Franken: Another liberal chickenhawk

There are plenty of political people (politicians and pundits) worth loathing: unprincipled schmucks on both sides of the aisle. The newest addition to the U.S. Senate, Al Franken, was a hilarious writer and side performer on SNL during the glory years of the 1970s. I still chuckle over his kiss-off to the Me Decade as the "Me, Al Franken" decade dawned.

I also fondly remember his sketches with writing partner Tom Davis, in particular the Tony Orlando & Dawn skit (with knitting needles driven into their eye sockets -- the kind of anarchic, bizarre humor that made those years on SNL so great).

I have no idea what sort of senator Franken will be. He can be perceptive and sharp. He can also be craven and dishonest, as the Independent Institute's Anthony Gregory points out today in the II's blog:

In chapter 41 of Liars, Franken discusses how he was among the many deceived about the war, convinced by Bush of its necessity because, after all, “the world changed” on 9/11, and the U.S. government needed to deal with Saddam’s infamous Weapons of Mass Destruction. Franken cites the uranium-from-Niger lie as the piece of evidence that clinched it for him. When it became politically correct to point out that Bush had lied the country into war, Franken felt so betrayed.

But actually, that uranium lie was discredited before the war even began. Given that he had so many researchers helping him with his book, he should have known that.

Besides, even if he did believe every single piece of propaganda about Saddam’s non-existent weapons program—and here, by the way, is my Independent Institute article from before the war, explaining why we could not trust the propaganda and why the case for war was so transparently without credibility—he should have still opposed the war. There was never any justifiable reason to support Bush’s plan to wage aggressive war on the people of Iraq, to murder many thousands of them, even if you believed Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction. It is an act of aggression to start a war, even if the enemy has scary weapons. The U.S. has a weapons stockpile that makes all the Middle East countries combined—even including Israel—seem minor in comparison. But that sure didn’t justify 9/11, did it?

Don't get me wrong -- Norm Coleman isn't any better, and I really couldn't care less who won that race. But if you're tempted to think Franken will somehow be different from all the "lying liars" he's had fun (and occasionally been very funny at) lampooning, you'd be wise to reconsider.

Our crumbling education infrastructure: Chicago

I happen to admire school teachers. A lot. I am the son of a teacher and brother of another one. There is no harder job that pays less or demands more. So nothing in this post is meant to slam teachers, even though a critique of teachers' unions is never misplaced.

Parsing blame has a purpose, but things have gotten so bad in public schools that it's hard not to blame our entire culture for the ever-declining standards of public education. For instance, Chicago Public Schools, from which comes our current Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. Duncan led a The much-vaunted improved test scores, as it turns out, were a trick of statistical manipulation, according to a new report from the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago:

Half of the students drop out by high school, and of those who remain until 11th grade, 70% fail to meet state standards, the report says. In fact, "In the regular (non-magnet) neighborhood high schools, which serve the vast preponderance of students, almost no students are prepared to succeed in college."

The report directly challenges widespread claims by current and former CPS officials that local students have shown substantial progress over the last decade on standardized tests.

For instance, it notes a 2006 letter from then schools CEO Arne Duncan, now U.S. secretary of education, stating that the share of CPS students meeting or exceeding state standards had leapt 15 points in one year.

In fact, it says, the change occurred because of a change in the test, not because of real educational gains. As a result, it points out, while a test cited by local officials showed that 71% of 8th graders met or exceeded state standards in 2007, a national test taken here the same year showed just 13% were up to par.

Wow! Only off by 58 percent! Not bad, by public school standards, at least. But even worse is the fact that fully half of the students in the CPS system drop out before they enter high school. Small wonder that juvenile violence is such an issue in that city.

As the economy continues to dive, even a high school diploma will lose its diminishing value in the ever-tightening job market. Not even making it to high school -- and remember, that's fully one-half of Chicago public school students -- is utter damnation for the future, but a great recruiting ground for the increasingly violent gangs the city of Chicago is famous for.

The corruption that plagues everything in Chicago does not stop at the schoolhouse door, either.

On a related note, here's a great roundup of Chicago's most famous corruption cases. Mind you, it only skims the surface. And it's 5 pages long. As the Jossip writer notes, "The reason Chicago politics is so corrupt is because, in modern American history, it's never not been, which makes it very difficult to clean up."

Cap and Trade: Will it work?

It seems unlikely, from a variety of points of view. Greenpeace is opposed, as are most trade groups. It's yet another effort to get around a direct tax by coming up with a system for taxing without calling it a tax. It will result in job losses; the question is, how many, and how soon. The Brookings Institution estimates a 0.5 bump in unemployment.

As E. Thomas McClanahan writes in the Kansas City Star:

How do you end up with a vibrant economy and lots of net job creation by forcing people to pay higher energy prices? Well, you don’t, and that’s why this measure is one of the biggest threats to the U.S. economy ever to emerge on Capitol Hill. ...

The whole purpose of the bill is to force people to pay more for energy. That won’t spur economic growth. It will retard it, by slowing the growth of consumer spending, which makes up the greatest share of the gross domestic product. The result will be lower output and fewer jobs.

The notion that cap-and-trade will do little harm came from a recent Congressional Budget Office analysis that pegged the bill’s annual cost in 2020 at a mere $175 for the average family. (Lower-income households would get a rebate reducing their energy costs by $40.)

The Heritage Foundation pointed out that incredibly the CBO study failed to include in its calculations the overall effect on economic growth. The bill would not only make energy prices go up, but — because energy costs raise production costs generally — it would make the prices of almost everything else rise as well.

Earlier this year, Pres. Obama said that transitioning to a green economy would mean real economic pain -- he was right (and deserves credit for being honest then, at least). Now the message from Democrats is that somehow, magically, jobs will be created by higher energy prices and, er, lost jobs in the traditional energy fields. But they're apparently not as confident as all that; the Waxman-Markey (aka ACES) bill contains provisions to compensate workers laid off by the economic pressures the new system will undoubtedly produce.

The European Union's system, the Emissions Trading Scheme, has had mixed results, to put it mildly. Investors Business Daily reported that the system has major flaws, including perverse incentives not to upgrade to environmentally friendly technologies. Even environmental groups have given the ETS a collective thumbs down, according to IBD:

Begun in 2005, the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme has raised energy prices with "uncertain" effects on greenhouse gas emissions, according to numerous studies.

Even green groups have been critical. The Natural Resources Defense Council, for example, has called ETS "an example of what not to do."

This failure has not daunted fans of Congress' cap-and-trade bill. They claim to have learned from the earlier mistakes.

In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Harvard Prof. Martin Feldstein argued that any unilateral (i.e., without anything compelling China and India to tighten environmental clamps) move toward cap-and-trade in the U.S. would raises costs without delivering any significant environmental benefit:

The Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that the resulting increases in consumer prices needed to achieve a 15 percent CO2 reduction -- slightly less than the Waxman-Markey target -- would raise the cost of living of a typical household by $1,600 a year. Some expert studies estimate that the cost to households could be substantially higher. The future cost to the typical household would rise significantly as the government reduces the total allowable amount of CO2.

Americans should ask themselves whether this annual tax of $1,600-plus per family is justified by the very small resulting decline in global CO2. Since the U.S. share of global CO2 production is now less than 25 percent (and is projected to decline as China and other developing nations grow), a 15 percent fall in U.S. CO2 output would lower global CO2 output by less than 4 percent. Its impact on global warming would be virtually unnoticeable. The U.S. should wait until there is a global agreement on CO2 that includes China and India before committing to costly reductions in the United States.

Remember who pushed this scheme to start with in the U.S. Not Congress -- Enron -- and there is a reason they were hot to set this market up, as US News & World Report's William O'Keefe pointed out:

The cap-and-trade system being touted on Capitol Hill would create a multibillion-dollar playground that would, once again, create a group of wealthy traders benefiting at the expense of millions of average families—middle to low-income households that would end up paying more for food, energy, and almost everything else they buy.

Enron executives—before their well-deserved fall—did little to conceal their lust for cap-and-trade. In 2002, the Washington Post reported that "an internal Enron memo said the Kyoto agreement, if implemented, would do more to promote Enron's business than almost any other regulatory initiative outside of restructuring the energy and natural gas industries in Europe and the United States."

Promoting the bottom lines of opportunists is not the job of policymakers. Assisting the staggering 2.6 million American workers who lost their jobs in just the last four months should be. With our nation struggling through the worst economic crisis in over 70 years, Congress shouldn't risk further economic damage by pushing a risky carbon emission mitigation scheme. There are far better alternatives for dealing with climate change.

Do we really want to go down this road? Apparently so.

Why this conservative Christian loves gay people

In a sentence: Because they're fallible sinners, just like me. Because God commands it. That's my view in the aggregate.

As for my individual gay friends, because they're wonderful -- each in his own (very different way). I treasure our friendships. I am thankful for them, even though they don't share my faith (for the most part). I don't want to think about what my life would be like without them.

In other words, it's the same as the way I feel about my straight friends, with only individual differences that have nothing to do with who they bunk with.

I have struggled mightily with the issue of homosexuality -- both within my life, years ago, and with the issue in general, since before that. Much has changed in the past 30 years or so, and much of that is good. Gay people aren't ridiculed, assaulted, or imprisoned for who they are to the degree they once were. And we've all learned a lot about gay people because so many of us have gay friends, gay family members, gay colleagues, gay leaders, or all the above.

But I was opposed to gay marriage ... until very recently. I believed that marriage was a foundational institution in our nation and culture, that tampering with it would open a Pandora's box of more difficult moral questions that could easily be answered to the horror of many of us.

I no longer believe that.

Gay marriage, I believe, would be a net positive for our society because it would bring greater stability on the whole. That's the broad view. Gay marriage, individually, would mean great joy (at least initially!) for millions of Americans.

(As a really solid piece on NPR this morning made clear, it's time for the military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy to go, too. Gay marriage would mean that military spouses would at least be notified when their loved ones die while serving their country, and entitle them to the benefits they should, by all rights, have coming.)

Of course, I'd love to see the government get out of marriage completely. If two (or more) consenting adults want to bond together in loving union and call that marriage, that's their business, not mine.

I would strongly support a mandatory age minimum of 18 for marriage, regardless, unless a pregnancy is involved.

So, what does the Bible teach about homosexuality? Banned for the fledgling Jewish nation of Israel; seemingly condemned in Rom. 1, although "unnatural acts" is never defined (though presumably, given Paul's Judaism, including all the Levitical laws regarding sexuality). This is a difficult, thorny issue, to be sure for any honest Christian who holds the Bible in authoritative regard. I don't know how to reconcile my Libertarian views on marriage and my Biblical views of personal morality.

But I do understand what I believe (at long last) and why I believe it. I realize that this will not sit well with some (perhaps many) of my Christian friends, and I am sorry for giving offense. I do not intend to offend anyone, even though that is unavoidable.

Count the cost

Just stand there and take it. Nothing harder. But that's what Christians are called to do, commanded to do. The world is full of people who will insult us, demean us, even persecute us. That's OK. It's to be expected, in fact. The life and walk of a Christian is supposed to be hard, profoundly difficult at times. Jesus said:

Now great crowds accompanied him, and he turned and said to them, "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, 'This man began to build and was not able to finish.' Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.
--Luke 14:25-33

Now, where might one find "health and wealth" in that passage? Where does the multi-million dollar homes, the mutli-million-dollar jets, fit in with the Savior's vision of discipleship?

You won't. And the passages that these wolves-in-sheep's-clothing quote are very, very selective, stretched out of all proportion to justify the unjustifiable.

There will be hell to pay for twisting the Word of God to suit one's own greed and ambition:

"Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea."
--Mark 9:42

"Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by their fruits. "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?' And then will I declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.'"
--Matthew 7:15-23

R.C. Sproul once called vv. 21-23 the most frightening passages in the New Testament. I tend to agree. But it's fair warning. Christ wants the heart devoted to Him; that's what He gave to us. There is no substitute. And living like rich people reveals a heart that is far, far from Christ.

Obama-nomics: Borrowing and spending so we can borrow and spend more

Der Spiegel's Gabor Steingart has been an apt chronicler of our nation's decline. His series on that very subject, from last year, was dead on. (His pieces on U.S. politics and campaigns, while enjoyable to read, are frequently wrong in their predictions, on the other hand.) He has a new article on our fiscal insanity, a continuation of George W. Bush's nitwit excesses by Obama's overmatched economic team. A particularly choice passage:

The crisis, Summers intoned last week at a conference of Deutsche Bank's Alfred Herrhausen Society in Washington, was caused by too much confidence, too much credit and too many debts. It was hard not to nod along in agreement.

But then Summers added that the way to bring about an end to the crisis was -- more confidence, more credit and more debt. And the nodding stopped. Experts and non-experts alike were perplexed. Even in an interview following the presentation, Summers was unable to supply an adequate explanation for how a crisis caused by frivolous lending was going to be solved through yet more frivolity.

Mind you, this is precisely what Nobel Prize-winner Paul Krugman recommends -- except he recommends even more borrowing and spending:

As for worries about increasing the national debt, Krugman said there's still plenty of room for the United States to borrow without losing the confidence of the financial markets.

"Belgium has debt equal to 87 percent of its gross domestic product," he said. "That's 40 percent higher than ours, with no financial crisis. So we can probably run up another $6 trillion in debt."

Belgium has no financial crisis? That may come as news to Belgium:

Belgium's economy will shrink by 2.5 percent this year and grow by a modest 0.3 percent in 2010 with a steeply rising budget deficit, the International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday.

'With a protracted global financial crisis and recessions in partner countries, GDP growth is expected to contract sharply in 2009 and to recover only sluggishly in 2010, with significant downside risks,' the IMF said in a report.

Paul Krugman is a very smart man, but he's got his blind spots, like the rest of us.

Another "pastor" out to fleece the flock

Why is it that idiot-level ethics eludes so many "Christian" leaders? Latest under the microscope: David Cerullo (son of the also-noxious Morris), whose $4 million home continues even as his Inspiration Ministries continues with layoffs and pay freezes. The (Raleigh, NC) News & Observer reports:

At a time when Inspiration Networks has been cutting jobs, freezing wages and even adjusting the office thermostat to save money, the chief executive of the Charlotte-area broadcaster has invested about $4 million in a lakefront home under construction in South Carolina.
CEO David Cerullo's new house includes more than 9,000 heated square feet, along with a 2,000-square-foot screened porch, records show. It sits on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains west of Greenville in a gated community that overlooks Lake Keowee.
And it's shaping up to be one of the priciest houses in western South Carolina. On Realtor.com, just two homes in the greater Greenville area are on the market for more than $4 million.

It's not just sad; it's angering. Thankfully, Cerullo is being investigated:

Cerullo's fast-growing religious network, meanwhile, is drawing scrutiny for the money it collects from donors and the incentives it won from the state of South Carolina to move from Charlotte. ...

S.C. taxpayers are already helping to subsidize the project. In recent years, South Carolina offered the broadcaster incentives worth up to $26 million to land its City of Light campus.
Taxpayer advocates question the deal, particularly in light of Cerullo's salary and real estate holdings. “If they've got these kinds of assets, does the state really need to offer… tax breaks?” asked Don Weaver, president of the S.C. Association of Taxpayers.

Naturally, Cerullo is one of the false "health and wealth" preachers who collectively blacken the eyes of Christians (as if we needed more of it). It's past time that Christians started cleaning house by withholding donations for those who use the faith as an ATM.