iPandora

Mr President,

You may think such children shouldn’t be faced with the hardships of life and instead ought to be terminated in utero. But, for your sake, I’m glad your mother didn’t think so.

Hat tip: The Point.

(A)s we revel in this gush of happy feelings it is important to recognize that not all change is good. It is important to recognize that we need to pin our hopes on solid ideas or our hopes will be quite hopeless.

On that depressing note I beg your pardon for having the audacity to hope that we can peer through his lovely rhetoric to see the ideas beneath as they truly are, warts and all. At the same time we must sincerely hope for his great success.

Monte Solberg in the Edmonton Sun, January 19th, 2009.

In the Bible we’re told that all authority is in God, and those that exist on earth, do so at His ordination and continue at His pleasure (Romans 13). Therefore I pray that Obama will find God’s blessing leading him on throughout his life and especially and particularly while he is President of the United States of America. Who am I to withstand God and withold my prayers from a man who will bear one of the greatest burdens known to man at this present time?

I make that statement unqualified. Barack Obama needs the prayers of each and every Christian.

But what do we pray for?

From a Christian perspective, we see the goals and aspirations, ideas and philosophies Obama espouses are diametrically opposed to God’s ideals and lofty standards. Obama has stated his unequivocal support for many of the most heinous forms of abortion/infanticide.

As an American, I see many of his goals will be to the detriment of this great nation and it’s Constitution. Obama supports and plans to implement some of the most sweeping tax hikes across the board in a long time. His social policies are in favor of taking away individual liberty, removing the Christian ideal of individual and community responsibility.

His philosophies are neither new nor are his proposals novel. They are tired and failed relics of a century lost to the dust of history. FDRoosevelt-style government interventionism which prolonged and deepened the Great (Government-caused) Depression. Soveit-style big government nannyism with the grasp of government-controlled means of production expanding.

How can we then pray for this man who will lead our nation?

In our own lives, when our parents, friends, spiritual leaders and mentors pray for our benefit and blessing, God is in no way constrained to bless our faults and sins. God’s blessing is always administered with the goal of bringing Him glory through us. In the life of Christian, his blessing may often go against our own goals and cause grief and pain as it tears us away from those things which are not pleasing to Him.

God’s blessing is not purposed for our good from our own perspective necessarily. It is instead always purposed for our own good from His perspective, and when we have been heading against His will, His blessing goes against our own will.

So it should be in our prayers for Barack Obama. He will need our prayers for the salvation and redemption of his eternal soul. He will need our prayers for God’s grace in his life, God’s wisdom in his decisions, God’s forceful and purifying love in every aspect of his life.

As politics cannot neither redeem man nor save him from himself, so the politician can no more give us our real needs than he can bring water from a rock for his own thirst.

Barack Obama, especially, will need our fervent prayers on his behalf because the real true change necessary to bring about his true alignment with God’s will and ways will require such a deep and tearing change in himself, his history, his understanding, his very soul. Such change, freeing his eternal soul and physical body from the ideas and philosophies which so enslave him right now, will be drastic and uprooting for him.

At the same time as I pray for Barack, his presidency, his salvation, and our Nation, I will, in the interest of fulfilling my obligation to God, to Barack as a fellow human, and to America, do my utmost to thwart any of the ideas or proposals which he may propose that threaten real progress and growth.

Both prayer and protection are my duty and they do not conflict.

Obama is now saying this recession could last for years, will cause double digit unemployment, and cause $1 Trillion drop in GDP.

In other words, his policies and “stimulus” will not work.

Big surprise.

But since the liberal mindset cares more about “doing something” and accomplishing anything, he will not be criticized by any of his own.

He’s lowering the expectations of his adoring fans so when they are clustered around the trash fire in the garbage can on the street corner 4 years from now wondering why Obama did not pay their mortgage, he’ll be able to justify himself.

And all this suffering AFTER he’s taken and spent a bloated “aid package” worth of our money.

However you look at it though, his election was a breakthrough to all the old Democrats who couldn’t stand the sight of a black person anywhere but bending in front of a shoe shine stand:

The consensus… is that Obama’s election at least shows that race barely matters to most people when they pick a leader. In the vanguard of that change are people under 40. They grew up in an America where people of color were routinely part of daily life – at schools and shops, and at sporting and social events.

At first blush, the Arne guy is rather interesting.

Barack Obama’s pick for Secretary of Education seems, by all counts, to be willing to make hard choices and push hard policies for the strengthening of the education system.

Pushing past all the arguments (which I tend to agree with) that education is not mandated by the Constitution as a responsibility of the Federal Government, we have what we have, and we must work with it at the same time we work to change it.

The newspapers seemed to be a little less rosy about Arne than for some of the other Obama appointees. And now they’re complaining.

What first perked my ears was when I read in the Chicago Sun-Times yesterday:

(Obama) praised Duncan’s shutdown of failing schools, charter school expansions, push for better teachers and pay-for-performance experiment that rewards teachers and principals for student test gains.

And this further down:

Chicago Teachers Union President Marilyn Stewart conceded Tuesday that she has not had a “love fest” with Duncan, who drew union ire by closing failing schools, leaving teachers scrambling to find new jobs. But Stewart said she also has been able to work with him.

Anyone whose credits include shutting down schools and drawing the ire of a Union President is probably a real reformer.

The Globe and Mail this morning hit the nail on the head:

The former head of the Chicago Teachers Union has condemned Barack Obama’s choice of Arne Duncan as education secretary – proof positive that the president-elect chose wisely.

And then this morning the gloves came off.

The Sun-Times this morning says teachers at the Chicago Public Schools board meeting were less than enthused about Arne:

With the school closing hit list due next month, teachers charged that CPS charter schools — which have replaced some closed schools — are “destroying” neighborhood schools by luring away high-scoring kids. Meanwhile, they said, neighborhood schools are being forced to absorb low-scoring kids.

This is a false argument. It’s like the kid blaming his mom when he drops his cake on the floor.

There are not rules precluding, preventing, any school from using the resources available to it to do a better job than it is doing.

It is a poor manager, superintendent, or principle who thinks because they can’t get more money they can’t improve.

In the real world, one has to improve in order to get more money. “In order” is a phrase of relative position, the process or action before the “in order” generally has to occur earlier in time than the result afterwards.

In fact, principles who complain when Arne encourage and facilitated the firing of poor performers are the worst sort of ingrates around. Our children are at stake, not your favorite pet teacher.

If the schools are so bad that people prefer to take their children out and find alternative and superior methods of instruction, shouldn’t that encourage those failing schools to reexamine their methods and seek to do better? Apparently not to some.

The Union mindset of entitlement has become ingrained so deeply in the public school system in America that someone with the guts to buck the protectionism and croneyism so common in the union is a breath of fresh air indeed.

Kudos to Obama for this selection.

And they were singing: Bye, bye miss American pie…

Yesterday the US automakers, the UAW, and the US government failed to reach an agreement that could have secured a bailout for the “Big 3″. GM is consulting with bankruptcy lawyers. Chrysler is considering selling itself. Ford is apparently mostly OK and will survive with little change.

Senate Republicans and several Democrats followed their constituents calls and stood up to another free money day for American business.

I don’t believe Darwinian Biological Evolution is likely have occurred but there is scant proof indeed than anything besides a Darwinian approach to business is dangerous to liberty and allows for bloat and growth of government both in the breadth of responsibility and the expectations of the populace. The dying ought to be allowed to die to make room for new and fresh ideas.

It is not a closely held secret, the fact the UAW does more harm to GM than it does good for its members.

The entitlement mentality of many die-hard union members I know of is something to behold. I make an honest wage for a job I truly enjoy. I’m expected to contribute to my insurance costs and my employer does as well. I’m given the choice which benefits I wish to make use of, and I have a marginal cost for each one. But for each additional cost, my employer also contributes amounts and so while I’m paying more (or taking home less in each paycheck) I’m actually earning more. The benefits are delayed but there nonetheless.

The union workers I know are decent people, no worse nor better than many others I know. However, they have become used to two paradigms at least which are either wrong or detrimental. They are used to a conflicting relationship between themselves and the management and they are used to a level of coddling by their employers at the behest of the Union.

The relationship of the employer to the employee ought to be one of shared and communicated goals and observed ability and process communication and refinement and achievement recognition. This is admittedly an optimal goal, but it is not unattainable and for it’s optimal nature it ought not be dismissed.

The Union infrastructure destroys both directions of communication necessary to the successful and profitable enterprise. By setting up a default adversarial relationship between the average workers and the management, with the workers via their Union trying to get more and more of the company ‘pie’ for themselves with deeper and longer guarantees of remuneration and the managers trying to get concessions and extra work from the increasingly insulated employees.

When you have cases where GM has shut down a factory and is still paying full wages and benefits to thousands of people there is something obviously wrong.

You may say that GM owes it’s employees something: I would get severance if I was fired, but the idea is to make me WANT to get a new job. Paying me as much as I made previously as part of some inactive workforce is sound business sense only to those without sense or with an incredibly skewed set of priorities.

Now that, directly because of the UAW’s actions, GM is in free-fall and will likely file bankruptcy, they will be firing a lot of people. There will be thousands fewer jobs. People will be in REAL hurt. Good union people too. And the UAW will be unable to to anything about it.

GM will be restructured and without the UAW in their shops.

Congressmen were quoted saying that if the UAW had only agreed to wage cuts they would have been able to salvage the bailout. Thank God they did not.

Greed and avarice are light labels for the UAW.

I will rise again…

But look out.

Barack Obama will be president soon, and the unions are virtually guaranteed that federal law will be changed to allow “card check” which will set the bar for unionizing agonizingly low. With public votes, strong arming and union thug pressure will thrive and the UAW will be able to unionize the Toyota and Honda factories.

So they’re not dead. They know their payday is coming soon.

If you don’t know Chicago politics you don’t know that corruption is the norm, and the appearance of honesty is a closely honed art. Unions run Chicago arm in arm with the Democrat political machine. They’ve delivered Obama to the White House and they are expecting a high return on investment.

My union friends have a problem, they refuse to see the forest for the trees. They are used to the safety and coddling in benefits they receive because of the Unions work, but they refuse to acknowledge their accepting the benefits of the Unions come at such a price.

Unions served their purpose, and in some cases they may still have  a valid place. Federal law for the most part has codified the reasonable purposes of the Union. But Unions are about power, and their continued presence in America is without merit.

The internet and the vast web of information and advocacy outside of the Union are quite capable of keeping accountability within the workplace without the need for the stultifying and parasitic presence of the Union.

Until the UAW dies, American industry will fail.

Some mornings I wish I didn’t peruse the news. Today was one of those mornings.

The stories were thick of people expecting things from the government, wanting the government to reach down and touch them, trying to get things through misuse of government power and responsibility.

The “big 3” are back in Washington, driving this time apparently for PR purposes, asking for more money. The proposed solutions generally include the government taking some significant stake in the companies. Everything from a “Car Czar” to enforced restructuring (which I would agree with IF I agreed with a bailout at all).

Then there are the world markets. Asian markets are quite happy the US government will step into the big brother mode again and prop up weak parts of the US economy.

And if you bail out the big guy, the little guy wants his piece of the pie too. In a small story blown big, Barack Obama has proven he really does care about the little guy and each individual American by themselves. He says the workers staging a ‘sit-in’ at a Chicago-area manufacturer are “absolutely right” in demanding not just their owed wages and normal severance pay but also pay for accrued vacation as that manufacturer has declared bankruptcy and is currently in liquidation proceedings.

Apparently Bank of America held the business credit lines for the company and refused to offer more credit as it saw the sales of the company plummetting.

The issues here, expounded upon by John and Cisco on the morning show on Chicago’s AM560, are these: What responsibility does BoA have after their own bailout and largess received from the government? And at what point should a bailed-out bank still be able to protect it’s assets by allowing truly faulty companies to fail.

The whole failure and bailout cycle is ferocious in that it is, more often than not, better to allow a company to die naturally than to prop up failed and faulty business models and management/labor relations.

My opinion? Because we’ve already got ourselves into this mess. The workers are justified in expecting a little bit of this themselves, but only what is justly owed. BoA should be admonished to extend enough credit to cover immediate owed wages to the workers with collateral being the amount the bank will recoup from the liquidation of the companies assets (I agree with John and Cisco here).

Jesse Jackson has likened the plight of these workers to that of the blacks during the civil rights movement.

That man has no shame. Willing to sell even his own birthright for another 15 minutes in the spotlight.

And both Obama and Jackson find an ally in the Socialist Worker, the newspaper of the International Socialist Organization.

Socialist Worker has strived to be a source of information like no other, presenting a socialist analysis of the events and forces that have shaped today’s world and sharing the voices of those involved in the many efforts to try to change that world. As a result, SW has always gravitated to the stories of struggle that rarely, if ever, appear in the mainstream media–the coal miners in Kentucky fighting for their rights, the South African workers and students who toppled apartheid, the young women and men who stood up to corporate globalization in the streets of Seattle, the veterans and active-duty soldiers resisting the U.S. war for oil and empire in Iraq.

Strange bed-fellows indeed. Not that it would surprise anybody who bothered researching and learning the truth prior to Election day.

But you can smile, and mean it, and affect more people than you know. If you know me you know I like to smile. A lot. It’s just so much more fun to smile than otherwise.

So when studies are showing that being happy affects more than your immediate circle of acquaintances, but can affect people up to 3 degrees removed from the original happy person, I became very happy.

Are you happier now? It’s because I am. And so are your friends.

Michael Medved opened my eyes.

On his radio show he was trying to explain on “Disagreement Day” to disheartened conservatives that trying to “purify” the Republican is not the correct course of action. The root of his argument:

You win by making your group bigger, not smaller.

First: you should not win by selling out. A win bought at so dear a price may not be worthwhile.

Second: you should not compromise your deepest principles either.

But, in my stands and beliefs there is a hierarchy: Abortion is one of my strongest concerns, to not value life is to not value life, there is no grey area. The issue of homosexual privilege is strong, though not as strong as abortion. Abortion is more external and more obviously a violation of laws and human rights and can be dealt with more legislatively than homosexual privilege.

The economy is a matter of principle: free market economics benefit the most people in a way most conducive to supporting Free Will as divised by God. But we can witness to people regardless of thier economic station and a faulty economy is less of a harm to people’s souls than abortion or homosexuality.

By balancing the hierarchy of beliefs and convictions and principles I can find ways to include people who I may have less in common with in reaching my goals.

I have no qualms working with members of the Mormon church to work for significant reinforcement of traditional marriage and the preventing of special privilege for homosexuals beyond the privilege accorded to heterosexuals, despite my serious disagreements with their beliefs.

I have no qualms working with Catholics to further the protection of the innocent unborn despite my belief that most Catholics are decieved and not Christians.

I have no problem working with athiests in pursuit of a libertarian economic policy despite serious disagreements on probably every other issue due to our differences in root beliefs.

The point is: Being wise as a serpent and harmless as a dove, I will work with any I can to achieve the ends which follow my convictions. I will be accepting and friendly to all as people so that none will have reason to say that I’m not for them as they could be for me.

With the devious I will be devious, with the narrow I will be narrow. The goal being that by any and all means, except those which violate my conscience and God’s law, we can advance the cause of physical and economic freedom here on earth for as many as possible, and hope and eternal freedom in the life hereafter for as many as will believe.

Refining this ideal is the fact that people follow a leader with a vision. It does not have to be a clearly defined vision so much as a stirring vision (or at least one spoken of stirringly, see Barack Obama). Reagan was the “Great Communicator” and people followed his visions. Barack Obama has a way with words, a visible empathy that stirs people to want to believe what he says.

Individually, we need to be ready and willing and able to act in concert with all kinds of people, making the “big tent” an actual Big Tent. Seek common ground more than ideological purity within the bounds of our own individual abilities to accept differences. Instead of finding people most like us, find people most able to bring most of us along with them in a path headed towards truth.

As a group we need to find those people who have strong and principled stands we can agree with mostly who are also strong communicators and vibrant individuals. Vision and passion have few foes who can stand against them working together.

That is my plan for real change.

Do you want to control your own resources gained from the use of your own abilities according to the dictates of your own conscience?

Then vote for McCain.

Do you want a wasteful and treacherous government to take your resources and distribute and squander them according to their whims and philosophies?

Then vote for Obama.

Do you believe that an unborn child is a human, or even barring that, do you believe that if a child survives the murderous intent of an abortion doctor and is alive outside the mother they ought to to be protected as a living being?

Then vote for McCain.

Do you believe that such a survivor, because the intent of their parents and doctor, deserves no protection and ought to be left to die?

Then vote for Obama.

Do you believe in personal responsibility?

The vote for McCain.

Do you believe the government knows best and is the best caretaker for all needy?

The vote for Obama.

It’s that simple.

The NYTimes goes through the numbers and estimates and says that Obama’s health plans will cause the cost of hiring people to go up for businesses, and this will cause businesses to decide not to hire people.

thatmarkguy says the NAA(L)CP is really involved in this election. More so than the last one. Much more so.

Compare the homepages then and now. There is one link to an article lower on the homepage regarding voter supression back in 2004, when two old white men were once again battling for head honcho.

Now the website looks like an election campaign, complete with the large black bus with the slogan “Vote Hard”. Conspicuously absent is the direct object. I suppose they expect the reader to add their own as applicable: “Left” being their preference.

Election 2008:

Election 2004:

It’s almost like it’s the leftists who want it to be about race while screaming interminably about how racist the right is…

Whodathunkit?!?

Some good and sane friends of mine have professed their decision to support a third party candidate on the contention he is a closer match to their own beliefs.

It struck me in reading their comments that just as many in America are looking toward Barack Obama as a messianic figure of boundless ability, there are many conservatives looking to Washington with too much longing and desire.

McCain/Palin can no more be expected to be capable of delivering on many of their campaign promises than can Barack/(whoever he’s running with). Neither can any of the third-party candidates be trusted to perform most of their promises.

And it is our mindless braying for salvation from Washington DC that feeds these pols need to fill our hungry little mouths with meaningless lies.

Even many conservatives have fallen prey to the temptation to vote ourselves pieces of the pie. Our desired pieces are just not necessarily monetary.

Our true Savior, Jesus, is the only one deserving of the desire and hope pinned on our candidates. To put it anywhere else is to commit idolatry and to set ourselves up for the failure of our hopes and dreams.

When our hope is in the Lord, we are less likely to put a false or unhealthy amount of hope in humans. We are anchored to the only Rock which cannot be moved. The inherent property of the Rock that is Jesus is that it cannot be moved.

No matter the storms of time, that Rock ever has and ever shall hold firm.

With a steady Rock to stand on, I am free to take the long view.

I do not need to look for salvation from Washington DC because I know real help comes from above.