• 1.     Don’t equate the biblical kingdom of God with any human political party or nation. We must maintain the distinctiveness between God’s kingdom and the kingdoms of this world. We must never fuse the two (John 18:36; Matt. 6:33).

   

  2.     Don’t elevate a politician to messianic status. People often falsely think a politician can single-handedly produce supernatural social results. We have one Lord, and we must resist any attempt to exalt politicians to unrealistic heights (Matt. 7:15; 1 Pet. 3:15).

   

  3.     Don’t just vote, but pray for the leaders of all political parties. Christians can be tempted to bless the politician of their choice, and curse his or her opponent, but remember, we must pray even for our enemies (1 Tim. 2:1–2; Matt. 5:44).

   

  4.     Don’t forget that your ultimate security is in the unshakeable kingdom of God. Many Christians often elevate the outcome of presidential elections to an apocalyptic status. If a particular presidential candidate does not win, we begin to think or act as if the world will end. In so doing, however, we express an unbelief in the active sovereignty of God over human affairs (Heb. 12:26–29).

   

  5.     Don’t bring the polarization of partisan politics into the family of God. Every Christian has freedom of conscience before God, and we must guard against allowing political perspectives to divide the church (Rom. 16:17; 1 Cor. 1:11–12).

   

  6.     Don’t demonize anyone. Every person has been created in the image of God, and Christians must not demonize or dehumanize other people, whether we agree with them politically or not (Col. 3:8; James 4:12).

   

  7.     Don’t engage in angry, hostile confrontation. Present your political convictions through civil debate and rational dialogue instead. Confrontational arguments demonstrate an ugly pride that demeans Jesus Christ (James 1:19–20; 2 Tim. 2:14).

   

  8.     Don’t become so intertwined with one political party that you forfeit your independence. When you do, you lose your right to be heard and to speak and clarify biblical truth to all politicians and political parties (1 Tim. 3:15; Rom. 3:4).

   

  9.     Don’t allow yourself to support attempts to divide races, male and female, rich and poor, or young and old. Partisan politics often divides society into voting blocks, and separates society instead of uniting it. Christians should function as peacemakers and reconcilers in the public square and should resist every temptation to join the game of dividing people for political gain (Matt. 5:9; 2 Cor. 5:18–19).

   

  10.  Don’t simply curse the darkness, but constructively engage it. The cultural and missional mandate of kingdom Christians is not to curse the darkness in our world, but to act as illuminating light and preserving salt. We must share the light of God’s truth and work to maintain the common welfare of our nation by overcoming evil through doing good (Matt. 5:13–16).

• Where classic Hollywood mostly held their activism to advocating for their causes, too many of today’s classless breed defines their activism through the hurling of invective at the other side - at 50% of the customers. They do it up on the screen and they do it while hiding behind a Hollywood media-machine owned and operated by sycophants who mostly agree. There’s nothing wrong with passion, humor, disagreement and debate, that’s what Big Hollywood is all about, but ad hominem that dehumanizes is the tactic of a new gen

• John Adams and John Hancock:
    We Recognize No Sovereign but God, and no King but Jesus! [April 18, 1775]
• “In the beginning of the contest with Britain, when we were sensible  of danger, we had daily prayers in this room for Divine protection. Our prayers,  Sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered… do we imagine we  no longer need His assistance?” [Constitutional Convention, Thursday  June 28, 1787]

• posted this to facebook - Daniel Moss on 2010-05-28

• Obama doesn't even seem to understand the ramifications of this concession. Poland and the Czech Republic thought they were regaining their independence when they joined NATO under the protection of the United States. They now see that the shield negotiated with us and subsequently ratified by all of NATO is in limbo. Russia and America will first have to "come to terms" on the issue, explained President Dmitry Medvedev. This is precisely the kind of compromised sovereignty that Russia wants to impose on its ex-Soviet colonies -- and that U.S. presidents of both parties for the last 20 years have resisted.  

  Resistance, however, is not part of Obama's repertoire. Hence his eagerness for arcane negotiations over MIRV'd missiles, the perfect distraction from the major issue between the two countries: Vladimir Putin's unapologetic and relentless drive to restore Moscow's hegemony over the sovereign states that used to be Soviet satrapies. 

• That -- not nukes -- is the chief cause of the friction between the U.S. and Russia. You wouldn't know it to hear Obama in Moscow pledging to halt the "drift" in U.S.-Russian relations. Drift? The decline in relations came from Putin's desire to undo what he considers "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th century -- the collapse of the Soviet empire. Hence his squeezing Ukraine's energy supplies. His overt threats against Poland and the Czech Republic for daring to make sovereign agreements with the United States. And finally, less than a year ago, his invading a small neighbor, detaching and then effectively annexing two of Georgia's provinces to Mother Russia. 

  That's the cause of the collapse of our relations. Not drift, but aggression. Or, as the reset man referred to it with such delicacy in his Kremlin news conference: "our disagreements on Georgia's borders."  

•  

   

   

    Plumage - But At a Price

• WASHINGTON -- The signing ceremony in Moscow was a grand affair. For Barack Obama, foreign policy neophyte and "reset" man, the arms reduction agreement had a Kissingerian air. A fine feather in his cap. And our president likes his plumage. 

  Unfortunately for the United States, the country Obama represents, the prospective treaty is useless at best, detrimental at worst.

• Useless because the level of offensive nuclear weaponry, the subject of the U.S.-Russia "Joint Understanding," is an irrelevance. We could today terminate all such negotiations, invite the Russians to build as many warheads as they want, and profitably watch them spend themselves into penury, as did their Soviet predecessors, stockpiling weapons that do nothing more than, as Churchill put it, make the rubble bounce.  

  Obama says that his START will be a great boon, setting an example to enable us to better pressure North Korea and Iran to give up their nuclear programs. That a man of Obama's intelligence can believe such nonsense is beyond comprehension. There is not a shred of evidence that cuts by the great powers -- the INF treaty, START I, the Treaty of Moscow (2002) -- induced the curtailment of anyone's programs. Moammar Gaddafi gave up his nukes the week we pulled Saddam Hussein out of his spider hole. No treaty involved. The very notion that Kim Jong Il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will suddenly abjure nukes because of yet another U.S.-Russian treaty is comical. 

• The pursuit of such an offensive weapons treaty could nonetheless be detrimental to us. Why? Because Obama's hunger for a diplomatic success, such as it is, allowed the Russians to exact a price: linkage between offensive and defensive nuclear weapons.  

  This is important for Russia because of the huge American technological advantage in defensive weaponry. We can reliably shoot down an intercontinental ballistic missile. They cannot. And since defensive weaponry will be the decisive strategic factor of the 21st century, Russia has striven mightily for a quarter-century to halt its development. Gorbachev tried to swindle Reagan out of the Strategic Defense Initiative at Reykjavik in 1986. Reagan refused. As did his successors -- Bush I, Clinton, Bush II. 

  Obama, who seeks to banish nuclear weapons entirely, has little use for such prosaic contrivances. First, the Obama budget actually cuts spending on missile defense, at a time when federal spending is a riot of extravagance and trillion-dollar deficits. Then comes the "pause" (as Russia's president appreciatively noted) in the planned establishment of a missile shield in Eastern Europe. And now the "Joint Understanding" commits us to a new treaty that includes "a provision on the interrelationship of strategic offensive and strategic defensive arms." Obama further said that the East European missile shield "will be the subject of extensive negotiations" between the United States and Russia. 

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• Democratic Leader Laughs at Idea That House Members Would Actually Read Health-Care Bill Before Voting On It
• House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday that the health-care reform bill now pending in Congress would garner very few votes if lawmakers actually had to read the entire bill before voting on it.
   
   “If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes,” Hoyer told CNSNews.com at his regular weekly news conference.
   
   Hoyer was responding to a question from CNSNews.com on whether he supported a pledge that asks members of the Congress to read the entire bill before voting on it and also make the full text of the bill available to the public for 72 hours before a vote.
   
   In fact, Hoyer found the idea of the pledge humorous, laughing as he responded to the question. “I’m laughing because a) I don’t know how long this bill is going to be, but it’s going to be a very long bill,” he said.
• Let Freedom Ring, a Delaware-based conservative organization, is circulating a pledge that asks members of Congress  to promise to read the entirety of the final text of a health-care reform bill before they vote on it.  They also are asking that the full bill be made available for review by the public for 72 hours before Congress votes on it.
    
   Colin Hanna, president of Let Freedom Ring, said Hoyer’s comment is evidence that lawmakers in Congress are “off-track.”
    
   “It tells the American people how off-track our legislative process has become,” Hanna said. “I think if the framers of our Constitution ever saw an entire legislative body vote on a 1,500-page bill that no one had read, they would shudder--if not go into fits of apoplexy.”
• Earlier CNSNews.com stories revealed that few – if any –congressmen read the 1,550-page American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 or the 1,071-page American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 before voting on the bills.

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•   

  Good News out of Iraq

  by Diane Singer

      

   

   

  

  Joel Rosenberg reports this bit of good news about what is happening with Iraqi Christians, who now have their own radio station:

  That station -- which can be heard throughout the Kurdish region and thus by more than two million people -- is broadcasting Christian music, original and previously-produced educational programs, original and previously-produced cultural programs, Bible reading programs and radio dramas based on the Bible. All of this is in the Kurdish and Arabic languages.

  One Iraqi Christian, and station manager, said, "Growing up under the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, we never thought we would see the day when we who love Jesus could run a radio station in Iraq.... We are excited to see how the Lord will use us to bless the Iraqi people, and particularly the Kurdish people. Please be praying for us that the Lord's favor would be with us and we would make a real impact in people's lives here."

  I'm praying. Will you? 

• Incentives vs. Virtue

• Across the country, school systems are paying children to do better in school. In New York, fourth and seventh graders can get up to $500 for improving their scores on the city’s math and English tests. Schools in Georgia pay eighth and 11th graders $8 an hour to attend an after-school learning program.

    

  You would think that, given what’s at stake, doing well at school would be its own reward. But, increasingly, both inside and outside the classroom, striving for virtue is being replaced by monetary incentives.

    

  As one principal told USA Today, he is “trying lots of different incentives for doing the right thing.” “Incentives” include iPods for attending Saturday study sessions and a flat-screen television for making the all “A” honor roll.

    

  Many critics prefer the word “bribe” to “incentive.” One compared the practice to giving athletes steroids: “Short-term performance might improve but the long-term effects can be very damaging.”

    

  Damaging or not, paying people to do what they should already be doing isn’t going away. Greensboro, North Carolina, is paying teenage mothers $1 for every day they are not pregnant. Like paying students to improve their grades and test scores, paying teen mothers to not get pregnant appears to be having the desired affect.

    

  The core ideas in these kinds of programs come from a new field known as “behavioral economics.” Classical economics assumes that people are rational and act in accordance with their best interests. Behavioral economics knows that, in the real world, people make bad and even self-destructive choices all the time.

• The goal of behavioral economics is to identify the “dizzying array of human foibles” and help policy makers take them into account when shaping policy.

    

  In the case of incentive programs like the ones I have described, it means “nudging” people to act in their own best interests. It’s an approach, by the way, that is favored by a “number of high-level appointees” in the Obama administration.

    

  While basing policy on human beings as they actually are is certainly preferable to basing them on rational “economic men” that exist only in economists’ imaginations (you can count me among the critics on that one).

    

  It doesn’t surprise me that these “nudges” can have a short-term positive effect. But it’s difficult to imagine these programs making a long-term difference.

    

  On the contrary, the “long term damage” mentioned earlier may very well include creating a generation of people for whom incentives will become a necessity, not a nudge.

    

  To put it in Christian terms, incentives will replace virtue. Instead of doing the right or prudent thing because it’s what a moral person does, people will do what they do because they get something out of it. This doesn’t build character—it builds calculators.

    

  What’s more, in the real world, people don’t always reward you for doing the right thing. But there are still consequences for behaving foolishly. How will people raised on a steady diet of nudges avoid these pitfalls?

    

  The answer is that many won’t avoid them because they never learned that, for the virtuous person, doing the right thing is incentive enough.

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• Obama Closes Doors on Openness

• As a senator, Barack Obama denounced the Bush administration for holding "secret energy meetings" with oil executives at the White House. But last week public-interest groups were dismayed when his own administration rejected a Freedom of Information Act request for Secret Service logs showing the identities of coal executives who had visited the White House to discuss Obama's "clean coal" policies. One reason: the disclosure of such records might impinge on privileged "presidential communications." The refusal, approved by White House counsel Greg Craig's office, is the latest in a series of cases in which Obama officials have opted against public disclosure. Since Obama pledged on his first day in office to usher in a "new era" of openness, "nothing has changed," says David -Sobel, a lawyer who litigates FOIA cases. "For a president who said he was going to bring unprecedented transparency to government, you would certainly expect more than the recycling of old Bush secrecy policies."

   

  The hard line appears to be no accident. After Obama's much-publicized Jan. 21 "transparency" memo, administration lawyers crafted a key directive implementing the new policy that contained a major loophole, according to FOIA experts. The directive, signed by Attorney General Eric Holder, instructed federal agencies to adopt a "presumption" of disclosure for FOIA requests. This reversal of Bush policy was intended to restore a standard set by President Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno. But in a little-noticed passage, the Holder memo also said the new standard applies "if practicable" for cases involving "pending litigation." Dan Metcalfe, the former longtime chief of FOIA policy at Justice, says the passage and other "lawyerly hedges" means the Holder memo is now "astonishingly weaker" than the Reno policy. (The visitor-log request falls in this category because of a pending Bush-era lawsuit for such records.)
• Administration officials say the Holder memo was drafted by senior Justice lawyers in consultation with Craig's office. The separate standard for "pending" lawsuits was inserted because of the "burden" it would impose on officials to go "backward" and reprocess hundreds of old cases, says Melanie Ann Pustay, who now heads the FOIA office. White House spokesman Ben LaBolt says Obama "has backed up his promise" with actions including the broadcast of White House meetings on the Web. (Others cite the release of the so-called torture memos.) As for the visitor logs, LaBolt says the policy is now "under review."

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• The Invisible Hand of Population Control

  The tragedy of the commons meets economic freedom

  Ronald Bailey | June 16, 2009

   

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  "The freedom to breed is intolerable," ecologist Garrett Hardin declared in his famous 1968 essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons." I recently re-read Hardin's call for population control, and this passage caught my attention: "We can make little progress in working toward optimum population size until we explicitly exorcize the spirit of Adam Smith in the field of practical demography." Hardin specifically wanted to exorcize Smith's claim in The Wealth of Nations that an individual who "intends only his own gain," is, as it were, "led by an invisible hand to promote...the public interest."

  Hardin believed that Smith's metaphor of an invisible hand was contributing to "the dominant tendency of thought that has ever since interfered with positive action based on rational analysis, namely the tendency to assume that decisions reached individually will, in fact, be the best decisions for an entire society. If this assumption is correct it justifies the continuance of our present policy of laissez faire in reproduction." As the essay makes abundantly clear, Hardin is convinced that "rational analysis" will prove that Smith's invisible hand leads to inevitable population ruin.

• In fact, several recent studies suggest that Hardin might have it backward. Under certain circumstances, there may actually be an invisible hand that leads to an optimum population.

  “There is no prosperous population in the world today that has, and has had for some time, a growth rate of zero,” Hardin declared. That’s no longer true. Japan is now experiencing a fall in its population due to reduced fertility, as are Germany, Russia, Italy, Poland and 25 other countries and territories. And there are many societies in which total fertility rates are rapidly decelerating.

  Let's take a look at two intriguing lists. The first is a list of countries ranked on the 2009 Index of Economic Freedom issued by the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal. Then compare the economic freedom index rankings with a list of countries ranked by their total fertility rates. Of the 30 countries that are ranked as being free or mostly free, only three have fertility rates above 2.1, e.g., New Zealand at 2.11, the Bahamas at 2.13, and Bahrain at 2.53. If one adds the next 53 countries that are ranked as moderately free, one finds that only 8 out of 83 countries have fertility rates above 3. It should be noted that low fertility rates can also be found in more repressive countries as well, e.g., China at 1.77, Cuba at 1.6, Iran at 1.71, and Russia at 1.4.

• In 2002, Seth Norton, a business economics professor at Wheaton College in Illinois, published a remarkably interesting study on the inverse relationship between prosperity and fertility. Norton compared fertility rates of over 100 countries with their index rankings for economic freedom and another index for the rule of law. "Fertility rate is highest for those countries that have little economic freedom and little respect for the rule of law," wrote Norton. "The relationship is a powerful one. Fertility rates are more than twice as high in countries with low levels of economic freedom and the rule of law compared to countries with high levels of those measures."

  Norton found that the fertility rate in countries that ranked low on economic freedom averaged 4.27 children per woman while countries with high economic freedom rankings had an average fertility rate of 1.82 children per woman. His results for the rule of law were similar; fertility rates in countries with low respect for the rule of law averaged 4.16 whereas countries with high respect for the rule of law had fertility rates averaging 1.55. 

  Economic freedom and the rule of law produce prosperity which dramatically lowers child mortality which, in turn, reduces the incentive to bear more children. In addition, along with increased prosperity comes more education for women, opening up more productive opportunities for them in the cash economy. This increases the opportunity costs for staying at home to rear children. Educating children to meet the productive challenges of growing economies also becomes more expensive and time consuming.

• Thailand's experience over the past 30 years exemplifies this process. During that time, female literacy rose to 90 percent; 50 percent of the workforce is now female; and fertility fell from 6 children per woman in the 1960s to 1.64 today. Although Thailand is classified as only moderately free on the economic freedom index, its gross domestic product (GDP) grew in terms of purchasing power parity from just over $1,000 per capita in 1960 to over $7,000 per capita in 2003.

  The income, investment and consumption opportunities that people forego when they choose to rear children are even greater in truly free economies. The U.S. government estimates that it costs an American family making less $45,000 per year in before tax income almost $150,000 to rear a child to age 18. Families making over $77,000 will spend nearly $300,000 per child. And that's before paying for college. In modern societies, children are no longer capital goods, but luxury consumption items.

  Norton persuasively argues that Hardin's fears of a population tragedy of the commons are actually realized when the invisible hand of economic freedom is shackled. Many poor countries have poorly specified and enforced property rights. Poor property rights means that many resources are effectively left in open access commons where the incentive is to grab what one can before the other guy gets it. Norton points out that in such situations, more children mean more hands for grabbing unowned  and unprotected resources such as water, fodder, timber, fish, pastures, and for land clearing. Lacking the institutional incentives to invest in and preserve resources, this drive to take as much as possible as quickly as possible leads to perpetual poverty.

• In his essay, Hardin gives us the arresting example of a pasture open to all people in a village. Each herdsman, seeking to maximize his individual gain, puts as many cattle on the pasture as possible, leading eventually to its destruction from overgrazing. "Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons," writes Hardin. "Freedom in a commons brings ruin to us all."

  But the problem is not the commons; it's the fact that it's open access. There are numerous examples in which property is held and effectively managed as a commons, e.g., condominium associations, medieval village commons, etc. Hardin is wrong when he concludes that "the inherent logic of the commons, remorselessly generates tragedy." Fortunately, the logic of an overused commons often ends its open access by remorselessly generating property, not tragedy.

  But what about the past? Haven't societies collapsed due to overpopulation? To the extent that it is true that some societies have suffered collapses, we now know that it was because they lacked the proper institutions for channeling individual striving into a process of economic growth which ultimately promotes the public interest. Very few earlier societies could be characterized as either economically free or respecting the rule of law. Throughout history most people lived in the institutional equivalents of open access commons overseen by rapacious elites which encouraged high fertility rates and the plundering of natural resources.

• The chief goal of all other species is to turn food into offspring. More food means more offspring. It is this biological logic that underlies the perennial fears of human overpopulation. Most creatures live in environments that correspond to open access commons. Recent fertility trends strongly suggest that the simple biological model of human breeding is wrong, or at least, is wrong when the institutions that support economic freedom and the rule of law, e.g., markets, price stability, honest bureaucracies, security of private property, and the fair enforcement of contracts, are well-developed. Economic freedom and the rule of law are the equivalent of enclosing the open access breeding commons, causing parents to bear more and more of the costs of rearing children. In other words, economic freedom actually generates an invisible hand of population control.

  Ronald Bailey is Reason magazine's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

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• A George W. Bush appointee, Mr. Walpin has since 2007 been the inspector general for the Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal agency that oversees such subsidized volunteer programs as AmeriCorps. In April 2008 the Corporation asked Mr. Walpin to investigate reports of irregularities at St. HOPE, a California nonprofit run by former NBA star and Obama supporter Kevin Johnson. St. HOPE had received an $850,000 AmeriCorps grant, which was supposed to go for three purposes: tutoring for Sacramento-area students; the redevelopment of several buildings; and theater and art programs.

   

    Associated Press 

  Gerald Walpin, Inspector General of the Corporation For National and Community Service, was fired by President Barack Obama.

   

  Mr. Walpin's investigators discovered that the money had been used instead to pad staff salaries, meddle politically in a school-board election, and have AmeriCorps members perform personal services for Mr. Johnson, including washing his car.

   

  At the end of May, Mr. Walpin's office recommended that Mr. Johnson, an assistant and St. HOPE itself be "suspended" from receiving federal funds. The Corporation's official charged with suspensions agreed, and in September the suspension letters went out. Mr. Walpin's office also sent a civil and/or criminal referral to the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of California.

   

  So far, so normal. But that all changed last fall, when Mr. Johnson was elected mayor of Sacramento. News of the suspension had become public, and President Obama began to discuss his federal stimulus spending. A city-hired attorney pronounced in March that Sacramento might be barred from receiving stimulus funds because of Mr. Johnson's suspension.

• Mr. Walpin brought his concerns to the Corporation's board, but some board members were angry over a separate Walpin investigation into the wrongful disbursement of $80 million to the City University of New York. Concerned about the St. HOPE mess, Mr. Walpin wrote a 29-page report, signed by two other senior members of his office, and submitted it in April to Congress. Last Wednesday, he got a phone call from a White House lawyer telling him to resign within an hour or be fired.

   

  We've long disliked the position of inspectors general, on grounds that they are creatures of Congress designed to torment the executive. Yet this case appears to be one in which an IG was fired because he criticized a favorite Congressional and executive project (AmeriCorps), and refused to bend to political pressure to let the Sacramento mayor have his stimulus dollars.

   

  There's also the question of how Mr. Walpin was terminated. He says the phone call came from Norman Eisen, the Special Counsel to the President for Ethics and Government Reform, who said the President felt it was time for Mr. Walpin to "move on," and that it was "pure coincidence" he was asked to leave during the St. HOPE controversy. Yet the Administration has already had to walk back that claim.

• That's because last year Congress passed the Inspectors General Reform Act, which requires the President to give Congress 30 days notice, plus a reason, before firing an inspector general. A co-sponsor of that bill was none other than Senator Obama. Having failed to pressure Mr. Walpin into resigning (which in itself might violate the law), the Administration was forced to say he'd be terminated in 30 days, and to tell Congress its reasons.

   

  White House Counsel Gregory Craig cited a complaint that had been lodged against Mr. Walpin by Mr. Brown, the U.S. Attorney, accusing Mr. Walpin of misconduct, and of not really having the goods on Mr. Johnson. But this is curious given that Mr. Brown himself settled with St. HOPE, Mr. Johnson and his assistant, an agreement that required St. HOPE (with a financial assist from Mr. Johnson) to repay approximately half of the grant, and also required Mr. Johnson to take an online course about bookkeeping.

   

  Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley, a co-sponsor of the IG Reform Act, is now demanding that the Corporation hand over its communications on this mess. He also wants to see any contact with the office of First Lady Michelle Obama, who has taken a particular interest in AmeriCorps, and whose former chief of staff, Jackie Norris, recently arrived at the Corporation as a "senior adviser."

   

  If this seems like small beer, keep in mind that Mr. Obama promised to carefully watch how every stimulus dollar is spent. In this case, the evidence suggests that his White House fired a public official who refused to roll over to protect a Presidential crony.

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