to the doc, they can expect to be told what it will cost in addition to the procedure, and wold pay the cost out of the HSA account.
The result of this plan would allow the patient to become the customer, focus on the actual costs of care and allow the free market to begin reducing costs and improving care as in our eye surgery model. Groups of like minded individuals may decide to form health co-ops to share costs, churches could provide outreach health care through "Parish Nurse" programs, to deal with normal maladies, educate people about living healthier lives and generally keep people healthier and out of the system. There are infinite areas that could result from a system like this one, which would improve basic health, reduce costs and allow personal care for each other.
How can the government help, after all, we don't want to totally discount the coordinating and pooling effect of government. For starters, help initiate a nationwide system of electronic records. Create a fund to assist different economic classes with deductible and premium assistance. Promote wellness programs. Pay for lower income folks to get regular checkups. Promote healthier foods that are given away at low income food banks across the nation, instead of filling bags with high carb and fatty foods that no one wanted in the first place. Provide information on doctors and hospitals that are providing the best care. Allow health care across state lines.
Here is a plan that will work, can be started today and will have an immediate impact on the core problems. There are many areas you might not agree with, or want to change depending on your focus, but this plan will work to address the core problems of cost and personal care. We simply cannot sustain this system, and expanding it will be an act of lunacy, there must be another direction. So, for those of you that say there are no good ideas out there, try this one on before you adopt either spending us into bankruptcy or saying we don't have a better idea.

Muslim Outrage at Ft. Hood Shootings

2009-11-07T17:16:00.003-05:00

MSN is running a piece today on the outraged Muslim community, trying to deepen a rift and throw salt in the wounds of the soldiers who have not begun to even heal physically yet. First of all, couldn't they let this type of thing settle down until we get some more facts? Secondly, why be so quick to take sides on an issue, is it so important to throw the evil American society under the bus that basic conscience can be ignored? They are in such a hurry to point fingers at our imperialism and greed as the leading cause of any terrible thing that happens in America, that they are willing to let the ink dry before the blood does.
When I mention "they," I am referring to the liberal minority in this nation that wants to remove everything that is good from our culture; our faith, our freedom, even our status as the greatest nation on the earth. I think that most of us are content to put up with it, let everyone have their opinion and be respectful of those opinions, but this one has gone too far.
One quote uses a Muslim source from Fort Hood to say "when a white guy shoots up a post office, they call that going postal. But when a Muslim does it, they call it Jihad." Hold on right there, let's get some perspective. The white guy that shoots up the post office isn't screaming "Allahu Akbar!" while shooting off rounds at people, and why even mention the "white" guy at all? Isn't that racist? If a "white" guy made a comment about a Muslim, or any other race for that matter, he would be apologizing on the national news within hours, and just for the record being Muslim doesn't count at being a race anyway it just determines your religion.
I am not sure what this nut was doing in our military anyway, but at the least this is proof to the world that we are indeed a free and open society, and to prove it we are willing to consider loss of life an acceptable alternative to living under the control of any person or institution. I don't see any Christians showing up at the local Muslim recruiter's office, getting a decent position and then shooting up their "friends" while screaming "Jesus is Lord!" If that absurdly impossible thing ever did happen, you can bet 2/3rds of the world population would be screaming for our heads. Instead, we acknowledge that in a free and open society there is an opportunity for terrible things to happen, but even those terrible things pale in comparison to the alternatives. Our freedoms are worth it, and we all know it, that's why we will lick our wounds and move on.
To go even further, the writers suggest that it is the military's fault for not recognizing and fixing this problem before it happened. This is akin to the Va Tech shooter situation, where the "government" is supposed to protect us from those things that cannot be predicted. Those that want to be protected from every possible ill really want our society to be recreated into a place that only Orwell could dream of, I for one want no part of that place. We live in the greatest nation on earth, one that has combined elements of faith and basic freedoms into a very special fabric, a fabric that is being tested and stretched to its limits by those seeking to destroy our Republic out of ignorance and carelessness. Our freedoms are to be cherished, even when they result in the possibility of terrible things. Our faith preserves us as a people of basic morality, so laws can be kept at a minimum, and our Constitution and the Statue of Religious Freedom guarantees that we are free to choose whatever religion we want. I doubt the Founding Fathers had Islam in mind when writing the Constitution or other statues, but it remains the choice of the individual, just don't use that as a cop-out against the foundations of our nation when things go wrong.

Election Integrity

2009-10-20T09:38:00.003-05:00

It is the home stretch here in the Old Dominion when it comes to the race for Governor, not to mention other Local and State offices. Much has been said of Republican nominee McDonnell's social positions after his 1989 Thesis from Regent University came to light, especially regarding the position of women and marriage. I have to say that when his poll numbers dropped I thought Deeds had his number, only to find out that apparently the dip was short lived. The reality is that the Virginia election is very, very closely watched nationwide; and with over $22 million (did you get that!) collected to support their candidate this is a big deal. Democrats and Republicans alike are jockeying for position to declare how important or unimportant every possible detail should be, and this race really highlights for me how much we have thrown integrity to the wind in order to get a desired result.
When McDonnell first announced his candidacy and Bolling bowed out as a Republican challenger, the Republican side of the ticket was set early and left the Democrats to fight out their candidate in a primary. I was very pleased to see Creigh Deeds chosen to represent the Democratic ticket, not because I particularly like his positions (which I don't), but because I found the idea that Terry McAuliffe could "buy" Virginia to be rather distasteful. I offered my help to the McDonnell ticket early on as a blogger and supporter, but I have to tell you that my support has waned over the following months. Now don't get me wrong, I am still a supporter of McDonnell and there is little to no chance he will lose my vote, but he has lost my passionate support. The reason for this change of heart is simple, I believe he has chosen a route to become elected that erodes his personal positions on many issues that I personally care about. This in itself is nothing new on either side of the aisle, but I am afraid that we are allowing our elected officials and staff to be rather Machiavellian in their approach instead of standing on personal principle. This is not about being divisive, capable politicians like Huckabee are able to articulate their positions without being abusively divisive as you might see on Hannity or from Daily Kos; this is about having integrity to stand for what you believe even if it means you lose votes. Instead of scraping every vote off the floor to gain an advantage, we need public servants that are willing to lead and present their positions in a way that creates passionate followers instead of just voters.
When Deeds lost his edge after the Thesis debacle and appeared to be on the downswing in the race, I found it interesting that the Obama administration started backing up on their support of Deeds which had been so solid just weeks before. They did not have integrity in supporting their man out of fear, fear of being associated with the loser in such a pivotal contest. McDonnell has backed up on issues such as abortion and traditional marriage that were outlined in his Thesis to keep his lead, which is also an issue of integrity. I could make the point that Obama himself is one of the few that has kept his integrity from the campaign, on the very few issues that he dared to make a stand on such as declaring universal healthcare as a right and not a privilege. I would call that "selective integrity," where you make sure your Thesis from Harvard is nowhere to be found, so you can't be called out on the integrity issue down the road.
I would ask my candidate to take a stand, lead us in a direction that makes sense and be able to tell me what that is, and allow room for others to ask critical questions that might open their ability to understand why you believe what you do. If I don't agree with you, at least I know where you stand and can trust you not to move around on issues, which might just let me actually listen to you. That is where real change can begin.

Quote of the Day...

2009-05-28T14:10:00.003-05:00

"Our experiences as men and Anglo-Saxons affect our decisions. I would hope that a wise white man with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Latino woman who hasn't lived that life."

If I made that quote in public, I can only imagine the outcry that would result. I would be ridiculed and harassed for being racist, sexist and part of the unfair "oppression" in this country. So how does a person get to say those words and rise to the top of their profession? I'm not sure, but rest assured there is a double standard at work in our society. Any white, Christian man in Congress that makes a quote like that will be resigning the next day. The same is true for any school system administrator or teacher, community leader, or even the postmaster for crying out loud.

But our latest nominee for Supreme Court Justice gets to make that statement, and be congratulated for it. Here is the quote, "Our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions. I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."-Sonia Sotomayor.

Make no mistake, she will be appointed with little opposition, because who can speak out against her without being branded a racist? A brilliant political move by President Obama, and a continuing result of the past election, but the fact remains that we are still an oppressive and racist nation no matter who happens to be on the receiving end. Until we are strong enough to stand up to this kind of divisive talk and correctly label it, we will simply be subject to the pendulum swinging back and forth instead of fixing the true issues in our hearts.

Abolish Slavery...Again

2009-05-25T13:11:00.003-05:00

We are undergoing a rather significant change in vocabulary these days, learning new terms reflecting green technology for our homes, cars and industry for example as well as new twists on old terms. One of these terms that conjures up a lot of different meanings is the word slavery, that "peculiar institution" that has not existed in the United States for nearly 150 years. Other countries have had to deal with the same issue in the past century, although the path toward abolition of slavery was not nearly as catastrophic as in the US. In Britain for example, the results of lifelong stands against human slavery by men such as William Wilberforce did not lead to civil war, but a gradual changing of hearts and minds over time. It could easily be argued that the slavery issue in the US was not the root cause of the Civil War, but rather a larger issue of States vs. Federal rights, but no one can deny that our country is better off without that institution.
Human slavery can be traced to biblical times, when a very different cultural view accepted and treated this type of bondage as acceptable. Slaves could have conformed to our modern view of forced labor, with strong taskmasters holding whips at the ready, but also could have been managers, bankers or even political figures that looked after the interests of their "masters." A slave belonged to a particular class, not so much to a group that was shamelessly abused for the benefit of another group. It seems that many today want to return to that definition of slavery, and use a wider meaning of that word to create another movement against human bondage. I wonder, however, if this movement to be has identified the right target...
The definition of slavery is being widened to include references not only to human bondage, which still exists in many cultures and eventually needs to be rooted out, but also to situations where people can be motivated to rise up against "the man" who has held them down and enslaved them. This is the "company store" argument, where workers are invited to get in debt and then owe their lives to the company store, never quite getting ahead enough to buy their freedom and becoming enslaved to the company as a result. This is yet another example of an attempt to demonize our capitalist system, that same system that has led us to prosperity unheard of in the history of the world, and is laid squarely at the feet of those who are running the businesses and industries that power the US economy. Now is it certainly true that there are evil people in this world, bent on treating those in their care with little regard, but you can encounter people with poor motives in any place you care to look. There are also good people there, who care for the health and well being of those entrusted to them. This argument against slavery is really an attempt to pit people against each other and replace good business practices with socialist "fairness" issues. The truth is, there are only a certain group of people capable of leading, inspiring and creating positive growth in business. Most personality models would place that number between 3-5% of the population. The vast majority of people are more capable of following instructions, completing tasks and allowing those with the ability to manage to focus on their gifts. What we are trying to do is skew the relationship between people and how we are made to function. It is true that is takes all kinds to create something positive, but those that have the vision and skills are worth more to that venture than those who are either not capable or not interested in that type of endeavor.
If you are looking for a realistic meaning of slavery in our world today, we should first focus on those countries that need a William Wilberforce type of movement and eradicate human bondage in our time. Secondly, we should approve and mandate proper limited government principles that do not enslave this and future generations in mountains of debt to pay for services that are used today. We are enslaving our children by spending money we do not have, on services that we do not need! This next year alone, we will borrow 50 cents of each dollar that is spent by our national government. No household, business or corporation in America would even think of buying a new car when they were already unable to pay for the one they have, but our government continues to do so, and will continue to do so until we put a stop to it or our AAA rating is downgraded. We are not a slave to the company store, if anything we are slaves to our own complex lives, allowing marketers to help people make a choice to get in debt, to spend and not be satisfied on top of it. We have a choice, yet are pushed along by messages we are bombarded with at every turn that are in opposition to the simple, community existence we are turning aside. Abolish slavery? You bet, and it starts with each one of us...

The $50 Lesson

2009-04-20T10:09:00.000-05:00

I recently asked my friends' little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be President some day. Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there, so I asked her, “If you were President what would be the first thing you would do?”

She replied, “I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people.”
Her parents beamed.

“Wow...what a worthy goal,” I told her, “but you don't have to wait until you're President to do that. You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and sweep my yard, and I'll pay you $50. Then I'll take you over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward food and a new house.”

She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, “Why doesn't the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50?”

I said, “Welcome to the Republican Party.”

Her parents still aren't speaking to me.

Founding Fathers

2009-04-14T09:01:00.004-05:00

Americans can trace their heritage and history with a certain amount of pride, overcoming pretty long odds to become the most prosperous nation of all time. We can all look back to Washington, Jefferson and Madison with a certain amazement at what they risked in order to gain our independence and create a new nation. Regardless of our opinions of the Founding Fathers and their motivations, religious convictions and social opinions, we can all agree that our respect for those men begets a high honor.
I wonder if our Founding Fathers will continue to be remembered through the ages, for we may be on the cusp of history that will redefine our "Founders" from a different time, and this time is rapidly approaching. I am most proud of our nation being able to put aside race and electing the first African American President, but at the same time I have a sense of foreboding that our new direction is borne of a calculated and precise plan to re-create the United States of America in a very different image.
Use a little investigative work on the web, and it seems painfully true that most of the people in power in the US today have a common background, and it is not one in support of democracy or our republic. There is a calculated effort in play right now to overwhelm capitalism in America, and replace this system with a new order that can be traced to a single source. Take some time to Google up Saul Alinski, a man who hated liberals during his lifetime not because they were not on the right track, but because they were too soft and not willing to employ militant tactics to achieve their ends.
Alinski wrote several books, among them Rules for Radicals, and traces his personal history back to a time when the Communist Party in America was just beginning, in Chicago of all places...If you keep looking, you will find that he proposed a tactical system of subversion that used community organizing to lead a powerful call for change, then overwhelms government systems with required services that cannot possibly be provided, and then allows a new system to prevail after rebellion that places a select few in power. There are two key adherents to this theory, who studied under this man and perfected this system, and those two people are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Now, before you get mad and call me names, do the research yourself, find the associations and draw your own conclusions. I am open to reasonable discussion, but the facts seem uncontrovertable, and we all should question whether or not this could be true and get it out in the open.
If this is true, then several things should start happening according to this plan. First, government programs will be funded with huge amounts of money, eventually becoming overwhelmed and unable to provide the level of service that has been promised. Community Service programs will equate to brainwashing our young people that America is a terrible country, full of evil and keeping the people of our world under our heavy handed thumbs. Community activism and reform groups will continue to grow with huge funding from our very own government, and the message that our Republican form of government does not serve their needs will be the primary focus. The opposing party will become the "party of no." Taxation will increase until the burden is so great on the working minority of the population that they will do anything to get out from under the burden.
What is the result of all this? A change of government form in the US, whether it be a Constitutional change or based only on reality, that we are transferring power from our Republican form of government to that of an oligarchy (rule by a few powerful people). If you step back and look, this epic shift has already begun, the situation is in place and the select few in control of our future oligarchy are completing the steps one by one. Perhaps I am a cynic, perhaps looking for a magic bullet and there really is no conspiracy, but as we see private meetings and controlled use of the media we should be thinking about the real story. Unfortunately, I feel that in just the past few months we have been unwittingly manipulated into letting this happen, not without protest to be sure, but without any real power to stop the onslaught that is coming. We may well be into a cycle that will indeed lead to rebellion, but I hope that it is a rebellion based on the Tea Party model that puts power back in the hands of the people and takes it out of the hands of government. The Constitution is the key, if we draw the line there we may have a chance, where power not given to the federal government must reside with the states and the people, and limited government is advocated so that this document may prevail and protect the people from the government as it was designed.
Do your research, make your own decisions, but do it quickly before we find the Constitution re-written and statues of Saul Alinski replacing those of George Washington.

Thank You Fargo, North Dakota!

2009-03-30T08:26:00.003-05:00

I want to make sure we recognize the people of Fargo, North Dakota in their battle against flood waters from the Red River. If you didn't notice, people lined up in 9 degree weather to fill sandbags to raise the level of their protective dikes when record rising water threatened the city and surrounding neighborhoods. The reason you might not have noticed is that this really wasn't a news event, other than a human interest story it did not get that much press, which is a shame.
What struck me is that these people did not complain about lack of government help, or why the dikes were a few feet short of the projected record flood levels, they just all got together as a community and solved the problem the best way they knew how. I was particularly struck by the neighbors that got together in small groups to work together and sandbag their homes in a protective circle, even the ones emptied by fleeing neighbors that didn't participate in the work. That is the true meaning of community and responsibility to our neighbor. How much easier would it have been to stand up on national TV and tell the world that their local officials had screwed the deal up by not having the dikes built high enough to anticipate a 112 year flood level, or why the federal government had not prepared for this disaster and supplied their every need? Much easier, but that is not what happened. They took care of the problem and each other in a very personal and responsible way, quite at odds with the practice of being a professional "victim." I certainly don't discount there are victims of many disasters, but want to highlight the different response from Fargo.
I dare say that if the Red River does spill over its banks and demolish Fargo, it will be rebuilt and we won't hear much about it, because the local community will take care of it as a dedicated group of hard working and responsible people. I would also bet there won't be blame assigned, crooked contractors salivating over government rebuilding contracts, or public officials using this disaster for personal gain. Perhaps the residents of New Orleans can learn a lesson from the people of North Dakota, hardy souls to be certain and a vanishing shadow of the American dream.

Financial "In"stability

2009-03-23T09:43:00.002-05:00

OK, so I am just as irritated as you are that 165 Million dollars ended up being paid as bonuses out of "our" money to AIG executives. After thinking about it over the weekend, I have to admit that I am more irritated that 170 Billion was spent in the first place, and now our Congress is reacting in a very terrifying manner in an attempt to keep the public's eye on AIG and not themselves. Looking back, this whole issue has ceded impressive new powers to our government's ability to tax, and we the people are the dummies clamoring for it...another reason to enjoy our Founder's wisdom at creating a Republic rather than a democracy, other than the small fact that the leaders of our Republic are actually the ones leading the masses into quick, reactive and punitive decisions instead of protecting us from that type of "mob rule."
One of the reasons I prefer limited government as the Constitution mandates, is that under this arrangement I can expect my stuff to be safe from arbitrary government action. When I see local governments declare property condemned with no other designs other than confiscation, I feel threatened that my property might be next. Now we have the nation's Congress applying a targeted confiscatory tax on a special group of taxpayers. Regardless of our feelings on the subject, whether we can associate with the overwhelming percentage of Americans who see this as an opportunity to "stick it to the man" that has stuck it to them with the gift of recession, or with the group that was contractually promised a certain income much as a waiter/waitress or salesperson would be compensated, the reality and long term implication of this action is we have implicitly given our Congress the right to tax specific groups of people at will.
Add to this frightening new development the role that the government intervention has played in normal business activities. Leaders of financial institutions are afraid to commit to normal business activities, out of fear of being the focus of the next public outrage. In a personal example, a large bank was recently in negotiations with a company I am involved with, the object of the "partnership" was to entertain selected high value clients in a special environment where those clients might be convinced to begin investing or increase an investment in the bank. With the recent developments and instability that our government has created by issuing funds and later disagreeing with the way those funds were used, this project was completely shut down before it ever got started. People are out of a job, and not business executives; caterers, hotel staff, organizers, mechanics, etc are all looking for work or have their job in jeopardy because of this situation. Whatever the intent of stabilizing the financial system, we can now clearly see the reality that any time the government gets involved in a uniform instead of a striped shirt the whole game gets confused, and people lose their jobs.
I will give President Obama one kudo, in the racing industry you hire the biggest cheater as the Chief Technical person. When he hired Tim Geithner he did the same thing, now we can expect the IRS to be fully capable of recognizing the tax cheats out there and getting every last penny out of them, after all, he has the best experience to know how to catch the rest of the cheaters. Its too bad that the real villains are the ones that refused to regulate companies like AIG, instead preferring to pander to their "constituents" at the expense of people that did the right thing and lived within their means. Now those same people in Congress are pointing distracting fingers at the greed of Wall Street, and in many cases rightfully so, but if those pointing fingers expect even the slightest credibility there needs to be some self examination at the same time, and some accountability for throwing money around like drunken sailors while using the AIG execs as their scape goats. It is the whole lot of 535 people in Congress that needs to be fired, well before we ask for the money to be repaid by the banks, so when and if we do get it back it can be spent in a prudent and reasonable fashion to repay the mountain of debt we are creating.

Top American Cities with Poverty-a Lesson?

2009-03-09T10:54:00.003-05:00

A friend set this to me, I haven't verified this information and thought someone might have a few comments. If its true then it speaks to a culture of dependence and oppression we have to stop empowering.
Cole

TOP 10 POVERTY CITIES

This has got to be one of the greatest American tragedies. What do the top 10 cities with the highest poverty rate all have in common?

Detroit, MI (1st on the poverty rate list)...hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1961;

Buffalo, NY (2nd)...hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1954;

Cincinnati, OH (3rd)...hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1984;

Cleveland, OH (4th)...hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1989;

Miami, FL (5th)...has never had a Republican mayor;

St. Louis, MO (6th)...hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1949;

El Paso, TX (7th)...has never had a Republican mayor;

Milwaukee, WI (8th)...hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1908;

Philadelphia, PA (9th)...hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1952;

Newark, NJ (10th)...hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1907.

Einstein once said, 'The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.'

It is the disadvantaged who habitually elect Democrats --- yet are still disadvantaged.

The disadvantaged remain disadvantaged because they are looking for a Liberal Democratic Government to give them something, when all they have to do is work for it.

(How can a person be 5th generation & disadvantaged in this country?)

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream.

It must be fought for, protected, and handed on to them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free".

The Greatest Socialist of All Time

2009-02-25T10:44:00.003-05:00

I was very happy to see the President return to the "Hope" and "Change" mantra that earned him the White House last night. Regardless of your opinion of the man and the direction he is taking our country, we all benefit when the tone is a positive one. This change of approach from words like "catastrophe" to "sputtering along" when referring to our present economy is a step in the right direction, sure to help stabilize markets and start some positive energy.

I don't know where this all takes us in the future, I fear a return to oppressive interest rates and the tax of runaway inflation due to our manipulation of the money supply, which I am not convinced is needed. I am not an economist, just a concerned citizen that sees a course of huge spending increases causing pain for future generations that could be avoided. The natural business cycle may prove to be the most powerful tool toward turning the economy around, and I am sure plenty of people will be lining up to take credit for it in a few years. I admit there are different points of view on the subject that can, and should, be argued in civil discussions, but I don't think anyone would refute the idea that we are headed for a period of increased government growth. Whether that growth proves to be a good thing or a bad thing is open to debate, and how the future will be told.

One area I am concerned about is the creep toward socialism. I am not sure exactly what the definition of a socialist nation is, I believe an economist would tell you when spending on social programs reaches about half of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) then you are classed as a socialist nation. The US is headed toward 40%. What that means in reality is a nation where the people prefer their government to be in control of taking care of its citizens. The care of individuals will be more in the hands of government run programs than in the hands of family, friends and community than ever before, but what does that really mean and why should we worry?

From my perspective, in simple terms, that means a government that wants to replace God as our caretaker. Providing for every need is the intent, so that we are all happy, productive and settled contributors for the common good. There are a few elements missing from this idea, however, first and foremost is that even if our physical needs are met we will all still hunger for something more. Over 90% of Americans profess a faith in God, whatever the religion doesn't matter to make this point, we mostly believe there is something else out there that is more than we can comprehend. Our understanding of this fact, and how we react to it, is just as important (I would argue more so) as our physical care and well being. We need to be allowed to wrestle with out current condition, struggling together to find our way out and learning about our inner selves at the same time.

The best care for any individual is to consider ALL of their needs, just not the physical ones. Government can swallow our corporate financial resources to provide for some important items, but in reality we are still left wanting more, and more, until the nation is bankrupted (see previous post on stages of democracy). The greatest socialist of all time was none other than Jesus Christ, he wept, healed, provided for and loved so much that he is regarded as one of the most important figures of our time. He truly understood people's needs, not just the physical ones, but the spiritual ones, and put himself in a position of relationship where those needs could be called out and filled. We would do well to learn a lesson from that example, we cannot provide for needs without relationship. Allowing people to fill out a form, stand in a line or Google up a webpage to collect some of our national resources for themselves is not providing, it is creating dependence. We are giving fish instead of teaching to fish, replacing relationship with bureaucracy, administering medicine for our bodies while our souls are withering.

Jesus Christ put modern socialists to shame. Not only did he provide food, health and well being, he provided relationship that went even further to heal the complete needs of the people. And he did it with no money. Now, I can't walk on water, or expect to fix problems without financial resources, but what I am able to do is help people by building relationships first and having faith toward positive resolution. Who better to understand financial issues than our families, communities and friends who are living with the same concerns? What better situation to push people together and help each other solve problems, instead of pulling them apart to rely on the ease of the government dole that requires no personal commitment? Modern socialists would do well to consider their own imposed references to separation of church and state. True need is a matter for the church, which does not require government to succeed, but partial need is a matter for the state, which must have a moral and upright society for the republic to function. Washington stated this reality in his farewell address, yet we are still trying to prove him wrong.

So while we are throwing money at a problem that might reach part of the physical need that is out there and protect us from struggling together, it still falls to those of us that respect personal responsibility to seek out and help those in need. It falls to us to build relationships, understand the problem, and attempt to help the best that we can, albeit with fewer resources since more and more will be going to DC to pay for a partial solution. It is easy to complain, but our responsibility remains, a responsibility not to our nation and its programs but to the citizens that make it up. The gift of Christ is part of that responsibility for those that believe Him as the only path to the Father, and if you want to give someone real "Hope" then that is the best path you can take.

The New Economy

2009-02-18T14:11:00.000-05:00

Should have been a Dead Donkey...

2009-02-16T11:55:00.001-05:00

Young Chuck in Montana bought a horse from a farmer for $100. The farmer agreed
to deliver the horse the next day.

The next day the farmer drove up and said, "Sorry son, but I have some bad
news... the horse died."

Chuck replied, "Well, then just give me my money back."

The farmer said, "Can't do that. I went and spent it already."

Chuck said, "Ok, then, just bring me the dead horse."

The farmer asked, "What ya going to do with him?"

Chuck said, "I'm going to raffle him off."

The farmer said, "You can't raffle off a dead horse!"

Chuck said, "Sure I can, watch me. I just won't tell anybody he's
dead."

A month later, the farmer met up with Chuck and asked, "What happened with
that dead horse?"

Chuck said, "I raffled him off. I sold 500 tickets at two dollars a piece
and made a profit of $998."

The farmer said, "Didn't anyone complain?"

Chuck said, "Just the guy who won. So I gave him his two dollars
back."

Chuck grew up and now works for the government. He's the one who figured
out how this "bail-out" is going to work.

New Economic Stimulus Plan

2009-01-17T12:19:00.003-05:00

It has taken me a while to catch on, but I think I am starting to get the economic stimulus program that President Elect Obama is proposing. We can see the program taking shape in the inaugural whistle stop tour leading toward the 20th on the mall in Washington, as hundreds of millions of dollars are bring spent to create jobs and stimulate local economies along the way. If people are losing jobs in the recession, all that needs to be done is to hire unemployed workers for security and service jobs along the way, fill up the hotels and provide the local restaurants and street vendors with crazed and trapped DC visitors to spend their money, and viola-instant recovery plan.

Once this starts to take hold, then we can use this model all over America to employ people in short term solutions so they have money to spend, and even throw in a dose of tax "cuts" to spur the recovery along even further. Never mind that the cost projections for this inauguration are estimated to be 5 to 6 times the cost of the '01 Bush inauguration, or that all of these jobs are temporary at best, or that our spending deficit is at obscene levels and projected to continue for several years. Never mind that defining a tax cut to include people that do not pay income taxes is a play on words at best and deceitful at worst, and never mind that the projected 825 Billion "shock and awe" stimulus project that will likely be voted on within days of Obama taking office includes over 500 Billion in entitlement projects that we were promised would not happen. I was one that intended to wait and see what Obama was going to do, for often those who are the most fervent supporters during an election are among those who are most disappointed after the election, but the respect due to his office must be tempered with some anxiety that he now plans to take our nation in a direction that has be tried before, and failed on the shoulders of oppressive taxes, regulation and government run programs.

This is welfare, plain and simple, promoted by the government using tax dollars that could be used much more efficiently by family, friends and neighbors to provide for those in need than by our federal government. When that money is taken from us, we are less able to provide for those needs on a personal level, and the inefficiency of the programs designed to provide for those needs wastes our combined resources. I am plenty angry about my money being taken and used in ways that I may or may not agree with, but I am more angry about those resources being removed and lessening my ability to support needs that I can see right in front of me.

We have managed to elect a President that is using the current economic mess, one created by the combined reckless spending of Republicans and Democrats alike, as an excuse to actually go even further down the road of reckless spending instead of an excuse for restraint. I use the word restraint because it was the word Barack Obama used during the debates with Senator McCain when referring to economic policies that included entitlement spending. The high cost of this inauguration alone is symbolic of where we are going. I realize a big chunk is being paid for by private donors, but Sharon Stone and Steven Spielberg paying out millions so they can come and weep at their accomplishment of helping elect Obama is less than a third of the total cost. Who pays the rest? The taxpayer.

The government is going to be allowed to intrude even further into our lives, and to take an even greater role in continuing the sloppy and wasteful management of people's needs that can only be solved by limiting governmental influence in their lives and turning over their "care" to local communities, faith based organizations and families that know and love them. We cannot rely on the media to report in an unbiased way on this subject, they are weeping along with the Hollywood elites and can't see through the fog of their own tears, choosing to spend their time whipping President Bush on his way out and coddling the new administration that they elected by virtue of their reporting. If they would only show a shred of fairness and report these inauguration costs as they had blasted Bush about them in '01 (40 million compared to an estimated 200 million for Obama), I would start to give them some credibility again.

People have needs now more than ever, and those needs must be met by other people that know their situation and care about them on the local level. We need neighbors to look out for those that are out of work, helping them with electric and heating bills until they can find something else, keeping an ear open for jobs that can provide for their families. We need businesses to be allowed to spend time looking into ways to promote new income and hire more people, which starts with time spent focused on their business instead of onerous regulation and laws, complicated and overly expensive tax issues and new requirements that will only stifle American entrepreneurship. As a small business person, you can get to a depressing place very quickly, a place that replaces the care and obligation for employees that are helping to grow the business with a feeling of apathy and comments like "let Obama take care of them."

This is not a healthy place to be, and the more we coddle and support this direction, the worse it will get. I warned of the potential for economic disaster several years ago when the stock market was at 14,000, even to the point of suggesting that a small % of your investments should be in "hard" assets. I wish I had suggested more, for given the direction we are heading, the consequences of inflation and higher interest rates are sure to erode our ability to provide for our families even further. The only "shock and awe" program that can get us moving again in a long term solution is something akin to the Fair Tax, a huge jumpstart in the private sector that will stimulate businesses in a way never seen before, rather than a replay of the Great Depression programs that did not lead to long term employment and paved the way for the eventual demise of our hardworking and productive society.

Is the Virginia Governor's Office for sale?

2008-12-03T09:34:00.002-05:00

With the Presidential election dominating the news for the past 2 years, I am not sure if we Virginians are ready to turn our attention to yet another political season, but it will be upon us soon as we prepare to elect a new Governor in 2009. It is no secret that the localities with high population density drove VA to the blue side of the slate this year, and that "trend" has opened the door for many Democratic hopefuls to consider this post as a real possibility. I am looking forward to learning more about those considering this office, although it looks like the race may be dominated by spending, positioning and which PR machine can land the heaviest blow instead of a focus on the candidate's positions.

I for one am very concerned with one candidate in particular, Mr. Terry McAuliffe who hails from the state of NOVA. NOVA is a state sandwiched between the Commonwealth of VA, the District of Columbia and Maryland that has produced a wealth of Democratic voters due to the growing high density population. I am not sure when they will petition for state status, but it seems this area in particular is proving an insurmountable obstacle for the rest of the Commonwealth to elect a statewide official other than a Democrat. Now I don't have anything against people from NOVA or even Democrats, I even voted for one in the recent election cycle that was on the VA ballot (I will leave you in suspense on that one...), what I do have issue with are candidates that appear on the ballot that have one main asset: funding.

The Republican candidate stands alone in the primaries, Attorney General Bob McDonnell. I have met Mr. McDonnell once, although I doubt he would remember it, and I have corresponded through Del. Steve Landes with his office on a recent issue concerning the VA State Police Chaplains. I have a pretty good idea of his stand on many issues (even though I don't agree with all of them), which for me are mainly the sanctity of life and less government intervention in the lives of its citizens, but I have less information on the other candidate's ideas. I am looking forward to learning more about the other Democratic primary contenders Creigh Deeds and Brian Moran, and where they will stand on the issues that are important to me before I have the chance to vote. Mr. McAuliffe, on the other hand, is preparing a campaign that alarms me greatly.

Mr. McAuliffe is not a native Virginian, something I could ignore if his status did not appear to be outright carpet bagging, and his campaign seems to be predicated on one thing and one thing only, money. The numbers promised to help his Democratic "friends" in the state legislature and elsewhere is reported to top 75 million dollars. Here is the layout, if you promise to support Mr. McAuliffe for Governor, then he will help you by providing your campaign with more money that you have ever seen for a local office. Who knows what resources are available for the Governor's race itself. I can only hope that the Governor's office can not be purchased, but just in case it can be I ask all Virginians to take notice of what is happening and join me in a public outcry against this outrageous activity. If the local Democratic candidates start running for office with a lot of "new" money and are supportive of Mr. McAuliffe as a result, I think their campaigns may be in serious jeopardy as the voters begin to recognize what is happening. This is not the integrity that I would expect from elected officials at the local and state level, and that lack of integrity will be hard to hide from the voters.

Mr. McAuliffe has never held a public office in the Commonwealth of VA that I have found, his public credentials seem to stand on his Chairmanship of the DNC (Democratic National Committee) and his claim of raising over 1 Billion dollars to support Democratic candidates. If he really has an aspiration to become the Governor of VA, my suggestion is to run for the State Legislature for a few years, let the people get to know him and what his positions are on key issues, and prepare a run that is based on service the people of VA. I am shocked at the idea that service is not a pre-requisite for this position from a voter's point of view, as a person who can afford to buy this office I do not have the feeling that he will "serve" the interests of our State and its citizens. This is strictly a business deal for Mr. McAuliffe, a short cut resume enhancer for perhaps something even more bold than this. The race for the VA Governor's office will perhaps be the biggest story in national politics in 2009, and we must ensure that we represent VA with our collective voices to prevent Mr. McAuliffe from purchasing that which should never be for sale.

As for the Republican side, I hope that Mr. McDonnell recognizes that he can not succeed in a campaign that continues the mantra of providing "nothing" as a response to "something." At least the Democrats are working to solve problems like transportation and education, even though I do not agree with most of them that these problems are solved by more programs and more money from their constituents. The Republican side needs to get creative and not respond to every need with the answer "we can't afford to do it." There are people out there that have real needs and are hurting, so let's think about local answers to these issues. Let's discuss local vehicle registration fees, toll roads and higher taxes on those areas that are requesting the greatest transportation funding and leave the rest of the state alone. Let's consider saving education funds by freezing the raises for administrators at higher learning institutions until better economic times come along, and allowing parents to have more say in early childhood education programs that amount to little more than tax paid daycare. Let's talk about supporting our youth by giving a year back in service to the community after school, and getting them into church and youth programs that keep them out of gangs.

These are the issues that will define our future, and it starts with each individual and their choices to be productive their own community. That is what we Virginians must figure out in 2009, Democrats and Republicans alike as Virginians first, and while I anxiously wait to learn more about the candidates who live among us and have real answers to the issues, I also will be asking you to join me in public outrage against money that will buy status at the expense of answers.

The Core of Oppression in America

2008-10-29T10:23:00.005-05:00

When people hear the word "oppression," they generally think of traditional examples such as slavery or heavy handed taskmasters to define it. The connotation here, however, is much more to the core of the word as it exists in our country today. Oppression has been used most recently to describe acts associated with the financial leaders in our country and the recent Bailout Bill that passed both houses of Congress. It seems that the "Greed is Good" mantra of Gordon Gecko in the 1980's has come home to roost, while greed may be good as it represents the core of capitalism the results can certainly be less than desirable when taken to extremes.

Oppression has also been used by some on the liberal left to describe the lack of compassion shown by conservatives on issues of equality that include social, financial and racial issues. This view represents a philosophical difference between the two schools of thought, and while neither side is always right or always wrong about any individual point of contention, the trend is toward equality in all areas of society. That phrase in itself sounds proper, after all, the rights of life, liberty and happiness for all men who are created equally by our Creator (words of the Declaration of Independence, not mine) are the bedrock of our nation and the foundation of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. While it all "sounds" appropriate, the issue of equality in the sense that it is being represented by the liberal left today is far from foundational thought. The Founders considered self-determinism to be the strength of an emerging America, where each would prosper through their efforts and be picked up again by their neighbors when things didn't go quite right.

Recent comments by Barack Obama concerning the Constitution bring us to the core of the issue at hand, which conservatives including John McCain are totally missing as the focal point of the upcoming election. The issue is not whether Obama is a closet Muslim, or a Socialist, or associated with the wrong people, I believe that Obama is as committed as McCain when it comes to the direction of the country and the common good of its citizens. They both believe their direction is the right one, I can see the passion of both points of view, so this type of attack will only enflame the passions of each side and turn off those in the middle. The current attacks on Obama's character are ineffective because they do not get to the core issue.

The real issue is much closer to the foundational tenets of our country, and miles away from the peripheral attacks on Obama's character. His questionable associations are a result of his beliefs, not the cause that should actually offend Americans. The more immediate cause of my concern rests in the core issue that Obama and liberals in America believe that the Constitution is a "flawed document" that reflects the "blind spot of our founders that continues in our nation to this day." That is a quote from a 2001 radio interview with Obama when he was commenting that the liberal court under Chief Justice Warren did not go far enough to establish equality outside of social issues evident during the Civil Rights movement. The Warren court was too conservative for Obama, and the apparent intention of the comments was to say that the Constitution had its day but is outdated and in need of reform. I can only assume that his true intent is to "correct" the document to include the basic rights we all are due, including access to health care, retirement and jobs that cannot be taken away. The courts would become a mechanism to accomplish this reform, instead of focusing on the law of the land and ruling on points of law, the court would extend the definition of equality to correct the blind spot of our Founders in all areas of our society.

I have the feeling of a Star Wars movie character, when the Senate voted all powers to the Chancellor the comment was made, "So this is how liberty dies, to thunderous applause." To continue the movie motif, the true heroes of our society (Jedi Knights) are made into villains by the oppressive Emperor who is squashing the rights of all in the name of equality while our individual rights vanish. We will see this evident in the future as we are made to report our personal habits to the Health Care police, any smoking, drinking or obesity will be against the rights of others covered by Universal Health Care and therefore you are not doing your fair share. Expect to have the plug pulled as the government makes decisions on your life based on your importance to them, not your family and friends. That is one example, consider the current financial mess as a result of political manipulation of market forces, and then consider what the effects have been. What will happen when we attempt to manipulate health care markets, and take over 401-K programs and replace them with "safe" government programs that pay 3%? The results will be disastrous.

The real oppressors in our society today are the liberal left, who would rather place government in the rightful position of the community and the church, manipulating people's care for their neighbors into government run programs. We will give people a fish instead of teaching them to fish, squash individual determinism and personal rights in favor of societal equality, giving no encouragement to job creation through business growth and innovation as we take money from those who pay taxes and give it to those who don't through financial equality, all ultimately to move us toward a society that is as far from our Founder's vision as we could possibly be. Even the media will be a part of this oppression, and those who do not participate will simply not be allowed access to the throne room.

In the most simple illustration, the tax returns of our candidates reflect this difference, McCain and Obama both made a few million dollars last year (subject for another time), McCain and his wife gave over a million to charity and Obama and his wife gave $3000 or so. Obama believes that his taxes should be used for charity since government should take care of those issues, McCain believes it is the responsibility of other people to intervene in situations that need our attention and get personally involved in the solution. The wealthy in America have a different agenda in this election. While the wealthy will support McCain, the super-wealthy will support Obama. I often wondered why this was the case, but now I understand, the super wealthy liberal elite are interested in maintaining a class structure where they have control, by keeping the majority in a situation where they rely on government that is under the control of those super-wealthy. The mere wealthy are interested in getting ahead through ideas and innovation, creating jobs for people and opportunities for the next go-getter to become wealthy. I hope there are a few more Jedi Knights left that can recognize this, before the Emperor begins to consolidate his authority behind the oppressive ideas of his supporters and allow the Harvard Law Review to re-write the Constitution of the United States.

"You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting a class hatred. You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves"-Abraham Lincoln

Can't Separate Church from State...

2008-10-06T06:58:00.005-05:00

Why all the fuss about separation of church and state these days? Does the "state" feel threatened by some uprising of faith that will topple our government? Are we in danger of declaring a national religion? Should we not allow people of faith to participate in matters of government? 32 Pastors from across the nation this past week have deliberately attempted to create an issue jeopardizing their 5013C status as tax-exempt institutions by using the pulpit to endorse a particular candidate for office. Immediately following that, a large number of pastors joined a statement to declare this should not be done, and they would not do it in their churches, mostly using the doctrine of separation of church and state in their argument. I can't help but think this last group are the pastors that would rather keep their job than their principles, and are relying on the state to supply them with the very essence of their defense while claiming the 2 entities to be separate. If they really believe in this doctrine, they need to be looking for a faith argument with biblical basis to support their view, not one from the side of the "state." This paradox alone should tell us that as citizens of the United States of America, we can not and should not separate our private (faith) and public (government) lives.

I am not suggesting that every pastor in America needs to stand up and start using the bully pulpit to endorse a candidate, I think the issue goes much further than that, pastors must first be attentive to the needs of their congregation and their community which more often than not in my experience involves finding areas of agreement and not division to endorse. Christians are biblically mandated in Matthew to "give to Caesar that which is Caesar's" and pray for those in leadership. As the politics of today become more and more divisive, we run the risk of alienating some that could be reached with the most powerful and life saving message in existence, one that supersedes any matter of government including the very rights of religious freedom itself. The message of Christ does not need government to exist and supply freedom, it just makes it easier to enjoy those freedoms, but government does in fact need religion (or some substitute) to create a moral people who are easier to govern. In fact, I could make the case that by securing religious freedoms as central we undermine the power of the Christian message by widening and straightening the path of faith. We are called by Paul to "work out our own salvation with fear and trembling," the connotation here is that the path is by nature rather narrow and winding, or it will be of little value.

In my reading of the Constitution and the Bill or Rights, I don't find any mention of faith other than in the first amendment. This rather brief statement that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" is the starting point for our new nation to remove the unnatural, powerfully emotional and coercive tie for Christian citizens emigrating from Europe. The state church in Europe provided the governing bodies with a means to force obedience to the law of the land, tying it to a citizen's personal salvation and providing a powerful yet imprisoning method of allegiance to the law. In other words, you could only have rights as a citizen if you belonged to the State Church. Shame on the church for ever allowing that to happen, and forcing those seeking religious freedom to the US in the first place. The US model caught on even in Europe, which has now replaced the church with modern social programs of aid and entitlement in order to maintain federal power over the populace. I am afraid we are walking down the same path in America.

The doctrine of separation of church and state is not part of our Constitution, but rather began as a line in a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists over 200 years ago. This letter basically assured the congregants that America would not declare any denomination as the national denomination, but it has been used in an attempt to remove matters of faith from public life. From the point of view of government, the church has little power to help maintain order as we have allowed our core values to become eroded and lifeless, participation in social programs has replaced that institution to satisfy those needs, so better that faith matters have no place in public life to further confuse the issue. Even worse, some church leaders stand up to air their viewpoints on the stage of faith and then further undermine the church by endorsing policies that move our nation even further toward centralizing power in the hands of the federal government and removing our biblical burden to care for others. Our founding fathers knew that centralized government power would only lead to an eventual loss of our personal freedoms, we would forego our personal integrity, accountability and ultimately our freedoms for promises of state run institutions as seen in Europe. Our churches should be standing up in resistance to "social" programs that are replacing our local involvement from faith communities, people are receiving the resources they need but no spiritual support, a double shot at replacing their true spiritual needs with basic human needs and removing the "hunger" that leads people to their only real salvation. We as Christians are enabling people to live feeble, shallow lives while providing their basic needs but not their most innermost ones, and even worse are allowing and even encouraging the "state" to supply those needs in lieu of faith communities. We should be providing those needs, not the government.

Virginia was the last state to ratify the Bill of Rights in 1791, showing little regard for the Constitution as written because of the fear that centralized power would one day overcome the rights of the States and individuals. The argument was that the original Constitution was a step back for the Republican form of government, and we were no better off than in 1776 without an appropriate Bill of Rights. Phrases cementing the idea include "the power of the government rests in the hands of the people," and "any powers not specifically given to the federal government should be returned to the States and the people" were added due to this concern. Over time, we have allowed that very concern to permeate our society as we transform ourselves from self-determinists into socialists, allowing freedom and care for our fellow man to be removed from the individual, church and community and placing it in the hands of our government. This is the very thing that our Founding Fathers feared, and it starts with removing faith and family from our society.

George Washington provides some of the best background on this subject, he, along with other Founding Fathers, knew that for citizens to live in a free society with limited government they would have to be able to control themselves or we would need a police state to maintain order. The "moral conditions of freedom" available to the fledgling nation were provided by individual, Christian faith. George Washington notes in his First Inaugural address that "there is no truth more thoroughly established that there exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness." He continues with "the foundation of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality." The thought that our Founding Fathers wanted religion to have no place in our society is absurd, rather they included faith matters as so central to our formation that they need not be explicitly mentioned. The Northwest Ordinance, passed by the same Congress that passed the First Amendment, states "Religion, morality and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." Do you see a trend here? In short, one of the purposes of the first school system was to promote morality, and one of the most important ways to achieve that was to promote religious activity. The two cannot be separated in a properly functioning republican government.

I will leave you with one other quote from Washington, to establish that religion assumes a vital role in public life, and that these 32 pastors are exercising their rights, whether to the benefit of their congregations or not, by declaring for a particular candidate. I certainly would urge caution on their part in order to delicately attempt to move our faith community back into a place of prominence in our social order, lest some would be confused and miss out on the most important message of our time (and any time) in favor of a political statement. Their freedom is sure, the place of faith in matters of government firmly established, yet care still required to present the more important message as paramount.

"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man ought to respect and cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity." George Washington's farewell address to the nation.

Sources: George Washington and Religious Liberty, PBS.org..The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United Staes, Maier..Holy Bible, NRSV.

2 Rights Makes a Wrong.

2008-10-01T09:22:00.006-05:00

I was recently "offended" (I don't really get offended that often...) when a member of my church denomination wrote a letter to the editor lambasting President Bush and his policies in favor of a vote for Obama. I am not sure if it was the open support for Obama on the basis of the state taking care of people instead of themselves, the vitriol on Bush's leadership or just the fact that a person of faith was involved at all in matters of politics (to be explored in another blog). I actually enjoy a reasonable discussion on matters of politics and how they relate to a choice for the 2 candidates, I find that to be a better position that widening the rift that seems to exist relative to this election. I have gotten to the point that I can't stand to watch CNN where you will find all reasons relative to Bush as the economic antichrist and why Sarah Palin should have never been chosen by McCain, as well as having Sean Hannity yell at me and look smugly at a Fox News camera when he digs up another obscure connection to Obama and some crook. We have generally reduced a philosophical disagreement over Government's involvement in the life of its citizens to a chasm that is rapidly growing due to the sensational nature of media broadcasting and our attempt to validate those points of view by being intolerant, rude and generally smug at our "rightness."

I want to make sure everyone knows where I stand on this, there are things that I disagree with re: both candidates, but I find myself falling on the side of less government intervention in the lives if its citizens which leads me to a vote for McCain in November. I feel the same level of commitment from those that support Obama, and personally I think the excitement on the part of his supporters has engaged us in a new era of political interest and activity not seen since the days of Kennedy. The hope and change platform has energized a lot of people that would normally sit on the sidelines, which is always a good thing in a republican form of government, but I do believe that our general direction toward government as the salvation of our society is a wrong direction. Socializing medicine, the economy and our infrastructure is contrary to free market policies and compromises the rights of the individual to make moral, individual choices on key issues of our day such as abortion and homosexual marriage. McCain for me poses less of a wrong turn, but I still am not 100% satisfied with that direction either, differing on key points such as the appropriate use of our military, Patriot Act provisions including the ability of the government to spy on its citizens, using our tax dollars to invest in socialized solutions (instead of reducing our tax obligations and stimulating our economy from the other side that is based on the hard work and determination of the American workers and small business owners).

I am taking my new acquaintance to lunch, so I can better understand his position and explain my own, for the arrogance of our positions is what is leading us to become offended, not the positions themselves. This idea of "I'm right" and by virtue of that statement then "You must be wrong" is affecting us from Congress all the way down to picnic after church. Maybe we could all learn something from a careful, rational discussion of the issues at hand, and how our personal mandate calls us to action as a community and a nation.

Election Observations....

2008-08-28T08:41:00.002-05:00

Interesting observations from the election so far:

-Barack Obama sure seems gifted when offering messages of "hope" and "change," but falls a little flat when on the attack or trying to be sarcastic. If he is going to get back on track, it will have to be behind inspirational and charismatic messages that rely on people's feelings and emotions instead of policies. I think if he focuses on that he will be the next President regardless of his experience, VP pick, pastor or anything else.

-John Edwards wasn't allowed to speak at the DNC Convention, presumably because he confessed to an affair that he lied about previously. Bill Clinton took his spot at the convention, does anyone else see the irony in this?

-Former Presidential candidate and Baptist minister Mike Huckabee was asked if he could vote for a Republican ticket that included Mitt Romney (a Mormon). He answered that he would vote for the ticket based on their public service, and their religion was not a factor for him. I didn't care for Romney personally at the start of the primaries because I distrusted his Mormon background, but I suppose as far as public service records go the Mormons have as good a track record as anyone. It comes down to not expecting Mitt Romney to declare Mormonism as our national religion any more that I would expect Huckabee to declare Southern Baptists as our national denomination. For me, that's the proper usage of the doctrine of church and state.

-The main hotels at the DNC convention are using room key access "cards" made of recyclable wood instead of plastic, just one example of many "green" items on display at the convention. I am not sure who declared the Democratic party as having a corner on the environment and science, but regardless it seems they don't have the corner on technology since the cards don't work and there are lines to get them re-coded...why is it OK to ride on a carbon-spewing airplane to Denver, go to lavish parties as long as you eat with a spoon and think it is OK to promote abortions that even doctors don't want to perform as long as we use hotel key cards made of recyclable wood?

-I actually enjoyed the fuss over Jeremiah Wright, it put the focus for just a moment on faith and community. I think Americans recognize that any "faith" tradition rooted in extremism really exploits the true nature of most of those traditions, whether Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, etc. I worry that extremism and terrorism are terms that in the future will define those that do not conform to a stated norm, in order to identify enemies of the state. In my view, Christian leaders (can't speak for other faith traditions) should be taking the mantle off the government and replacing government welfare with community welfare, as long as they are allowed to speak openly about their faith in the process. Turning churches into nondescript social replacements for welfare is hollow unless accompanied with Christ's message of love.

-This may be the first election where the "haves" and "have-nots" are pitted against each other instead of two opposing candidates. I am not so sure that a vote for either Obama or McCain is more of a vote for those who believe the government is their salvation or those who believe that the government gets in the way of their prosperity. Reconciling those two points of view is the real division, not the people that hold those points of view.

-This election will definitely be very divisive, whether Obama or McCain wins. If Obama wins, then the stage is set for more open displays of power from minorities, especially the African-American community, as a sort of new sub-nationalism is created within the US borders. If McCain wins, that same community will be very disappointed and withdraw from the American community that has somehow managed to "cheat" them out of victory. There is great passion on the Obama side reflecting the possibilities that he represents, some of it well founded, but unfortunately there is no Bill Cosby around to inject an air of responsibility into this movement that first calls us Americans. Obama should have asked Cosby to help his campaign instead of Oprah.

-Are they really going to let Obama give his speech in a Greek temple? There really isn't a place in American politics for such a display, and if this naked self confidence is allowed to continue people are going to rebel against it. The Obama campaign knows this will be a big deal, but they still think its a good move...are they possibly that arrogant about this campaign?

-Is McCain playing golf or saving up his push for later in the fall? I see some ads here and there, but it seems he is content to let Obama win or lose the election on his own, which may be the smartest move of all.

-Boy, Obama sure made some interesting choices of "friends"that are coming back to haunt him. I am not sure if that tells us he is an extremist, or just willing to let anyone with resources help him get where he needs to be, or just naive about the whole thing since that is really the "norm" in the South Chicago environment?

-I wish they would show election maps based on population instead of states, I think we would be surprised at the concentration of people that will vote for Obama as being in high density areas that rely on government programs as there source of well being and prosperity, and for McCain where the population density is very light representing people that don't want government intervention in their lives other than the original Constitutional mandates. I mean, out in the middle of of nowhere you have to depend on faith, yourself, your family and your community to prosper, in the cities you rely on the government. Since we are not adding land to the US these days, the long term forecast is for the Dems to take over just based on demographics and perpetuate the program mentality, until the Russians get crazy and nuke the cities, the terrorists get them with a virus or the entire economy collapses under the weight of less than 10% of the population paying for the programs that keep the other 90% under roof.

Cult Kids in Texas, Who's Next?

2008-05-12T07:53:00.003-05:00

Watching the news reports from the LDS fringe "church" in Texas gave me the chills. Yes, I was horrified at the reports of child abuse and cult religion, but the thing that gave me the chills was the sight of local and federal agents in SWAT gear making a full assault on the compound. I can't help but think that one day, one day that will be the picture coming toward me as a Christian in America.

There is no doubt that someone needs to go to jail for the improper and illegal treatment of minors, particularly women and girls, and that is why we have laws to protect innocents. I am sure there are a select group of men in that compound that have broken several laws and need to be removed from the situation by the authorities. What struck me is that our government at some level decided to assault this compound and remove children from their mothers to place them in foster care. I can't help but think this is not in the best interest of those children, or the mothers that have done nothing wrong. This smacks of a heavy handed attempt on the part of our government to establish their own sort of dominance over innocents and those people that they do not understand. Who's next?

I do not in any way condone the LDS lifestyle, and count the movement as a fringe cult that attempts to maintain a weak tie to Christianity in order to maintain some level of credibility. This faction is even more fringe than the LDS church in general, but other than the polygamy laws that can trace their origin to an attempt toward eliminating this cult, I cannot see where any laws were broken other than by the men who pushed the young women into something they did not want to do. They should be punished for their actions, but what of the innocent children in that compound? Their lives are forever marked by this incident, one that they had no part in creating.

What will be next? I'll tell you, more and more religious groups will be"raided" for their aberrant beliefs, today which are quite contrary to law and general accepted standards of living, but tomorrow it will be mainline Christian groups that propose lifestyles that are deemed aberrant by the general population and our government as a result. This country was founded on religious freedom, an escape from government that chose to force its view on those who place faith before anything else. In this country, our ancestors escaped unbelievable persecution in Europe because they placed their personal heirarchy of importance in this order:

1-God (Faith)

2-Family (In the order of spouse, children, grandparents, others)

3-Government

Our founders attempted to place this order into the form of government they created, and our basic rights as citizens. We fought the Civil War over these basic rights, and whether they reside in the governed or the government, that was the beginning of the end for individual rights whether you agree with their legality or not. The only positive outcome of this Civil War was the immediate freedom of the southern slaves, all else signaled the loss of our individual freedoms in favor of centralized government. Our real disagreement in the social order and political arena boils down to a disagreement, or re-writing, of the original intent of our society. This order has eroded to its present day form, which looks something like this:

1-Government (intended to replace self-determinism as the main support of the people)

2-Family (expanded to mean life partner in support of whatever feels right" to me)

3-God (Faith)

Many people today claim to be spiritual, but not religious. The modern church has done a poor job of making faith relevant to people today, and has provided a wall of separation between people that believe there is something else out there bigger than they are and the institutions that provide a very strict and rigid means of finding that "something." The result has been a rebellion of sorts against foundational doctrine, toward church as defined by people searching to ease their spiritual curiousity. We have the Oprah church, the "Black" church, the New Age church and many others variants that take our focus away from the real church, which Christ established for those that place their faith on belief in Him as the Risen Son of God Himself.

There is no Black Church, only one church that devotes its energy toward fulfilling the commands given by the Savior, to love one another and to go and make disciples of all nations. Anything other than that introduces a human element and dilutes the salvation message of Jesus Christ. We need to introduce more people to Him as the means of their salvation, once that relationship is established we can move forward toward teaching more about His manner of living and how we can emulate that in our lives, and lastly we can determine what kind of life choices are acceptable given that relationship is intact. I think our Christian churches today make a mistake of reversing the order I just gave you, we tell others if you act a certain way, don't smoke, drink and have sex then we will be able to introduce them to Jesus eventually. By doing so we lose the connection toward the person of Christ as the first and only focal point, which people like Oprah and social movements like the civil rights movement are all to willing to step in and replace in "their" church. If we kept our focus on Christ, as He said, there would be no need for laws because we would be operating at a level far above their reach, and these fringe cults would be no more because people would find their spirituality within the church.

Many people today also believe that government is the source of their salvation, their keeper and their provider. We have lost the self-determinist drive that resulted in America becoming the greatest nation on the earth, to be replaced with a needy people that turn to politicians and the government program for their welfare. We are even re-defining the term "family" to mean any person we want, and any situation that we choose to live in that feels right to us. We see business as a means to exploit people instead of the machine that drives us forward into prosperity, soon this process will leave us with scarce few self-determinists forced to pay for those who choose to sit and let the government take care of their needs. The family, church and community should be taking care of those needs in the first place, not the government. This single issue alone will ultimately drive us from poverty into oblivion within a few generations, the replacement of the dollar with the Euro will be the first signal of that ultimate transaction of power and wealth. I suppose that may be a good thing, as we are forced to face our problems through the crises that will develop from our socialism and faithlessness, then we will be forced to return to limited government and people that can take care of themselves, which will lead to a resurgence in faith. This is the most important element of our lives, how we get there is not important. Making feeble attempts to separate church and state are just not possible, they are intertwined for people just as much as spirituality, in a much more complicated issue than just establishing "separation."

For now, that "revolution" has yet to take place, we have slid along for years toward the path of socialism, replacing our faith in God with faith in a government that meets our needs. Because government meets our needs as a replacement for our own courage and conviction, we have allowed it to usurp our freedoms to the point where armed men assaulting a compound of mostly women and children, separating them as wards of the courts, no longer alarms us. We just count that sort of action as warranted to preserve society and its laws, and go about our business. Were we still a nation of self determining Christians, that action would have been condemned, lest we see that very government on the horizon ready to assault our own individual rights.

US Tax System Needs Overhaul

2008-02-27T09:46:00.003-05:00

I am not sure who gets the credit as the candidate for tax reform, perhaps it goes back to the institution of the Internal Revenue Service itself and the first person to complain... Did you know that the Income Tax was not included in the original Constitution but added through Amendment in 1913? There was a short flirtation with an income tax during the Civil War (appropriate, don't you think, as the Federal government started replacing the State and local governance), the office of the Commissioner of the Revenue was created in 1862 as a means of paying for the costs of the war. This office lasted about 10 years, I assume until the financial and social crisis was seen to have passed. It was resurrected in the 1890's but deemed unconstitutional within a year by the Supreme Court.

Only in 1913 did the Income Tax "stick," creating the Bureau of Internal Revenue through the 16th Amendment to the Constitution. One assumes that this was another tool of the Federal government to use against those involved in unlawful enterprises as many of the "gangsters" of the day were jailed not due to their activities, but due to their failure to pay appropriate income taxes, as well as providing general income funds. The rates were generally low other than in years of wartime or distress, and the Bureau gradually evolved into the IRS that we know today that is tasked with providing the funds necessary to run our burgeoning bureaucracy.

We have managed to allow the IRS to become the most feared government agency in existence, I think we would all rather the FBI was chasing us around than the IRS. We allowed government spending to increase to such a level that taxes are necessary to keep it afloat, but this agency was never a part of the plan of the Founders plan, it is a relatively modern invention, an agency tasked to do whatever it takes to raise funds and with the "teeth" to back it up.

I support those who want to do away with the IRS and the confusing tax codes, so confusing in fact that the CPA's and general accountants and clerks across America don't know much more than we do when it comes down to it, they rely on complex software packages to keep up with the rules. I personally prefer no tax at all other than to provide for the common defense and essential services that no one area can provide for itself, but even then the source of that revenue should be changed to something that makes more sense.

The buzzword today is the "Fair Tax" or the "Consumption Tax," which has been passed around in elite circles for quite some time. Basically, if you buy a good or service, you would add a percentage to that purchase which would go to the Federal government, much like the Sales Tax that most States use. No muss, no fuss, simple and to the point, you keep all the money you earn to spend as you like with no one checking up on you once a year. I believe this is a much more favorable means of appropriately and fairly raising the funds needed to run the necessary programs, although the actual amount and the programs that would be funded is another subject entirely.

Think of our tax system in this very simplified analogy:

10 friends enjoy each other's company and like going to the movies together on Friday nights (had to pick a reasonable place and use nice, round numbers to simplify this for myself...). Their total cost for the night at the movies is $100. Using recent IRS rates to illustrate:

The first 4 (the poorest of the group) would pay nothing, the fifth pays $1, the sixth $3, the seventh $7, the eight $12, the ninth $18 and the tenth (the richest of the group) $59.

And they were OK with this arrangement, enjoyed their movie and just assumed the disparity in cost was fair. Now let's assume for a moment that the movie theater needed to create income for the snack bar, so they offered a 20% rebate on the cost of movie tickets. The total cost for the Friday night out would now be $80. They all still expected the first 4 to get their tickets for free, but had to decide how the $20 in savings would be distributed among the rest. $20 divided by the remaining 6 people would be $3.33 in savings each, but they quickly realized that they would end up paying the 5th and 6th moviegoer to see the movie which did not seem fair, so they decided to reduce each person's ticket by an amount relative to their current price, so:

The fifth now paid nothing like the first four, the sixth paid $2, the seventh $5, the eighth $9, the ninth $14 and the tenth $49. Pretty obvious that they were all better off than before, but pretty soon someone got out a calculator and figured out that although the sixth person saved 33%, that amount was only a dollar, and although the tenth person only saved 16% that amounted to a whopping $10 in savings.

This situation started a firestorm.

The fifth person was also upset that they only saved a dollar and the tenth person saved $10, the seventh joined in to exclaim how the wealthy get all the breaks! The first four people were up in arms at how this system did not give them anything back and was used to exploit the poor! Pretty soon the whole group was bickering over their own situation, which eventually turned into railing on the tenth person until that person quietly decided to move (the Cayman Islands I guess...) to avoid the whole mess.

The next Friday night at the movies the tenth person did not show up, and the other nine were shocked to find that even with the cost reduction, they did not have enough money between them to cover even half the tickets. Now what to do?

We are presently right at the point of deciding what to do, how to get the same services (movie tickets) tomorrow that we are enjoying today, before the whole system blows up and we can't even afford half of what we have. Please consider the Fair Tax and its cousins as a viable alternative that is fair for everyone, simple to understand and necessary for the future growth of our nation. Compliments to David Kamerschen, Professor of Economics at UGA for the original premise of the tax illustration.

Student's Pledge of Allegiance

2008-02-23T19:10:00.002-05:00

I found something that I thought I should share, I wish I could claim it for my own, but it was written by someone smarter than I, a 15 year old student from Arizona...I don't think I need to add a thing.

Now I sit me down in school,

where praying is against the rule.

For this great nation under God,

Finds mention of Him very odd.

If Scripture now the class recites,

it violates the Bill of Rights,

and any time my head I bow,

becomes a federal matter now.

Our hair can be purple, orange or green,

that's no offense, its a freedom scene.

The law is specific, the law precise,

prayers spoken aloud are a serious vice.

For praying in a public hall,

might offend someone with no faith at all.

In silence alone we meditate,

God's name prohibited by the State.

We're allowed to dress and cuss like freaks,

and pierce our noses, tongues and cheeks.

They've outlawed guns, but first the Bible,

To quote the good book makes me liable.

We can elect a pregnant senior Queen,

and the unwed "Daddy" our senior King.

Its inappropriate to teach right from wrong,

we're taught such judgments do not belong.

We can get our condoms and birth control,

study witchcraft, vampires and totem poles.

But the Ten Commandments are not allowed,

no word of God must reach this crowd.

Its scary here I must confess,

when chaos reigns, the school's a mess.

So, Lord, this silent plea I make

should I be shot, my soul please take.

The Divided States of America

2008-02-19T09:19:00.004-05:00

Never since the Civil War (or the War Between the States if you prefer) has America been divided into such a clean division of social and political ideals. That is a bold statement, but if you really stop and think about it you will find it appropriate. We are 2 nations within common borders, without geographical identity so each side is hard to pinpoint, unable to move forward because of the stalemate that exists in our divisions.

The Presidential race has magnified this divide for me, and while people size up the candidates to see which one fits their value system most closely, the results of that decision will identify a much larger issue. Gone is the day when the US was united in the face of social and political issues, and even threats to our freedom. In the past 60-70 years we have experienced change at a dramatic rate, from our social system that found the need to support our economic systems through programs due to the Great Depression but allowed those programs to continue and grow even after the need had passed, from the institution of an income tax and removal of the US financial system from the gold standard which ultimately will prove to be an issue that erodes our prosperity back to the last century, and from the social upheavals of the 1960's that resulted mostly from the abuse of power in our government and loss of leadership on moral issues. If you are looking for a change in government, you need look no further than our own recent history that is threatening to divide the very institutions of our nation. The real candidate of change will be the one that returns us to the original democratic ideal that brought us to America in the first place. I am not sure that candidate is available to us yet, because the radical change that will be required can only happen when we all realize where we are going (see blog topic-How Long will Democracy Last).

I recently heard someone on talk radio announce that he is voting for the Democratic candidate because "the Democrats give us what we want, and the Republicans just take it away." Seems to me this is a common theme, and while the Republicans certainly have done their part to deserve the stigma of government mismanagement as much as anyone else, I think the idea that was voiced on that radio show is more dangerous yet. It signals a choice of the American people, a demographic shift that we are in the midst of right now, where people feel more comfort and security in allowing the government to take care of their basic needs than they do in determing those needs for themselves. We are slowly becoming the same form of centralized government that our ancestors would do anything to escape, including a 2 month sea passage in horrid conditions away from the place you were born and raised, just to escape government that held control over your property, religion and personal freedom. Think about it, we are voting now to give that control right back to the government that our ancestors abhorred!

I would pre-suppose that the worst areas of the country that are in the midst of the housing turmoil, where in some cases nearly 50% of the homes sold are sold out of bankruptcy, are mostly those areas that will vote Democratic in the next election. I'd like to see an overlay map illustrating that feature. The last election between President Bush and Al Gore illuminated the fact that in simplistic terms the inner cities voted for Gore and the vast areas of the US with lighter density voted for Bush. What is that telling us? It is telling me that the people that expect government to provide for them are mostly centralized in higher density areas, dependent on the public dole in the midst of higher crime and substance abuse issues. Those issues that this demographic faces are not issues that government can repair, only community and the courage to rise to a higher level of personal integrity can provide relief, not more government intervention and support programs. The fact that we are nearing a 50/50 split between those that want the government to provide for them in a relatively small overall area of the US, and those that want government to be diminshed in favor of personal liberty is cause for alarm, but I think we are going to quietly continue to move in that direction until we become a socialist nation before anyone figures it out.

There is evidence on both sides of the aisle that we are moving in that direction, even the Republican leadership is eroding our personal rights by allowing spying and wire tapping in the name of national defense. The fact is, if we choose to remain a self sustaining democracy, then we are going to be open to attacks that we simply cannot defend. In fact, if we are truly a free and open society, we should look on the attacks of others that hate that freedom as an occasion for celebration. We cannot be open to personal freedoms of thought, movement and ownership and closed to attacks from the outside, or we will inevitably lose those freedoms. We have a lot of very good people dealing with national defense issues every day, and I am thankful for them, but as Americans we should have a higher standard than the rest of the world when it comes to personal freedom in all areas of our society. We know who the bad guys are, get the court order to tap their phones and whomever is in contact with them and take care of it, but the rest of the American public should not be subjected to a blanket proclamation. The same is true of the sanctity of life issue, by turning over our rights to the government and its courts we can't be sure that one day national health care means they get to decide who lives and who is too expensive to keep, just as by turning over our private conversations means some degree of added security today may mean you are labled an enemy of the state tomorrow.

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on their worst day would never trade personal freedom for government intervention, yet some would use their names in defense of government supporting people in need instead of their neighbors supporting that need. The premise that our young Democrats hold today, the same ideals that John Kennedy tried to establish where people take personal initiative in making our country better is not the same ideal that the Democratic leadership exhibits. I admire those that hold on to that ideal on the democratic side, but if they will just take a moment to look at the big picture they will see this is not the case today, they have been duped into something else. We have allowed our welfare system to overcome the position of the church and community in taking care of our own, we have allowed our government to exercise more and more control over our personal lives since the end of the Civil War, and now we have become so used to that control that we are willing to vote it away in the name of national health care.

I am still unsure where my vote will go in November, but regardless of those that even go so far as to say don't vote unless your candidate fulfills all of the "requirements" for your side, I plan to vote for someone. I encourage you to vote as well, and I hope that your vote will go toward uniting a country divided by policies we have allowed to separate us. Our democracy will not last if we allow our government to become what our ancestors risked everything to leave, please take a step back and consider the big picture, before its too late...

Healthcare a Basic Right?

2007-07-10T10:16:00.000-05:00

We live in a complicated world. Anyone that has recently filled out a form, added an email account or dealt with any government agency or large company can tell you that. Things are not so simple as the days when our focus was on mere subsistence, of course they are not quite as easy as we have it these days either, but it seems we keep slowly moving down the path of complication. At my son's recent birthday party I was informed by another 6 year old that he "had a lot going on this summer." I wonder if that was the actual truth, or if he had heard that from a Mom or Dad that wore that phrase as a badge of honor. Seems to me that unless we have a lot going on we are not worthy of each other's respect, or perhaps not included in the natural sympathy we are expected to show for the busyness we have created.

Now I for one don't want to give up my hot showers, microwave and washing machine for a shot at simplicity, but I would sure like to have the time back that those conveniences were supposed to provide. No matter what we create to bank up time for ourselves, the decision still falls to us to organize and use our resources. It is our own fault for letting our society and culture of busyness eat away at the conveniences our modern society has provided. We are trading our simplicity away for more "stuff," and this trend will continue until we bury ourselves with extra burdens. As a Christian, I believe that anything which takes our focus away from God has a potential negative affect, whether or not the activity is generally positive or not. We can create a negative situation even by "over-volunteering" for good causes!

I have been trying to decide whether the whole issue of universal healthcare is a good decision or a bad one, whether or not this is a good thing that provides for the needs of many Americans, not just those facing issues of aging but all Americans that deserve a shot at the advances that our modern society has provided in medicine, or a bad one that forces us to sacrifice something important in order to have this important care. I am still on the fence about some of the issues, but universal healthcare is growing in importance for everyone and deserves a closer look. Are we adding healthcare to the role of busyness in our lives, to our badge of honor looking for sympathy at the amount of specialized care that we need, or are we actually taking care of patients that need this care in a way that makes our society a better place? When I get sick and need a doctor I want to be able to go and get it fixed, but I am not so sure that it is in my interest to have the government paying for it out of my taxes.

I recognize that perhaps my personal views are different from other folks, but at the same time my views are likely very similar to others. It seems that reconciling personal viewpoints in a way that improves the general condition of society is why we have government in the first place, whether or not we agree on the nature of government and what it is "supposed" to provide for citizens. The current healthcare "crisis" is basically a fiscal one, the costs continue to rise at an exponential rate for even basic care, forcing decisions to be made regarding the level of care that is appropriate for each individual. If the costs were not increasing so quickly, this would not be such a big issue, but since they are and expected to do nothing but continue to increase, in my opinion we should tackle the cost side of things at the same time as deciding who pays for it. I see 3 basic elements to rising healthcare, elements that may have legitimate importance to some and disdain for others, but nonetheless contribute to the fiscal crisis surrounding healthcare.

3 elements contributing to healthcare costs include:
1-Our legal system. It is no secret that malpractice insurance for doctors is a huge element of rising healthcare costs, not to mention the costs on the industry from mega-million dollar judgements against insurers, doctors and hospitals alike. There are some bad apples out there, but I think that merely making a doctor's record available to the public will take care of that in the marketplace, absolving the need to let the legal system take care of it. No one is perfect, people will make mistakes and people will die, but I am not so sure that every time someone dies it should result in a huge settlement. I see law firms advertising for certain people to call them if they fit within certain guidelines for a lawsuit, so that the firm can represent them in a situation they have already identified and now only have to convince the person that they have been "wronged" so that a suit can ensue. This is only to improve the bottom line of the firm, and a gross twisting of our legal system, leading to huge costs in healthcare that have to stop.
2-Government intervention. No one can argue that involving our national government in something so personalized as the doctor-patient relationship will add to complexity and cost. That is a given. What people rationalize is that the benefits of having the government pay for some or all of the care is worth the added cost, not considering that it will be our taxes that pay for any government program. For me, I think that the only way to sort out a patient's specialized needs is to let the doctor/pharmacist figure that out, then let private insurers deal with how much the premiums will cost to manage that care. Having our government involved will only add to the costs, and while I am for everyone getting the best care available, private insurers need to deal with the issue in order to improve the quality of care and keep the costs as low as possible. We don't need to add to that layers of government inefficiency that will make things take longer and cost more than they already do.
3-Drug Company Advertising. When the FDA allowed drug companies to advertise on national tv, our "need" for drugs went from the doctor's advice to that of the marketing agency. You could argue that the doctors were already under some pressure from the drug companies who make regular office visits with samples and profit sharing, but at least you could trust your doctor to make a decision in your best interest. Marketing has a powerful impact on our ability to make good decisions, how much "need" has been created by marketing from these companies is open to verification, but it exists and contributes to the overall costs of healthcare. We have over 100 million prescriptions annually for anti-depressants, the largest category of drugs sold in the US, you can't convince me that the need is that great without some assistance from advertising. They advertise and convince consumers that we have an issue worthy of taking a new pill, then we go to the doctor and convince him that we need that pill, then we take the pill and go back to the doctor for another pill to counteract the side affects of the first pill. I wish I could get a doctor to comment on this subject, because they are the ones that hold the keys to this answer and I am not qualified, but the costs due to advertising are a direct redistribution of wealth from our pockets to the media (so they can show more disturbing stuff to our kids so they need anti-depressants at an earlier age), ad agencies and drug companies. Advertising of drugs is the same as advertising hard liquor on tv and needs to stop.

Philosophically, I am for health care and consider it one of the best benefits any company can offer an employee. I own a business of my own and have provided healthcare for many years to my employees, and they always comment how important it is to them as well. The costs for the plan that existed in 1999 have basically gone from $1000 annually to about $5000 annually for the same number of employees, what has changed even more is the content of the plan. My hope has always been that insurance would be available to cover that catastrophic need, if an employee or a family member gets cancer or needs a major operation they will not have to declare bankruptcy in order to pay for it. The original plan was very reasonable and even included normal doctor's visits with a reasonable $20 copay. The copay had to be increased over the years from $20 to $30 and $50, and just this past year we were forced to go to a high deductible plan ($6000), but placed a significant amount ($500 to $1000) in an HSA account with a debit card for each employee and instructions to use that and let me know if they went over that amount so we could work something out. This satisfies the need that exists and mitigates the costs to a bearable amount, but I am already thinking about what happens next. If my company with less than 10 employees cannot bear the rising costs, how much worse must it be for larger ones? Once the costs rise again I will be forced to do one of several things-reduce the work force and continue to offer insurance, continue to reduce the coverage and push more and more of the burden toward the employee (same thing as raising taxes, takes money out of our pocket), or stop offering insurance altogether and put that money toward a pool to help in case of an emergency, buy health club memberships for the employees, or some other such compromise. If I were forced to provide the original level of coverage to all my employees today, then the company would exist only to provide that coverage instead of growing and I would either sell out or close the doors. If we do not contain the costs noted above, the every company in America will be faced with the same choice sooner or later.

What concerns me the most is that if our government takes over the issue, then we will have another albatross other than Social Security to pay for, the cost of such a program will strip the life out of the economy and force the government to pay for healthcare with huge tax increases. In many socialized nations with universal healthcare the tax rates are over 50% of income, is that worth the changes that would inevitably be forced on us? We would quickly move from a "free" society to one that is enslaved by our fiscal responsibility. Do not let the Socialists among us force us into this scenario, they want all wealth redistributed so there are no income gaps in our nation and the government takes care of everything. What needs to happen is private insurers work with companies to provide the best care at the lowest costs, churches are able to receive monetary and volunteer gifts that are appropriate to help people in need, and friends and neighbors step up to do the same. If we do this, then the care will improve, our social network be strengthened, our fiscal responsibility be maintained and our nation allowed to remain free and strong. If we adopt universal healthcare, then our nation will take another step toward socialism and we will continue to put more of our focus on government instead of God for our providence. The slide in this direction is slow and purposeful, we cannot continue to vote ourselves more benefits from the public till until our nation experiences a new form of slavery, the answer must be in our individual resourcefulness, private investment and personalized response to this crisis. Healthcare is important, especially for those Americans and their families who are working for a better tomorrow and not trying to "beat" the system, but it is not a "right." We have to decide the importance of universal healthcare as a nation and decide the best course to take, hopefully the simplest and least costly approach will be preferred even if it does not cover every need.

Whose Fault Was It?

2007-07-07T09:33:00.000-05:00

It has been a long summer. I counted at one point a stretch of 19 straight days that I was out "on the road" working in June. Not a lot of time for family, relaxation or tending to the basic things of life for certain, but life goes on nonetheless. Bills still have to get paid, kids to their summer "stuff," groceries bought, gas in the car...just a lot to do even as many think of summer as "vacation." Maybe this little story will help put things back in perspective, and give you a little relief from the summer heat.

We had a small water leak from our refrigerator this past week, when I was home for a few minutes between trips my wife noticed that the wood floors near the fridge had separated slightly and were bowed at the edges. I thought it was curious but did not give it much thought other than a cursory inspection, and went off to bed. The next day the situation was a bit more evident, the slight warping had moved outward to a few more boards, so we decided to investigate. Eager to avoid a trip under the house for a leak or some other source, I wanted to take a look at the only appliance with water involved that was in the vicinity-the fridge. Sure enough, as we pulled it out, we found a valve that transferred water to the ice maker was leaking, the leak was dripping down and running along the very slight cracks in the wood floor so it was not very conspicuous. I turned the water off to the fridge, but the damage had been done. The seeping water had warped several boards that would have to be sanded and repaired.

Over the next few days, the slightly warped floor issue was pretty much stabilized to about a 10 foot area, not really a huge deal but enough that you could feel it when you walked over it. I thought about calling the floor guy to have it sanded and repaired, but after looking at the floor and trying to decide where we would have to re-apply the coating to the entire floor to make it look correct again, I decided to take a shot at calling our insurance company to see if the homeowner's policy covered such things. Lo and behold it turns out that such damage is covered, and they would be sending a check for the damage after the estimator took a look at it. He made sure to tell us to keep the faulty part, because they would try and recover damages from the refrigerator manufacturer.

After he left, I started thinking about that. Whose fault was it? I guess the manufacturer made the thing, so they must be responsible, right? But I suppose that the story will not end there, because if you look inside the part you can see evidence of some calcium deposits. I feel sure the manufacturer has a case against the water softener people since the damage to the valve could have been caused by those deposits. The attorneys will no doubt have a meeting to discuss culpability and loss due to damage, you know, lawyer type stuff. The billing will probably reflect the legal opinion of several key attorneys whose experience will also be reflected in the cost of the consultation, after all, they have several years of school to pay for. After the meeting they will advise the manufacturer to hire an expert to examine the part and decide what went wrong. The expert will spend several hours at $100/hr or so, he may have to consult with a design engineer who will undoubtedly notice that the part has a "Made in China" sticker on it, concluding that the part was outsourced by the manufacturer to a Chinese company that was undoubtedly at fault, because they should know that we Americans like our ice convenient and properly softened. That's it, it was their fault, case closed. Estimated cost is approximately 5 refrigerators and 2 new wood floors, to be recovered by increasing my homeowner's policy slowly over the next 10 years, and including a percentage to be amortized by everyone in my nearest zip code.

What really needs to happen is that we develop a government committee to examine the costs of the production, sales and shipping of that part to the American manufacturer, then establish the costs of a flight and $1/hr labor for an underage Chinese worker to come over here and sand my floors smooth and re-clear them. That has to be cheaper than the whole process as it exists now, and could lead to better relations with the Chinese on a cultural level. The only person that would be out anything is my floor guy, but he got paid once to put the floor in the first time so he should be OK. The guest worker could then apply for citizenship while they were here, or just defect and request asylum due to the intense political pressure of the job. The cost of getting them here is already absorbed but the government committee's budget paid for by our taxes, so they can be a productive member of society almost immediately.

So there you have it, a reasonable solution to the water leak issue and the blame properly placed on the manufacturer of the fridge, the water softener company and eventually the real culprit, the Chinese company that made the thing without considering American tastes in the first place. I'll just keep making my homeowner's policy payment in the meantime until they sort that all out, in the end figuring I don't deserve to cash the insurance check because if I was still using those old plastic ice trays instead of expecting my ice to appear out of the front of my refrigerator door, this would never have happened in the first place...

How Long Will Democracy Last?

2007-06-04T09:29:00.000-05:00

Alexander Tyler, a late 18th century Scottish history professor, had some comments on Democratic government that seem well placed today. His comments were not about the new American Republic that had just come on the scene, but about the rise and fall of the Athenian Republic some 2000 years prior. His comments carry some points in common to our own republic today, although he could not have envisioned where the American experiment was going.

Tyler suggested that true democracy is temporary in nature, and follows a sort of life cycle seen in the Athenian fall, and many other civilizations if you think about it. The life cycle includes the following stages:

1. Bondage to Spiritual Faith .
2. Spiritual Faith to Courage.
3. Courage to Liberty.
4. Liberty to Abundance.
5. Abundance to Complacency.
6. Complacency to Apathy.
7. Apathy to Dependence.
8. Dependence to Bondage.

The average lifespan of a democracy over history, using this model, takes around 200 years. Some of these stages take very little time, and others take many decades, but it seems the inexorable tide continues through this cycle as Tyler suggested. It does not take much effort to apply the history of America to this model, and placing our life cycle today somewhere in the 5-7 range depending on your personal view. It seems that as we "allow" government to replace liberty, it is as if we are winding up a big rubber band that gets closer and closer to the point where it breaks loose. That would have been the case in the American Revolution, the French Revolution and ultimately every revolution that has been fought to "free" people from bondage. We replace faith with government programs, freedom with protection, personal accountability with "rights," all the way to the point where the society we created has ceased to be a democracy. You can see this today in many European countries, even those claiming to be free and democratic, where in reality the situation is some sort of pseudo-Socialism as the people have discovered they can vote for candidates or structures that provide personal benefits in lieu of personal freedoms.

Personally, I prefer government to take a lesser role, I don't want the government to tell me how to live my life, especially in return for a program that may or may not help me have a better life. As a nation, we established the direction of the federal government during the Civil War, that the federal government will centralize power over states and ultimately individuals. That direction will continue until the day the people take that power back, either through a cultural change that says enough is enough or through some calamity that forces a new start. I think it is time for Americans to stop taking the easy way out, stop depending on government to provide for our needs when we should be doing it ourselves, stop depending on others to define our relationship to our God and stop depending on our leaders to work to supply our needs in order to stay elected. Let's put people in positions to get the job done and expect that we have some responsibility to do the same, regardless of whether or not "our" person is elected.

Government exists to satisfy a need for the common good, to provide a central authority where larger needs such as common defense would not be appropriately handled by individuals. In the beginning of a democracy we see anarchy alongside freedom, later to be replaced with policies and regulations alongside government intervention. There are many who are labeled subversives, and rightly so when they use force to achieve their goals, but throughout the history of democratic government it has been the "subversives" that are now considered the heroes of society. Our Founding Fathers expected to be captured and hanged as subversives, but instead we lionize their activities as those of courageous men. Good thing it worked out that way for their (and our) sake. I suppose the term "subversive" only applies to those who failed to achieve productive change, and not to those who took a great risk and achieved something.

We are biblically called to provide prayerful support to the leaders of our government, and that counts whether or not you believe their actions to be in line with your own or not, but we as individuals fail our higher calling when we sit back and let things happen through our own apathy. The simplest power that we share in a democracy is the power to vote, and I hope and trust that every one will do that, regardless of who I think is "right" or "wrong." There is a local primary in VA today pitting Scott Sayre against Emmitt Hanger, personally I do not have a clear understanding of which candidate to vote for as I think they are both good choices for very different reasons, but I am hopeful that people will get out and vote absed on their conscience and then be prepared to help support the winner, instead of withdrawing if their guy is not elected. Either candidate will do a good job for VA in terms of keeping government smaller, keeping taxes low and supporting the conservative views of the region, so vote for your choice and exercise your democratic rights to support our republic and hopefully extend or alter the life span of our democracy.

No tractors left in Kansas...

2007-05-08T11:06:00.000-05:00

When the words left Governor Kathleen Sebelius' mouth, I was stunned. As residents were pulling dead and injured neighbors out of the rubble from an F5 tornado, she was suggesting that the response would be slowed by National Guard deployments to Iraq that included men and tractors. Was the Kansas governor suggesting that instead of focusing on what we could do to help and assist in the almost total devastation in Greensburg, Kansas, this was an opportunity to take a shot at the was on national leadership? Seems out of place for a Democrat devoted to caring for the people, or is it? The fact that over 80% of the local guard unit was intact and functioning did not seem to enter into her mind, and it appeared from news accounts that the response was going as well as could be expected given the situation. I fear that the governor really believes that government exists to solve her problems instantly, and this is yet another example of how incorrect that assumption is. Neighbors, law enforcement and fire fighters in the community are the ones that risked their lives, they were the only ones in a position to accomplish anything in the important hours following the tornado. Did she really expect the guard to handle it?

Regardless of her intention, whether it was true frustration at a lack of immediate suport, a shot at fellow Kansas presidential aspirant and rival Sam Brownback, or a statement against Republican leadership at the federal level, I think her comments were rather misplaced the day after 9 people died. Someone should remind Ms. Sebelius that this is not the aftermath of Katrina, where widespread damage made the FEMA response agonizingly slow and worthy of criticism and eventual reform, this is an event that while terrible in terms of loss of life and property cannot be compared to failures such as the Katrina aftermath. It seems that any problem or catastrophe these days triggers a response from some people that brings to light a much larger issue, an issue of what our government is here to do in the first place. Each side shows up to prove they were doing their job, but the real issue is what job needs to be done?

I am really trying to understand what would make someone in a position of leadership and power say such words after a catastrophe like the Greensburg tornado. With an open mind, I am trying to understand how we have managed to have such conflicting points of view, and what we can do to help each other understand the other side. I want to understand Ms. Sebelius and her point of view, even though I believe she had a lapse of judgement in the timing of her comments. I think what we have as an underlying issue is a basic conflict, a conflicting opinion of what our government is supposed to do vs. what we as citizens are supposed to do. I am assuming that she believes that government exists to solve the problems of society, and lawmakers and leaders should plan for all contingencies in order to take the responsibility away from the citizen and place it in the hands of the federal government. I think she believes government exists to serve the needs (all of them) of the people, partially as a mandate to secure her position as a leader and member of the "elite" and partly out of humanitarian desires that may be well founded. I am making these assumptions because I hold different views and am trying to understand hers, but the basic assumptions are so conflicting that middle ground seems difficult.

The governor's comments do little for my impression that Democrats consider society their playground, where manipulation of social programs and entitlements serve to protect the elite's position in society as priority, but the real issues confronting people's lives are not dealt with. There are people out there that really think we can solve our problems with more government intervention, and there is no middle ground in that argument. I believe there is a place for government intervention, especially in natural disasters like this where the local and regional response would be overwhelmed by the magnitude of the disaster, where we can do more together instead of as individuals in areas like national defense and economic policies, but I do not think that government intervention belongs in our neighborhoods and local communities. Over our nation's history we have steadily moved away from our personal freedoms and placed them in the hands of our national government, sometimes willingly out of great need during the Great Depression and at other times unwillingly out of great passion during the Civil war. There is no doubt that the programs designed in the 1940's were necessary to help recover from the Great Depression, but instead of returning to normal after that crisis subsided we allowed that to be the starting point of an even greater "trade" of our personal freedom for federal subsidy.

I will give you a current example. We spend a gross amount of money on entitlement and welfare programs in the US today, that much we can agree on. These programs are administered on a federal level and budgets created that consume a great deal of our national resources. I think most Democrats think people like myself intend to get rid of those programs altogether to affect some sort of bottom line or enforce some "self-determination" ideal where everyone needs to work in order to eat. That is not the case. I recognize that some people are in situations where they need help, but I am very concerned when that help comes from Washington DC lawmakers who do not know the individual circumstances and whose intention appears to be an attempt to trade votes for cash.

I would propose welfare reform in the following way, give the people their money back through tax credits equal to the amount spent at the federal level and let the local communities and churches handle it. They know the situation and the people involved, and can best prepare assistance that provides what is needed and a means to return to productive society as soon as possible, without reams of paperwork and useless waste getting in the way. Americans are very giving people, and if even a percentage of Americans turned over those tax savings to local community boards and churches, I believe that vastly more work could be done and more importantly the right work would be done. We could use a rifle instead of a shotgun to solve people's real issues. This is a very simplified view of the concept of course, but I used this illustration to show what is different about the basic concept, and how that difference is used to paint each "side" into a corner with no middle ground. We must find that middle ground, and we will disagree, but the current situation of spending and expecting all our cares to be removed by the government must be met somewhere closer to reality and less along "party" lines. If it continues, we will walk down the path of fiscal ruin and personal loss of freedom to a point where there is no turning back until disaster comes, then the whole debate won't matter much.

Room for World Religions in the US?

2007-05-04T09:06:00.000-05:00

I often wonder what the members of the first Constitutional Conress would have thought of including faith traditions (other than Christianity) into their fledgling nation? We could learn a lot about what their intentions were for this young nation in terms of religion if there was a Muslim in the membership of that body. We forget pretty quickly that the signers of the Declaration of Independence were pretty much cut from the same cloth when it came to religion and matters of faith. Sure, there were some from either side of that debate, but the debate generally centered on what it was like to be a Christian, not that we should conform to, condone or accept another religion altogether like Islam or Hinduism. That was completely out of their minds at the time and left for us to face, we were a Christian nation from the beginning whether you subscribe to the idea the Founding Fathers were Deists (a Creator made the Universe and then set it aside to run itself by natural laws) or Evangelicals (God is actively involved in the workings of the Universe with a desire for a personal realtionship with each of us). Do you think our nation was founded on Christian principles, and do these principles still have value for us today?

I have heard a lot of people today comment that they are spiritual but don't want to be involved in religion, I suppose the church in general has given no real reason to dispute that. Constant strife, bickering and a general desire to change the way people live without giving them any relevant need to do so is a difficult way to increase membership. The part I can't seem to get over is why I can't get normal people to come to Sunday School with me, but other people will join a cult with crazy practices that end up fodder for low budget movies. People are looking for relevance, but the church is becoming less and less of the answer for many. It seems the first issue is whether or not religion is relevant to people's lives today, whether the issue is important to their general well being and purpose for life. I have been doing some research for a paper that involves how people lived years ago and why there has been a steady decline in church membership over the last few generations. Seems to me if you could answer that question then that would lead you to the real answer about relevance in people's lives.

I am not talking about government and legal trends that started in the late 1940's and continue to today, about rulings that removed the Bible and prayer from schools and the 10 Commandments from the court houses. That is a topic for another day and worthy of discussion, since those factors do influence the relevance of faith. I believe that something more basic is at work, a combination of advances in technology and ease of life combined with poor overall leadership in the church. A few generations ago, surveys noted that people were less interested in financial goals and getting rich as much as they were in finding fulfillment in their lives. Data also suggests that we were more comfortable with less, not needing houses larger than 1500 square feet or so, only one car in general, one phone line, no need for microwaves, air conditioning, stereos and I-pods that we consider "must-haves" today. What has triggered this new trend? Advances in technology have provided many of these things that make life easier, and each advance in technology that makes life easier has the ability to divert our attention away from matters of faith.

We can occupy ourselves with any means of entertainment and live cushy lives for the most part, in stark contrast with life as a search for fulfillment and general survival not many generations ago. When you are in survival mode, then matters of faith are most important, when we are "comfortable" then it is less so. When you combine this with organized religion asking us to conform our lifestyles to join their clubs, it becomes pretty evident why church membership is declining. I am not for giving up my hot shower or microwave or suggesting that from anyone else, but I will ask that you truthfully consider how your life and matters of faith would be different if your focus was elsewhere.

So back to our original question, was our nation founded on Christian principles, and do those principles still have value today? I can only imagine the scene if it could happen today. Thomas Jefferson sitting in one corner, telling whomever would listen to beware of the clergy because they were only interested in taking away people's personal rights in order to conform them to their version of Christianity, any number of the 55 licensed clergymen that participated in the signing roaming the room to offer up their testimony of how belief in Christ had changed their lives, to the point of being willing to die for the right to tell others, and George Washington in the middle talking about how life is made better by following the practices of the Bible and how can we try and work together to make America stronger. About that time a Muslim walks in the room and everyone stops talking, like an EF Hutton commercial. This adds a new twist to the conversation altogether.

I would be willing to bet that if that Muslim asked for the same rights and priviledges to practice his religion as had been afforded the early Americans, his request would have been brushed aside with no second thoughts and great indignation. The rights and priviledges of free practice of religion were intended solely for those practicing the Christian religion, not for other faith choices. Now I am sure the debate would center on letting people have the freedom to make their own choices vs. not allowing false religions to sway the hearts and minds of simple people, but would have returned to the general premise that only Christianity was intended as the faith choice for America. The same men that penned "all men are created equal" and then allowed the slave trade to continue would have come to this conclusion quickly, there was no room in their world for weak acceptance of religious diversity. They would have accepted a person's right to choose their own path and rejected the incorrect choice as one not to be made or suggested to others.

Freedom of religion through the Bill of rights in 1789 was intended for Christian denominations, and resulted from the desire of the leaders of the day to avoid having a State mandated denomination as existed in European nations. We have taken that a step further and perverted it years later by trying to remove Christianity from the mainstream altogether by building a "wall of separation" between church and state (Did you know that was not in the Constitution, but in a letter sent by Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Church ansering a query about which denomination was most important? This letter was used later by the Supreme Court to create a law that changed the original intent of the Constitution and Bill of Rights). We are a nation of personal freedoms, but have continued to water down the original intent to the point that the church has to make much better decisions or our nation's heritage and history is lost. Other religious choices have to be tolorated as a personal right, but acceptance of other faiths on the same level of Christianity in our government, schools, courtrooms, etc. is unacceptable and should not be allowed any more that having a State Denomination shoudl be allowed.

What can the church do to make a comeback? Is is even possible? Absolutely. The church has to return to the basics, every denomination must focus on the core belief that Jesus Christ is the only way to a personal realtionship with God the Father and Creator. Christianity is the only world religion that can make that claim. If we can agree on that then the rest is semantics. People need to be introduced to this man as the Savior of mankind, the conduit to eternal life. People have to be told the message that belief in Him will lead to a changed life, you don't have to change first to be "accepted." If the church can get that message righted again, then the pews will be filled with people who discover the relevance in their lives and want to learn more about His love. As they accept that love, they will be changed forever, and the old things will not hold sway.

We must introduce them to Christ first, and let them make the choice whether he is the greatest fraud in all of history or who He says He is, but that is their choice. This is the most important choice anyone can ever make if He is who He says He is, and irrelevant if not. We must start there, the life change will come after the decision is made, but it cannot come beforehand. Let's get the order corrected, stand fast against other religions that do not put Christ at the center of the salvation plan, and have the fortitude to stand up when others dispute or confuse the message that our forefathers clearly understood. We have already made the mistake of allowing a fringe element attempt to remove the vestiges of Christianity from our daily lives, but now to have that replaced with acceptance of other religions seems doubly incorrect. There are places where other faiths are allowed to operate and Christian churches barred due to separation of church and state issues. There is more diversity allowance for other faiths than the faith that our nation was founded with, and we go on with no concern because Christianity has been placed in a benign holding pattern for many. You can make whatever choice you want regarding faith, but don't try to transform America from a Christian nation. I wonder what that meeting room would have looked like?

"Had the doctrines of Jesus been preached always as pure as they came from his lips, the whole civilized world would now have been Christian." Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse in 1822.

Put Your Money Where Your Heart Is

2007-04-23T09:01:00.000-05:00

It appears that everyone is ready to go back to work after a week of tragic TV news in Virginia. Not to diminish the grief of the families and friends suffering their loss, I am pretty happy to be able to focus on something else as well. There were a lot of comments about the Tech article, but after leaving that up for several days I think it is best to heal and move on the best we can.

The news you are going to be hearing this week will probably include something about the imminent record close of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (Dow), for the first time a close is expected over 13,000. I know this could be a boring subject for most people, but it brings up a subject that I think is important in this day and age, definitely worth discussing. The financial markets can at best be confusing, but in my simple view there are a few things that most people don't know and could benefit from. My basic advice is this, find something that you are very interested in where you can invest your money and beware of assuming everything will continue to go along as "normal." My goal here is not to scare anyone into putting cash in their mattress, actually it is completely the opposite. We should save for a rainy day and be prepared to invest in appreciating assets (key word here is "appreciating"), it is a subject even the Bible talks about (remember the parable of the "talents" in Luke 19 12-26 as one example?).

A little background to start, a very important history lesson that I can pretty much guarantee you will not hear in the mainstream media. In the early 1970's our nation removed ourselves from the Gold Standard that existed (other than the Confederate States during the Civil War) since the start of our national economy after the American Revolution. What that meant is that each dollar that existed in circulation had a corresponding value of gold at a central depository, like Fort Knox for example. Each dollar had a real value based on gold, you could show up at any time and request your dollar be traded in for gold. What happened to change that? Well, simply put, we ran out of enough gold to ensure it could back the currency due to our expanding economy, the government had to remove us from that standard and then create "legal tender" laws that basically made it illegal for anyone to refuse the non-gold backed dollar in any financial transaction. This was a key moment in time.

Why is this a problem? Well, simply put again, any fiat (another name for a currency that is not backed by some tangible, precious metal source) currency in the history of the world has eventually failed due to the fact that only the faith and credit of the issuing government backs the currency, not a bonafide source of wealth. It is a 100% certainty that as more dollars enter circulation, the value of each dollar has to become less (remember Econ 101?), and it will take more dollars to buy the same item you purchased yesterday when fewer dollars were in circulation. This is called inflation, and it is important to remember that it is not the price of goods and services that is going up, it is the "cheapening" of the dollar you are using to purchase them that creates inflation. The only way to stop inflation is to stop printing more money.

So why do we keep printing money? We continue to print money for one reason, to keep our economy alive and vital. Over our history we find a cycle of boom and bust that generally happen each 37 months for boom and 18 months for bust. Our Federal Reserve Bank does an unbelievable job at efficiently managing the money supply to keep the economy rolling. As inflation gets carried away, in simple terms they just reduce the amount of money printed to slow it down to a reasonable level. As the bust cycle takes over and unemployment begin to rise, we print more money to pay for programs that stimulate the economy and bring us back to a boom cycle. This happens over and over again, pretty much indefinitely, as we generally increase the supply of money to keep up with our promises over time. If you want to ask my political affiliation, this is one of the main reasons I am in favor of less government intervention, which typically falls to the Republican side of things. I know there are several programs that really help people, as we have removed the church from our support of those less fortunate and replaced it with government programs, but that is a subject for another day...

The Federal Reserve is rather artful at managing this scenario, but the end result is that the endless money printing does have a price. Inflation and taxation act together to erode the value of our dollars, to the point where we have to borrow against the faith and credit of the US to keep the cycle intact, which will continue until we either stop printing money and let inflation run wild as it did in Venezuela most recently (not going to happen in the US, I know that much), or until the borrowing to maintain the boom and bust cycles buries us in the failure of our currency, most likely to be replaced with another world currency such as the Euro or the Yuan (much more likely, followed by the biggest credit call in history). With the pressures of our current entitlements such as Social Security, the pressures to continue the cycle are enormous.

Unfortunately, I have an opinion there is not much that we can do other than prop up our economy the best we can until the inevitable happens, until we cannot even maintain our standard of living because our dollar is mostly in circulation to pay for the interest on our approaching 10 trillion dollar debt (have any idea how much money that is? Each trillion is a thousand billion dollars, enough to already force nearly half of our national budget toward payment of interest on that debt due to our borrowing). Until we either force our elected officials to revise the policies and stop the trend, which I do not see happening because they want to be elected and that is not the way to get (or stay) elected, or other nations begin to stop offering loans to support that debt, we are going to sail along in this present cycle of building huge mountains of borrowed money in order to maintain the steady increase in our money supply. We are already opearting at a discount of nearly 30% to the Euro since its inception, and I don't think that trend will reverse itself. As Haggai remarked in the Bible, we are putting our money into bags with holes.

What can you do to protect your investments? For now, you can just play along and try to achieve returns that exceed the combination of taxation and inflation, there is no need to alter that strategy unless a collapse appears imminent, and I would think that would be reasonably well publicized in advance. I would strongly suggest, however, that you also invest a portion (maybe 10-15%) of your savings in something that you are really interested in that involves a tangible (something you can touch), appreciating asset. New clothes, furniture and most new cars are not apprecaiting assets, but if you think about it for a minute you can find items of interest from classic cars to baseball cards to antiques to actual gold and silver. The key would be to buy the best quality available of an item known to be appreciating and of interest to you. I would think of it in terms of holding certain items that you could use to buy groceries if you could not access a bank account, but don't take that statement as suggesting the sky is falling. If you can act prudently and be aware of what is going on, then you can be prepared for most anything that comes your way.

VA Tech is a dream come true for the "fringes"

2007-04-19T10:19:00.000-05:00

I suppose there is very little we can claim as a positive from this terrible thing that has happened, but I for one found a great deal of comfort and pride in seeing the reactions of the students and University leaders over the past few days. Most notably was the reaction of the student body toward President Bush and the University President. Their very lengthy ovation at the introduction of both told me a few things about the general character of the students there, and really made me proud to be a citizen of both Virginia and America. After all the criticism of the school administration, I think the question was answered in that moment about whether or not the people closest to this tragedy were in support of their President Charles Steger. We all know that college campuses in general are not that friendly to Republican Presidents either, but the show of respect for President Bush was yet another example of putting differences aside for the sake of something bigger. For all the attempts at trying to pull anger and hatred out of people while they were at their lowest moments, I think the fringe elements of our society were silenced by the desire of that commmunity to pull together instead of breaking apart.

It is simply amazing that there are people in our society (and around the globe) that insist on using this awful event for self promotion of their own fringe agenda. The huge gathering of students for the vigil held on the drill field and the memorial services remind me that the majority of Americans hold similar values and points of view, but the fringes get the airtime because they offer up the greatest opportunity to "shock" us into wanting to watch something extraordinary. Normal people don't make headlines, only the fringes get the headlines. The photos of that nutcase Cho are going to be forever immortalized in history as a symbol of what is wrong in America, I would prefer to focus on what makes America strong.

The issues that keep getting played across our televisions are much less than assignment of blame, gun control and our responsibility to keep everyone safe. The real issues are about our freedom and how we react as Americans to pull together in times of crisis instead of allowing the fringes to pull us apart. I would put this idea out there for everyone to consider, that the time in our history as a nation with the greatest personal freedoms would be the period of time following the Amercian Revolution. That would also be the time of greatest chaos in our history of government, because those 2 things are generally mutually exclusive. We are most comfortable with systems and programs in place to repress anarchy, which generally means we slowly move from a free society to some sort of democratic socialism at best, and situations where a single ruler that controls everything is in power at the worst.

The far left is taking the stance that we should remove all guns from society, because that will make us safe. If only the government had guns, then we would not have to worry. Wow. Where would we have been in 1776 with that concept? I suppose if no one had guns then they would have to find another way to kill each other, so gun deaths would decline, but at the same time we would give up our Constitutional right to bear arms and leave our society open to manipulation and control by anyone that had guns. Giving up our personal rights will never make us safer, only open the door to a slow slide toward control moving to a central source of power. I suppose that is why the Europeans have hit us so hard with our "gun society," they have had more history and time to move toward socialiasm than we have, which is exactly where we will end up if we give up our freedoms.

The far right is taking the stance that everyone should have guns and that will make us safe. I am not so sure of that either, giving all the students at Tech a gun just seems that we will kill 33 students over a year's time on Saturday nights instead of all at once. I have even heard some people pushing the idea that they all deserved to die as a representation of God's retribution for the partying and sex that goes on. Wow. I don't even know where to start, but the idea that God planned all this to teach us a lesson is beyond my comprehension. God loves each one of us in a way that we cannot imagine, and wants to be in a personal and meaningful relationship with us that involves a choice on our part. We must separate this idea of Old Testament retribution from the consequences of our actions, when we choose to do something outside of acceptable behavior then we face consequences for those actions, but God wants us to turn to Him first and then we will want to change our behaviors because we live within that relationship. He did not come to condemn the world but to save it.

The fact remains that we have a very terrible and unusual situation brought on by one person's sadistic actions. If I hear another talking head suggest that we failed Cho as a society because we did not identify him and get him into the right program, so that he could be reformed and rejoin as a meaningful contributor to our society, I am just going to throw up. The guy was a nut, sadistic, crazy, whatever adjective you want to use that describes someone so unbalanced that they could even consider the act, much less plan it out so that he would be immortalized by his actions. If anything he needed to be identified and locked up for the rest of his life, instead of playing the role of "It was his societal condition," "he just needed help," "our gun society is to blame," "his privacy was more important," "if we just could have reached out to him..." There was nothing that could have prevented this guy from going postal. It would have been better if some boyfriend of a stalked girl on campus would have taken him out before he could kill all those people, but even that is a pretty hollow victory.

You could maybe make the point that we sanction violence on TV which allows these things to happen, but the reality is that we can only "vote" on whether that violence is acceptable with our pocketbooks. I would agree that what we watch on TV and the movies has a very negative affect on our actions, but we allow it to happen because we watch and advertisers profit from it. We have a choice, if something is inappropriate then we have a duty to letting those advertisers know we won't be purcahsing their producsts as a result. Wonder why Imus finally got fired? Because that is exactly what happened. We not only have the rights to our personal freedom, we have the obligation to identify people and situations that are outside acceptable behavior and remove them from society. We can get all crossed up in what is acceptable, but I am pretty certain that killing people would be considered unacceptable, and violence that depicts and glorifies those situations should be considered the same.

We live in a free society, where people are free to fly into towers and shoot college students. There is no means of protecting people in a free society from events like this, nor should there be beyond reasonable measures from law enforcement to detect and identify nutcases like Cho, hopefully before he is able to kill, but certtainly not to second guess their actions when they are trying to protect us within an open society. We have to use these terrible situations to pull together and celebrate our freedoms, amid the grief and anguish from those families that are enduring great pain and sacrifice. We cannot let this situation overshadow the fact that life is transient and there are different views about the sanctity of human life over the globe. Over 170 innocent people were killed in Iraq yesterday, but we don't seem as upset about that as the college kids because it is far away and we are used to them killing each other on a regular basis. Our european neighbors are incensed about the evils of American society as a result of the shootings, but they ignore Muslim extremists who are executing and beheading people at the same time. What am I missing? We have to accept by our very nature that America is open to this type of tragedy, for the benefit of enjoying our individual freedoms we have the potential for disaster every day. We can fall prey to trying to fix it, which can only result in the loss of those freedoms, or we can pick each other up when the dust settles and gather together as Americans devoted to maintaining those freedoms as a tribute to those who gave their lives.

VA Tech 24hrs later-let's focus on what is important!

2007-04-17T11:03:00.000-05:00

Let's give these people a break. We are going to explore every little detail of what happened in the coming weeks, we are going to learn where this troubled young man lived, who his family and friends were, and every small detail of his life. Everyone with an agenda is going to get to discuss gun control, why God "let" this happen, how to magically keep this from happening again, who is going to be sued because we need to assign blame somewhere...but not now, not yet.

Let's focus just for a minute on the families of the 33 that are dead (including the family of the shooter, since their lives are going to be forever changed as well), those who are injured and their families, the friends, co-workers and people affected by this horrific act, the law enforcement officials working to find out more details, the local clergy and counselors struggling to cope with helping others when they don't have the answers themselves (and no, God did not cause this to happen, this is an act of free will in a broken world and society where bad things do happen), the medical specialists working to save lives and care for the injured, the officials of the school who did what they knew best to do at the time and are getting second guessed and will feel a measure of responsibility no matter what happens, etc.

We can argue about what happens when we have a free society later, how we can choose to be open and free or try to legislate some sort of safety mechanism into a free and democratic culture called America, how to keep guns out of the hands of nut cases like this one, what kind of domestic issues exist in our country and how the implications of broken relationships affect us all (it is not OK to do whatever you want because it is not hurting anyone else, damage ends up being done regardless of being this kind of heinous act or a quiet hurting no one can see), how the responsibility of the college will somehow end up in a lawsuit, the great character shown by the students and staff in interviews and heroic acts, how perhaps this terrible thing can somehow be used for good in the future, etc.

We can get to all that later, for now, let us keep all those involved in our prayers. People are hurting, give them the respect they deserve to sort this out each in their own way, lay off supporting the media in trying to create anger out of bewilderment, and at least give this a few days to support those grieving by whatever means we can. Please.

The Real Problem With Global Warming

2007-04-14T08:01:00.000-05:00

I just came back from a trip to the Historic Triangle of Virginia (Jamestown, Williamsburg, Yorktown), mostly to have a brief time out from work which followed me anyway, but also to enjoy a little of the history display at the Victory Center in Yorktown. The exhibits were very interesting, featuring a live camp and original farm outside the museum center, and a host of historical information. In case you forgot from the 5th grade, Yorktown is where George Washington teamed up with the French to trap Cornwallis and end the Revolutionary War in 1781. If you have any English, British or United Kingdom nationals as acquaintenances (Boy, they go by a lot of aliases over there) they will be quick to refer to you as a colonist to this day, even when you have to remind them that we had to come save their behinds from the Germans.

It is a helpful reminder to me that in those days news had to travel far, letters were considered the FedEx of the day and if you were a military commander you could send an IM out on horseback that would only take a few hours or days to reach the "recipient." Most news traveled by horseback, and we all know how reliable information becomes after it is passed along a few times. I have a few friends I can think of that would have been perfect for that job...

I can't imagine how anyone knew anything unless it just happened a farm over in the woods, but I also imagine it was not a big issue to those early Americans who were relatively preoccupied with that survival thing. Today, we get our coffee going and hit the PC for a taste of the news, mortified at the goings-on in who-knows-where as we shuffle the kids off to school and put in a good days work. I was being kind to the other 250 million of us that wait until we get to work to check the news on the company's time. We know more about how safe a street corner is in downtown Iraq than we do about that big accident that happened a few miles away. I can't even get a local channel close enough on the dish to listen in to what is happening to Aunt Fanny down the street, I have to check in to Aunt Fanny that lives in Atlanta, San Francisco or New York for my dose of local living. I even have a fully automated check out at the Wal-Mart so I don't even have the inconvenience of having to speak to a check out clerk. We have traded global information for local isolation, and I wonder sometimes where that "information" really comes from.

I guess I should get back to the point, today we have a wealth of information at our fingertips, we can Google someone right up and figure out if they are worthy to be our neighbor, or listen to any and all opinions on any and all subjects at any time of the day or night. In the old days it seems people were a little more authentic in their speech, the message that they wanted to get across was thought out and prepared for some public occasion or not given at all. I wonder if Patrick Henry would shout out in downtown Richmond, VA today, "Give me a safe enironment, or give me death!" He might have swayed a few people.

Truth is, I am not sure who to listen to these days because I have no idea who is authentic. I am pretty sure that Patrick Henry got his message across because people knew he was taking a huge risk in speaking out, but in today's world we are constantly bombarded with all kinds of information and have no idea where it is coming from. I have a reasonable degree of certainty that Patrick Henry spoke his own mind, and was not representing some politically charged think tank's opinion of how the Brits were over taxing the colonies and suppressing personal freedoms. I have heard plenty of opinions and I guess the consensus is that we have a global warming problem, but to what extent, who knows the real deal, how do we fix it and where do we go from here? I can't tell if Al Gore is right because he has time to sit in his well lit and energy devouring home and hand pick self-promoting reports on the issue, or if the Bush Administration can overlook the big business implications on the economy that they get graded on each week long enough to give me the real answer.

I just don't see how we get together on this issue with everyone pulling at the end of the rope, trying every trick they can think of to get people on "their" side. Last time I checked, we were all in this one together. What is missing today is a spokesperson that is authentic, someone with no other stake in the game that knows the score and is willing to tell us with no agenda. Not sure how that person ever gets the information they need from an unbiased source, or how they get the information to us from an unbiased source, or why they would be interested in the job at all, but that is what is missing. We have created a culture of people who are leading our nation with little to no authenticity-and people know it! You can see that from the approval polls on our government from common people, nobody trusts people in power because they cannot be seen as genuinely interested in the well being of our nation and our planet without some other motivation. Perhaps it is time for a change, maybe the best medicine for us would be to dump the whole batch and only allow people to be elected to higher office who have never been elected before, who make less than $100,000 per year. Its all a game so far, we keep spinning our wheels with no decisions that help anyone, on issues from global warming to social security, because there is no one we can trust to be authentic in government.

Benjamin Franklin put it best when he told the rest of the Declaration of Independence signers, "From here on out we hang together, or we surely will hang separately."

Imus in the morning, Imus in the evening, ain't we got fun!

2007-04-08T10:48:00.000-05:00

No doubt Don Imus joins the rest of the "shock-jock" world with his version of how to act like an idiot in public. The phrase "nappy-headed ho's" referring to the "rough" girls playing for the Scarlet Knight of Rutgers University is certainly out of place, derogatory and just plain rude. And? What did you expect?

These guys make their living as "shock-jocks," that means they are paid to shock us. People listen, advertisers sell their wares to those of us listening and that's it, pretty simple business transaction. What? Outrageous behavior?1st Amendment rights? What about it? This is a business deal and nothing more, don't get all politically correct over it.

The First Amendment guaranteeing our freedom of speech was designed with a purpose in mind by the Founding Fathers. That purpose is to expose stupid people by letting them open their mouth. If we kept them from talking, then no one would realize they were stupid. Pretty smart bunch, those Founding Fathers.

Now if things really get out of hand, the FCC (Federal Communication Commission) will be there to save us, after all, we can't include vulgar speech under those freedoms. Expletives will be met with severe fines, maybe even enough to offset the revenue flowing in from those listening to hear what outrageous thing might be said next. But other than that, it is pretty much free game for anyone to prove their stupidity in the national airwaves. You want to stand up for something, how about raising a fuss over Howard Stern's treatment of women (white or black) on his show. Only trouble with that would be most of the time he is just providing a means for their stupidity of even being there, oh well, back to the original plan of the founders. Howard is just wishing he called those girls something better than Imus did before Imus got all the credit.

What really makes this fun and interesting is that the very people who stand up and insist on freedoms, insist on equality, insist on fair treatment of everyone at all times and rub our noses in the dirt of the ACLU, they are the first ones to stand up and demand Imus' dismissal for this outrage. Come on folks, you can't have your cake and eat it too, either we get to talk about everyone with equal disdain or we get to talk about no one at all. Those same groups don't get all up in arms when one of our national leaders gets bashed over equal rights or some such similar topic, they only get up in arms when they see a way to get "righteous." We are not a nation together anymore, we are a nation made up of a zillion small groups with specialized agendas that just happen to occupy the same basic geography. I'd say the last time we were together on much of anything was World War II, and most of the people that remember that are dead.

Was Imus fulfilling his Constitutional right to stupidity when he made those remarks? Absolutely. Was he being a political figure, aiming to discredit women in general and black women in particular by his remarks? Of course not. He just wanted to sell more ad space, and he can say and do whatever he wants to get noticed, right up to the point of getting fined for a greater sum than the ad revenue generates. If you really want it to stop, impose your own fine and stop listening, stop buying products that are advertised on the program, and stop whining about him singling out minorities in some vernacular frenzy. They are just doing their job, and exercising their Constitutional rights to stupidity at the same time.

The real sadness is that we just continue down the road of providing one more wedge in our society, one more opportunity to drive us all apart. That is what we have lost. Our decency is not being eroded, that much is already gone because we let our community fail first. You want that to change? Then start finding ways to build us back up as a nation instead of delighting each time we can be an antagonist.

Ricky Bobby Easter

2007-04-08T10:36:00.000-05:00

All over America, at least in the South, families are sitting down to dinner together while the Ricky Bobby prayer is recited, "Thank you, little baby Jesus..."

I for one, got just to the border of being offended by that scene in the movie, not so much because of it picking fun at the simple life of many southern families, but more at taking a stab at people of faith. Like most "spoof" films, things get a little carried away, but I wonder if there was anyone in the writer's booth that perhaps thought this one was a bit too much for a different reason. I would have to think that making fun is one thing, but making fun at the expense of something so explosive as people's religion is perhaps another.

Are we held accountable for our words and actions, even when just poking fun? I am sure that no one intentionally meant to harm anyone in a mean spirited sort of way, there were a few spots in that movie that were pretty hilarious (not as many as "Elf" for sure) but the regional nature of the humor is not going to make for a very lucrative play at the box office. Is that worth straying into an area that perhaps has some far reaching implications?

Is it really the impression of faith in the Bible-belt south that everyone has such a simplistic and skewed perception of who Jesus is? I hope not, if anything it seems that no one really cares about what goes on "down there," "over there" or "up there" so long as it does not encroach on my life.

I am not sure if this is a statement on our society in general, how we interact as different regions in the US, or just plain apathy. I could stand the first few lines of the prayer, but come on guys, enough already after a few minutes. I got it.

Faith still relevant in the US?

2007-04-07T15:02:00.000-05:00

Everywhere you turn these days, there is someone claiming their own little corner of the "truth." People are stumbling over themselves to find some sort of meaning in their lives, through politics, religion, "unique" lifestyles, whatever seems to be right for them. I haven't noticed many more people finding fulfillment, however, as a matter of fact I'd say there are more folks with questions than answers these days...A few generations ago, we were basically a Christian community, which I am not saying was inherently a good or bad thing, it is just a fact of our history. We lived, worked and played in an environment that was vastly different than today, but the foundation of society was pretty much set that faith was a matter of course and not so much choice. If nothing else, it was a safe place to exist (or return to if we ventured too far outside that safety for comfort). With the advent of modern communications like television, mobile phones, email, blogs, etc, we now have the opportunity to ignore community as a means not only of existence but in terms of our life choices. The Christian community has been pretty satisfied to sit this one out, embracing technology only to the point of some nutcases on higher cable channels and trying to find the most embarrasing personalities out there to represent Christianity to the world. I can honestly say that until people find faith, whatever faith we are talking about be it Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, whatever, until they find that faith to be RELEVANT to their daily lives then they will not have any interest.

I can remember when I saw my first fax come out of the machine, rolling up into a little tube of thermal paper and being so amazed at how technology was moving forward. First the microwave, and now this! I could not imagine anything more astounding-no more need to overnight letters or wait for mailed information to appear, we could do it at the push of a button. Today, the fax is nearly extinct, we are even removing fax numbers from business cards. Kids today complain about using email because it is too slow, if it is not IM then they are wasting their time. In this new world, there is no doubt that faith has not kept pace, but is there even a chance for it to become relevant in anyone's life today?

You may have guessed that I am a Christian (don't hang up!), and this blog is not about making someone feel guilty enough to want to be one, too, or about scaring people into joining a church before they go to hell, but it is about asking hard questions that have multiple defensible answers on many different levels. I am convinced that faith is relevant in life today, and in many ways is needed more than ever before to maintain some sort of sanity with everything coming at us so fast. What needs to happen is an open discussion with no personal attacks, because late at night when everything else is distant, these questions sooner or later come up for everyone.

Is there a God? Who was that Jesus guy? If all that stuff He said is true (I only capitalized the He because I believe its true and I choose to show respect that way, not because of some secret code going on, you can choose to believe what you want), then learning more about His life and teachings has to be the most RELEVANT thing in my life. If not, then this whole deal is the biggest scam of all of history. How does my answer to that affect my stance on politics, treating other people, my lifestyle, what I consider to be right and wrong? Regardless of your position, the answer to those questions (and more to come), have to be the most RELEVANT discussion in America today.