The Orator in Chief

Obama is out speechifying again today after last night's State of the Union address. Because we haven't heard him enough to fully comprehend his wonderfulness. He's so convinced of his persuasive abilities that if the American people are opposed to his ideas, clearly he just hasn't communicated enough about it.

He's so over-exposed that I think Americans have just tuned him out -- for good.

Among the stuff that made my brain bleed last night, after the petty attacks on his predecessor and the Supreme Court (the most un-presidential address I've ever seen), was the whopper about lobbyists being banned from policy positions. How dumb does he think we are? I guess if he is convinced that the media isn't going to expose him, he can say whatever he wants.

Hello emperor? You're naked!

Erick at RedState lists the former lobbyists currently in policy decisions.

Time to milk the churches

This just in...

There has been a bill introduced into the Kansas Legislature that will repeal the sales tax exemption for churches. The exemption has been in place for 11 years and has saved churches approx. $18 million dollars per year. That is a total of approx $200 million that churches were able to use in their ministries to our communities the last 11 years.

The Kansas budget shortage has legislators looking for revenue and “churches are not that well organized and usually don’t put up much resistance” according to a former State Senator.

“The legislators do not want to go after exemptions that education/elderly/colleges/disabled presently have because those groups all fight back and have full time lobbyist.”

Therefore the church sales tax exemption money is low hanging fruit to them and in 2-3 weeks they will be acting on this.

Kansas City has a church ready to break ground on a $2 million dollar first building---if this legislation passes the cost to build this building just went up approx. $160,000.00.

Churches may differ on doctrine, but this is a cause that should unite them. Can they do it?

For additional information or to give additional input, please contact:
Tim Boyd
KNCSB Director of Communications
785-228-6800
tboyd@kncsb.org

Personhood

I like this point made by Cal Thomas in his column today:

"The ruling came the week of the annual March for Life, which draws thousands to Washington to mark that same court's 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. The march has become not so much a protest as an affirmation of the value of all human life. What makes the ruling and the march ironic is that the 1973 court, in essence, downgraded a human fetus to the level of nonperson, while the modern court has invested "personhood" in corporations. Does anyone else see a contradiction or at least a moral inconsistency in these two rulings?"

37 years of Roe v Wade

Marchers walked through the streets of Topeka and many cities around the country to express their ongoing dismay over abortion rights in America.

I was conceived out of wedlock by two college students and put up for adoption in late '66. My mother had the "right" to kill me, but she chose to give me life and put me up for adoption. I was then adopted by a wonderful Christian couple who raised me as their own.

I'm alive. I'm breathing. I contribute to society. I have parented children. I am an employer. I'm a husband.

And none of that could have been possible if she chose instead to have an abortion. The result would have been the same as if someone went into the hospital nursery and smothered me with a pillow.

Is there any other way to look at it?

The pursuit of rewards

Sent to me from a friend...

In the movie Cool Runnings the Jamaican bobsled team is so desperate to win an Olympic medal, they're convinced none of their efforts matter if they end up without it. All the learning, joy, and growth they'd devoted themselves to are forgotten next to a piece of metal on a ribbon. Their coach is a four-hundred-pound man who won an Olympic medal bobsledding twenty years earlier and had been a complete loser ever since. He tells them, "If you're not enough before the gold medal, you're not enough with it."

Jesus talked a lot about rewards. But the pursuit of rewards can hurt us when we go after them for the wrong reason.A trophy is not the achievement itself - it's not the learning we gained, the muscles we've trained, or the courage we've developed. It's just a symbol of achievement. It's an external validation of our worth.

At best,the trophies in the showcase are little reminders, something to make us grateful for the past and keep us motivated for the future. At its worst, the trophy case becomes a shrine, a tool to prop up a false image of ourselves. Trophies bring momentary pleasure that can be addicting, but the pleasure always wears off. In the book of Revelation we see twenty-four leaders "lay their crowns before the throne and say: 'You are worthy, our Lord and God.'" (Revelation 4:10-11) When you give all the glory to God, your accomplishments bring joy, but when you try to take the credit for yourself your trophies tarnish, fade and become a burden.

Look at Enoch: his ultimate trophy was "that he pleased God."

It's KLINE...again!

Just to show you the price you'll pay for being a public pro-life official who had the temerity to take legal action and investigate the illegal activities of the abortion industry, today's headline screams "Kline accused of ethics violations."

They just won't leave that guy alone. He's been out of office for how long? They also continually go after Kline's right hand man, Eric Rucker. Now this is a man I personally know and hold in the highest regard. This is just a witch hunt so that no one in the future will ever dare to be another Phill Kline and take on the abortion industry.

Now Kline may have been zealous and enthusiastic -- but if you earnestly believe that babies close to full term are being slaughtered, I would hope you'd be zealous about stopping it! And if a clinic performing such "services" are not following standard health clinic laws, why wouldn't the chief law enforcement officer of the state pursue legal action and investigation against it?

Because most in the higher echelon of legal society hold abortion rights to be sacrosanct -- completely untouchable. If you dare go there, they will fry you to the point that no one will ever, EVER try that again.

Best wishes to Kline and Rucker. It seems that no amount of time between them and their time in office will free them from persecution from the abortion zealots in the state judicial system.

Our Pizza Sucks

I just watched Dominos Pizza's new video in which they admit how bad their pizza sucks. The crust is like cardboard and the sauce is like ketchup. Duh. We all knew that! But good for them for fessing up to it.

I feel bad for the chefs in the video, especially the guy who says he's been doing this for 20+ years. Seriously? You've been making pizzas for over 20 years and it took focus groups to tell you your product sucks? What kind of chef are you?

I love pizza first and politics second, so it's a good segue into whether or not the Republicans should do the same thing. "Hey, we've sucked and we know it. We spent like drunken Democrats. We didn't provide proper oversight to the financial sector. We dished out more pork than IHOP. But here's our new recipe...the new Republican recipe loaded with strong national defense, conservative spending and tax cuts that will truly stimulate the economy."

People like transparency and honesty. Dominos picked up on that and took the brave step to fess up to their crappy product with a promise to do better. It's time for the Republicans to do the same.

Speaking Tea Bag

NPR published an animated cartoon mocking the tea party movement as a bunch of stupid people who don't understand the terminology or issues so they simplify things down to socialism and Obama is a Nazi.

I'm trying to recall their cartoon mocking the anti-war/anti-Bush crowds who called him a Nazi. Hmmm? Can someone send me a link to it?

Considering that a recent poll had the Tea Party ranking higher in the esteem of the American public than either the Democrat Party or Republican Party, I wouldn't be so quick to ridicule them. Or perhaps that's why the left/media are doing so.

I had the opportunity to speak at a Tea Party rally, and the people that attended were true blue, patriotic Americans who understand the issues very well, thank you very much Mr. Hoity-Toity East Coast Elitist Cartoon Guy!

This cartoon is just another example of the elitist mindset of the cocktail party liberals. Conservatives, in their view, are too simple-minded to grasp such complex issues. We're not nuanced and educated enough (The New York Times' designated "Republican" David Brooks recently labeled the liberal media as "The educated class" -- like conservatives are toothless hicks who never made it past the 4th grade).

But really, are the issues that complicated? The free market, with proper oversight (not over-control) brings us products and services we want with competition that keeps prices in check. That's a pretty simple concept, and it works everywhere it's tried. Low taxes spur more investment in business, creating more jobs and, therefore, more tax revenue to the government. A certain president named Ronald Reagan proved that model to work quite nicely. Pretty simple. And health care works best when I get to deal with the doctor of my choice to make the health decisions for me and my family -- and it would be even better if I could comparison shop among doctors and health insurance providers (with any company based in any state) to make sure I'm getting a good value.

So, yes, I'm a simple-minded Tea Party member. Mock us at your peril.

It's Winter...still

The weatherman is telling us we'll have gusts of arctic wind (20 mph or more) with temps in the -12 degrees area.

When the puppy has to pee, I'm just throwing him out the door on a long rope and then yanking him back when he's done.

Here's a poem that was just sent to me:

WINTER Poem
It's winter here in Kansas
And the gentle breezes blow
Seventy miles an hour
At thirty-five below.
Oh, how I love Kansas
the snow's up to your butt
You take a breath of winter
And your nose gets frozen shut.
Yes, the weather here is wonderful
So I guess I'll hang around
I could never leave Kansas
I'm ...frozen to the ground!

This is the "talking point" someone has memoed out to the Global Warming people: "Don't confuse weather with climate." That way when your eye balls are frozen and you've got snotcycles dangling from your nose, you can't say this is proof against global warming because you're just experiencing a bout of cold weather. It has nothing to do with the climate.

Of course I never heard that refrain in the Summer time when it's hot and they can blame your SUV and hairspray. Then the hot weather is evidence that global warming is caused by...you! (so shape up!)

What's the difference between weather and climate? Here's what NASA says:

The difference between weather and climate is a measure of time. Weather is what conditions of the atmosphere are over a short period of time, and climate is how the atmosphere "behaves" over relatively long periods of time.

The problem with the argument that we can't consider the blizzards we are currently experiencing because that's weather and not climate is that climate studies only go back so far as when they started using instruments to evaluate it. Which, in the big scheme of things, hasn't been very long.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: when they can show me what the cavemen did to bring about an end to the Ice Age, I may care more about the impact our human activities have on the "climate."

Happy New Year!

What a lovely, lazy day. I might as well not have even gotten out of my PJs today. This is what New Years Days were made for.

I did manage to get out for an hour or so to take the kids over to Quinton Heights Hill, the famous Topeka sledding hill. I hadn't been there for probably a dozen years or so. It's where I spent a great deal of time during the heavy winters of my childhood. I wanted to be sure my kids had the memory of Quinton Heights in their heads too. During the past few years, we haven't had enough snow to warrant a trip over to the hill -- we're making up for lost snow this year apparently.

What I didn't remember from my childhood is how to successfully climb a hill coated in ice after I've had my thrill ride down it. Twice my feet flipped out from under me and I landed on my rump-side to slide back down the hill without the comfort of a sled.

The few times I was able to sled from the top of the hill to the bottom were a blast. I have my childhood sled with the metal rails and, on ice, that thing zooms.

To me, winter has few redeemable values. KU basketball is the main one. Otherwise, Topekans are probably left with the thrill of sledding down Quinton Heights Hill.

I'm not huge on New Years Resolutions because I'm not huge on keeping them for more than a few weeks, but I do know that in 2010 I want to be a better citizen and a better Christian -- which means I want to be the best I can at doing what I think God wants us to do. I hope I not just study the Bible, pray and go to church, but actually live what I learn and make a difference in people's lives.

I hope you have a successful, prosperous 2010, and you too will fulfill God's purpose for your life in a new and fresh way.