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  • Health Care: If It's a Tax, It Should be Called One

    That’s the core issue of challenges to the health care law:

    When 21 states and several private groups initiated lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the Obama health care law earlier this year, critics denounced the suits as frivolous political grandstanding. But it is increasingly clear that the plaintiffs have a serious case with a real chance of victory.

    The suits focus primarily on challenges to the new law’s “individual mandate,” which requires most American citizens to purchase a government-approved health insurance plan by 2014 or pay a fine. One of the cases was filed by 20 state governments and the National Federation of Independent Business in a federal court in Florida. Another was initiated by the Commonwealth of Virginia in a federal court in this state, and a third by the Thomas More Law Center in Michigan…

    The federal government claims that Congress has the power to impose the mandate under the Commerce Clause, the Necessary and Proper Clause, and the Tax Clause of the Constitution. On the first two claims, Judge Vinson ruled that Supreme Court precedent doesn’t clearly support the government, thereby enabling the plaintiffs’ lawsuit to go forward. He outright rejected the government’s claim that the mandate is constitutional because it is a “tax.” It is instead a financial penalty for refusing to comply with a federal regulation. As Judge Vinson pointed out, congressional leaders consistently emphasized before the law’s enactment that it was not a tax.

    In September 2009, President Obama himself noted that “for us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase.” He was right. If the mandate qualifies as a tax merely because it punishes violators with a fine, then Congress could require Americans to do almost anything on pain of having to pay a fine if they refuse. It could, for example, force citizens to buy virtually any product, such as purchasing General Motors cars for the purpose of helping the struggling auto industry.

    This is the end result of a political system where transparency is out the window.

    It may seem like a semantic difference.  But that semantic difference is what got the health care bill passed.  Had its proponents–Obama and the Democrats in Congress–done the obvious and proposed a tax to pay for those who couldn’t afford health care, not even Nancy Pelosi could have gotten it through.  (We’re already doing that with Medicaid, so that precedent is established).  But instead they went the route of requiring people to purchase a product from a non-governmental source that they may or may not want.  All the while they characterised the requirement as a “non-tax”.  Now they have no right to complain when the courts call their bluff.

    I’m not sure that the courts will, in the end, toss this thing out.  Our judiciary has a strange way these days of not discerning where their values end and where the law starts.  For people with substantial incomes, making others pay for anything might not seem much of a requirement.  But how you see that depends upon what end of the economic spectrum you’re at.

  • The LGBT Community Shifts toward the GOP

    Hard to believe, but…

    More self-identified gay voters chose the GOP in the midterm elections than in previously recorded totals, according to a CNN exit poll.

    Thirty-one percent of self-identified gay voters cast their ballots for Republicans on Tuesday, 4 percentage points more than in 2008, according to a similar CNN exit poll…

    “The gay left would have you believe that gay conservatives don’t exist,” said GOProud Executive Director Jimmy LaSalvia. “Now we see that almost a third of self-identified gay voters cast ballots for Republican candidates for Congress in this year’s midterm.”

    In Europe, the trend of LGBT people voting with the right is driven by the Islamicists.  In this country, I suspect the economy is causing this.  The Tea Party, for all of the catcalls from the left, has put economic issues at the centre of the agenda as opposed to social ones, and that in turn reflects the state of the country.  It’s hard to maintain any kind of lifestyle when the economy is in the tank.

    Now if we could just get civil marriage abolished…

  • The Old British Tactic of Playing Off Minority Races Against Majority Ones

    This interesting tidbit, buried in an Asia Times Online piece about why Myanmar (Burma) has been a string of dictatorships and conflicts since independence:

    During Myanmar’s period of colonial rule, from 1886 to 1948, Great Britain preferred hiring ethnic minorities to work in its colonial administration, for fear of putting the majority Burman in positions of power. As a result, ethnic nationals were often better educated and developed strong ethnic identities.

    After independence was declared in 1948, the tables were turned and Burman politicians dominated the government, with long memories of their time in exile. “Many ethnic leaders viewed the Burman leaders as hegemons whom they could not trust,” writes Myanmar observer Kyaw Yin Hlaing. “They agreed to join the union only out of respect for General Aung San.”

    Convening a meeting at the town of Panglong, Aung San promised an equal power-sharing agreement, pledging to ethnic minority leaders that they could opt out of the union 10 years after independence if the benefits of cooperation failed to materialize.

    The “Panglong Agreement” gave rise to a spirit of equal representation that would be short lived. After Aung San was killed, Burman leaders tried but failed to work the agreement into the new constitution. Ethnic minority groups rebelled, with a handful launching civil wars against the Burman majority.

    Does this sound familiar?

    It’s interesting to note that Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Prize winner, is Aung San’s daughter.

  • Getting Past Panic in the Climate Change Debate

    Without including engineers, who are charged with coming up with solutions to the problem, things get pretty irrational, as the September-October 2010 edition of Geo-Strata notes:

    Evolution has been at work on the climate situation recently. Let’s overlook the late 1970s forecast of an impending ice age and focus on the early- to mid-2000s ‘global warming’ discussion. Cooler temperatures and climate science research concerns notwithstanding, the term became ‘climate change’ even as governments sought to establish policies to restrict Man-generated green house gasses that were considered to be the cause of global warming. The transportation industry concluded in 2008 that the impacts of climate change could be handled best by adaptation strategies. The global warming evolution thus became ‘environmental change’ which permits consideration of non- climate processes, such as coastal subsidence, in a holistic way.

    Global warming policies were created without significant input from engineers. Sensational sound bites and photos of pathetic polar bears played on a scientifically illiterate society to pit the environment against development. Skeptics of (Milutin) Milankovitch’s theory (the wobbling of the earth’s axis as it rotate around the Sun) found items to support their objections to it; Milankovitch was reported to have been untroubled by the criticisms, commenting that it was not his duty to educate the ignorant. Geo-engineers today should be aware of opportunities to ‘educate the ignorant,’ but society seems to be filled with well-meaning, but misinformed, people who are unduly influenced by Hollywood science and environmental activism, making the education task more challenging. It seems that the transportation industry’s adaptation strategy for dealing with climate change also may be the best approach for dealing with climate-change policies.

    Emphasis mine.

    The article is “Commentary: Is Uniformitarianism Sustainable in an Age of Environmental Change?” by Jeffrey R. Keaton.

  • NPR News and Fox Not News? You've Got to be Kidding!

    But that’s still NPR’s line re the firing of Juan Williams, as elucidated at the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches:

    When asked about the firing of Juan Williams by NPR for comments he made on Fox News, (NPR Political Editor Ken) Rudin said he regretted the way it happened, but it was almost inevitable. Rudin said he doesn’t think commentators should appear on both NPR and FOX because Fox is opinion and NPR is news.

    It’s not a liberal versus conservative issue,  Rudin said, because he would feel the same way about an NPR commentator going on Olbermann’s or Maddow’s show.

    “Juan was a time bomb waiting to happen because he was saying a lot of incendiary things, and that’s what you do when you go on Fox,” Rudin said.

    “You can’t serve two masters, especially Fox, which doesn’t believe in the same journalistic principles that we do.”

    That has to rate one of the most sanctimonious things I’ve ever heard a liberal say, and that’s saying a lot…

    Juan Williams is probably one of the least incendiary people who regularly appear on cable news, period.  I don’t always agree with him but he makes sense and I admire him.

    Dragging MSNBC into this is a red herring (literally), although I suspect that NPR sees MSNBC as sharing/competing for the same audience.  And no one is going on Olbermann’s show in the near future, because Bathtub Boy has been suspended for contributing to Democrats (surprise)!

    It just gets crazier and crazier…

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  • Some Closing Thoughts on Cyril of Jerusalem's Catechetical Lectures

    This is the twelfth and last in a sporadic series on the Catechetical Lectures of St. Cyril of Jerusalem.  The previous post was Mystagogy, Sacramental Theology and the Poker Playing Dog.

    It’s time, I suppose, to “put a wrap” on this long series on the Cathechetical Lectures of Cyril of Jerusalem. For me at least, it has been a rewarding journey. Whether it has been so for the readers of this blog is something only time will tell.

    Looking at this blog, people probably ask themselves, “Why does this guy stick with an Evangelical—and specifically Pentecostal—church?” That’s a legitimate question, and the answer to that isn’t easy or straightforward. But let me set forth the most important reason, and what is, in my opinion, the greatest lesson of Cyril’s Catechetical Lectures.

    As I observed in my critique of Jim Wallis’ book, Christianity isn’t primarily a moral system. To say that it is or act as if it is is a grave mistake. It is the restoration of our relationship with God through Jesus Christ, his removal of our sin and his transformation of our very being. It’s true that this transformation results in us doing things we didn’t do before and not doing things we did before, but putting “doing things” before the transformation is putting the cart before the horse. Those who have experienced this transformation gather into what we conventionally call the church, the “called out” ones.

    That puts me on the wrong side of many people. It certainly puts me on the wrong side of both liberals like Wallis and others who believe that Christianity is a moral system. It also puts me on the wrong side of these who think the church comes before the people, that Christians exist to serve the institution—and receive salvation therefrom—and not the church serving the “called out ones”.

    Evangelical churches have distinguished themselves by emphasising the primacy of a real relationship between Jesus Christ and people. I would be the first to admit that they’ve not been perfect: there’s a lot of “churchianity” out there and these days Evangelicals—especially in the West—have been attracting the “poker playing dog” rather than recruiting leaders. But Evangelical Christianity has not survived centuries of marginalisation and legal obstacles to thrive and expand the way it has by simply offering a milquetoast gospel.  That emphasis is the main reason why I’ve stuck with one over the years.

    That, unfortunately, has been the response of the “Apostolic” churches. Rather than really challenge their people on a consistent basis, these churches have contented themselves with making Christianity a cultural statement. Baptising infants and running people through ritual and sacrament has given a false sense of security to many in these churches. In the past, when we had “Christendom”, that made for institutional perpetuation, but whether by force of arms or cultural changes that won’t cut it for the propagation of the faith.

    The big lesson that Cyril has in these lectures—for me at least—is that it doesn’t have to be that way, that Christianity isn’t the either/or proposition it has become.

    Cyril is a product of a church that, within living memory, survived three centuries of persecution, the last sixty years of which were especially arduous. One of the advantages of venerating martyrs is that you remember them, and the fact that they gave their lives for Jesus Christ. Some of that persecution persisted via Arianising emperors, a process ongoing when the lectures were given.

    Cyril is also a product of a church which had no problem making demands of its adherents, both current and prospective. Jesus set out a demanding gospel, and that had been handed down to Cyril’s day. The fourth century is portrayed as the time when the church sold out to the state and the culture, but it didn’t do so without a fight. Part of that fight was monasticism, but not all. Cyril makes it abundantly clear that those who choose Christ and are baptised in his name need to reflect that commitment in their lives in a real way, a view unchanged by his real sacramentalism.

    Cyril also from time to time brings up another issue: the issue of the Christian sexual ethic. Today we have two unappetising choices set before us. The first is what David Virtue refers to as the “pansexual” ethic, where anything goes and, as long as it’s a committed relationship, it’s okay, and everyone who doesn’t like it are bigots and homophobes. The second is what I call “beauty pageant Christianity,” where, as long as it’s heterosexual and we state that sex is to be kept in the bounds of marriage, then just about anything goes. That’s one reason why we have the divorce rate we have in Evangelical churches and fiascos like Carrie Prejean. Cyril comes from a church where the renunciation of sex, although not universal, is a real option for Christians, and that’s something that has been shoved under the rug these days. Jesus’ demands for sexual purity are higher than just about anything being taught these days, and Cyril was as aware of this fact as we are not.

    It has been my view for a long time that the “Apostolic” churches were God’s “Plan A”, and that the gaggle of groups we have today the result of human failure. If same churches really want to get the momentum back and move things towards real unity, they should ditch infant baptism (or at least make it optional) and catechise those who come into the church in a similar manner to Cyril. Doing this would put Evangelicals in a corner, but the goal is the unity of the church and the propagation of the gospel.

    In Patristic studies, Cyril is generally regarded as a thinker of “second rank”. He is neither a theologian like Athanasius and Gregory Nazianzus nor a preacher on the order of John Chrysostom. But his basic theology is sound, and the lectures give us a priceless picture of basic discipleship in the Patristic church, which brings many issues of the day into a more comprehensible perspective.

    But he also brings some issues of our own day in a new light, and that is where Cyril can take his place amongst the greatest.

  • Transportation Lobbyists Better Work With the Winners

    That’s what they’re paid to do:

    There was a palpable sense of disbelief in the air at Wednesday’s gathering of the Minnesota Transportation Alliance.

    On Tuesday, the transportation advocates saw some of their biggest boosters, including U.S. Rep. Jim Oberstar, chair of the House transportation committee, go down to defeat as Republicans took control of the U.S. House and the Minnesota Legislature.

    “We’re all certainly in mourning,” a somewhat serious Margaret Donahoe, executive director of the Alliance, said at the event.

    “How do you spell tsunami?” asked Dennis McGrann, a lobbyist with the firm of Lockridge, Grindal & Lauen who represents various Minnesota transportation interests in Washington. “There has been a huge sea change in Washington.”

    Oberstar, who lost to Republican newcomer Chip Cravaack, has his imprint on a $500 billion, six-year federal transportation package that would significantly increase federal spending on roads, bridges and mass transit.

    And at the state level, voters took power away from the party that famously overrode Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s veto to secure passage of a $6.6 billion transportation funding package in 2008.

    Still, transportation lobbyists who spoke at the event described the political upheaval in Washington and St. Paul as an opportunity to reach out to new leaders and continue their push for more transportation investment.

    “This is a new class,” lobbyist Gary Botzek said. “It’s our job to educate and inform these new students.”

    Oh yes, it is.

    Although many in the transportation industry have the idea that the Democrats are more favourable to transportation (read: infrastructure) spending, the reality is that neither party has as strong of a commitment to transportation infrastructure–to say nothing of any other kind of infrastructure–improvement.

    The Republicans reflexively call infrastructure spending “government spending” and oppose it.  The exception they always carve out is the military; perhaps if DOD was the lead agency rather than the FHWA, they would feel differently.  (They are on Corps of Engineers projects).  This was one of the major disappointments of George W. Bush: for all of his willingness to deficit spend, he short shrifted infrastructure improvements.

    The Democrats, for all of their talk of economic progress, prefer wealth transfer than infrastructure investment.  That’s one reason why the stimulus was something of a letdown for transportation spending.  Another was the aggressive lobbying of feminist groups to direct money to groups that proportionally employed more women.  This contributed to the “he-session” and is an insult to all of the fine women engineers and other female transportation professionals.   And then, of course, there are all of the ’60’s radicals left over who think that primitive living is the answer for all of us.

    The blunt truth of the matter is that every “bridge to nowhere” has a greater contribution to the general productivity of our economy and nation than the vast majority of government entitlements.  The sooner both parties understand the connection between infrastructure improvement and the productivity of our economy, the better.

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  • The Nastiest Election of the Season, and Yes, They're Smoking Something

    A couple of interesting tidbits from this election cycle: first, concerning Allen West’s victory over Ron Klein (congratulations are in order) in Florida’s 22nd Congressional District, the Palm Beach Daily News noted the following:

    The West-Klein race was one of the nastiest campaigns of the season.

    Only the Shiny Sheet would put it this way.  But now that the election season is out of the way, Palm Beach can turn to what really counts: the social season.

    And this concerning the downfall of Proposition 19 in California, which would have legalised marijuana, this back and forth from the proponents and opponents (emphasis mine):

    “It’s still a historic moment in this very long struggle to end decades of failed marijuana prohibition,” said Stephen Gutwillig, California director for the Drug Policy Project. “Unquestionably, because of Proposition 19, marijuana legalization initiatives will be on the ballot in a number of states in 2012, and California is in the mix.”

    Tim Rosales, who managed the No on 19 campaign, scoffed at that attitude from the losing side.

    “If they think they are going to be back in two years, they must be smoking something,” he said. “This is a state that just bucked the national trend and went pretty hard on the Democratic side, but yet in the same vote opposed Prop 19. I think that says volumes as far as where California voters are on this issue.”

    Mr. Rosales is quick on his feet, but that’s the whole point of this: they are smoking something, and want to make it legal.   Rosales also has a point when he observes the state that just flushed two successful Republican women to preserve the People’s Republic characteristic of the place turned around and nixed the legalisation of marijuana, a cause célèbre of the left since the 1960’s.  It may not be the point he wanted to make, though: it looks to me like the people of California have moved on to other mind-alterning substances, the most serious of which is government money, which Californians like to burn with glee.  That in turn explains the financial condition of the state, and I’m not holding my breath about that being fixed any time soon.

    Personally I think the legalisation of marijuana (along with other drugs) is coming, as was the case with same sex civil marriage (another phenomenon Californians voted down).  Then we’ll be regaled with pop-up ads like, “No stems, no seeds that you don’t need…”

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  • The Closet Socialists are Still in the Closet

    The late 1970’s and early 1980’s were an exciting time for me for this reason, but they were also a stressful time.  Between the challenge of dealing with a Scots-Irish workforce (organised and otherwise) and a “culture of envy” which hadn’t experienced the Reagan Era, things could get frustrating.  It got to the point where I confided in a friend that I felt that many of the people around me were, underneath a capitalistic veneer, basically socialists.  My friend, who was born and raised in the area, agreed with me.

    And this was in the South.

    Things are never simple in Dixie.  Chambers of commerce here always tout a hard-working ethic that dislikes trade unions, but our business was organised within a year and a half of arrival, and the majority population’s ancestors didn’t come to these shores to be told what to do, or even if they had to do anything.  It’s certainly possible to make progress, but it takes a different, more relational approach, and at that point I certainly hadn’t mastered it.  On the other hand it was and is a lower tax regime than we had back in Illinois, but that’s not an ideological statement; it’s just an ingrained cultural dislike to have to shell out one’s money to take someone else “to raise,” to use a colourful expression.

    In some ways that seeming contradiction is the root cause of the disaster that the Democrats have experienced in this 2010 mid-term election.  They can see that the American people like, on the whole, to receive government benefits.  So they come up with them, health care being their signature achievement in that regard.  They step back, figuring they had bought the electorate.  What they have bought is a lot of trouble, and a pushback that has many of them scratching their heads.  Unlike the LGBT community, where people get outed against their will (and that somtimes with tragic consequences), the closet socialists are still safely in the closet.

    Some of the issues are straightforward.  Our federal government has a talent for taking the simple and making it complicated.  Government benefits are seldom “user-friendly” and usually take a great deal of patience and a knack for navigating bureaucracies (finding the right person is problem #1) to obtain results.  For a people used to the consumeristic convenience of the private sector, this is a bummer.  If our government, for example, would just stop dreaming up new programs and work on the “marketing” of its existing ones, it would have more fans.  Obama’s health care maze is a good example; with its endless list of agencies involved and the outside organisations like the insurance companies thrown in for good measure, getting benefits out of it will be a challenge, and the shifting of costs will produce sore losers.

    Another simple issue is the debt.  If there’s one thing Americans understand, it’s being in debt: on the whole, we’re up to our eyeballs in it.  It’s hard to sell a people on ballooning debt for any reason when the central cause of angst for many is their own ballooning debt.  People understand that not only are the “children” and “grandchildren” (the usual final appeal in American politics) at risk; their own bennies are on the line.

    But beyond the obvious there’s the obvious contradiction.  Americans fancy themselves as a self-reliant, individualistic people, and their self-image is built on that.  But anyone who has led or managed our people know that things are more complicated than that.  In the past, our leaders have understood how to play “both sides of the street” and win, and many in the corporate world still do.  In places where the government is still reflective of the governed, that still holds.

    Given, however, that our political system is divided by ideology–a fairly recent innovation for Americans, although it seems rather permanent to some of us–we have the spectacle of two parties, each controlled by an intellectually homogeneous base, who think that life will be good for everyone if their program is uncritically adopted.  For those caught in the middle, neither side has figured it out, and that becomes especially evident when our economy goes “poop side down,” as happened in 2008.  What we have now is a situation where the electorate swings from one side to the other, dissatisfied with the present situation but having only one alternative.

    As I see it, there are only three ways out of this mess that would keep the United States united.

    The first two are the victory of one side or the other and the relegation of the loser to the asheap of history, or more accurately the Federal penitentary system.   That’s certainly possible; had Barack Obama put that as his #1 objective, pursued it administratively and left Congress out of the loop, he would be further down the road to a more permanent victory than he is now.

    The third is the development of a multi-party system and the coalition politics/haggling that goes along with it.  Divided government is a form of that, but in reality our present constitutional system–along with our Anglophone political sensibilities–rule out that kind of thing.

    But in the end it may not matter.  Unless this newly divided government discovers what fiscal restraint is–and I’m not holding my breath–our debt will eventually overwhelm our ability to earn our way out of it (and that ability is increasingly encumbered by the legal and regulatory maze we have for business people).  At that point we’ll have lots of choices, because our continent will be restarting itself.

  • Katharine Jefferts-Schori on Leadership: Has an Entire Generation Given Up on Democratic Process?

    This fascinating video from the Washington Post by Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts-Schori opens with this comment:

    …and at some point it became necessary to shift approach and to say: “If you’re going to stay as a leader in this organization, you have to be engaged, even if you don’t like this decision over here. And if you are not willing to be engaged it’s time to let go of your leadership position, and that’s hard, that’s hard…”

    Just about everyone knows that KJS is an expert in giving people the boot.  But in watching this video something else occurred to me: has the entire Baby Boom generation, especially in churches liberal and conservative alike, given up on any kind of democratic process in the church, with the messy and slow politics that go with it?  And is this reflected in our society at large?

    The answer to the second question is obvious to anyone who watches our polarised system and the demonisation that is stock in trade these days.

    With the first, KJS speaks of the urgent changes that she think TEC needs to respond to ASAP.  If we look at her time as Presiding Bishop, we see her both ignore the canons of her church when she deems it necessary to deal with those who oppose her and change them radically when the opportunity presents itself to centralise the church.  TEC historically has a more decentralised organisation–one that, as she admits, wasn’t accidental–than most other churches with diocesan bishops.  Her idea, of course, is that this has to be changed to meet the challenges in front of her as she sees them, and her actions speak of a “take no prisoners” approach to leadership.

    On the conservative side, I see my own church centralising in many ways, eliminating elected offices, tightening the central structure, lengthening the terms of its own presiding bishops, etc.   Conservatives, however, have Bill Gothard as their eminence grise in this project.  Beyond that though, we have the endless corporate example, where a certain leader comes in and transforms the corporation (or is up from nothing in a corporate start-up) and makes it successful.  This “hero narrative” relegates the messy politics that churches as standing in the way of progress.  That’s why we have so many leadership seminars.

    So we see a centralising–and anti-democratic–ethos on “both sides of the aisle”.  But will this result in institutional progress in either case?  I doubt it.

    In the case of TEC, the whole idea of embracing the culture’s elite conventional wisdom is a dead end.  Why go to the trouble and expense of being part of a church when you can achieve most if not all of what the church is doing in a secular context?

    In the case of my own church, the “missional mandate” masks the preservation of the centrality of a Scots-Irish core with a penchant for expansive physical plants and the debt to go with it, neither of which is particularly missional.

    The church needs a remaking, but Boomer “top-down leadership” isn’t the answer.

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