It's not been a good year for Kentucky's basketball team; they beat Florida International this afternoon to get up to 6-6. On Saturday, they lost at home to San Diego. Not San Diego State, but West Coast Conference U of San Diego; yes, they hang with Gonzaga and a 24th ranked St. Mary's club, but we're talking low mid-major here. Not Gardner-Webb subterranean-major level, but no powerhouse.
I was watching the Kentucky-FSU Music City Bowl game (UK's leading 35-21 with a shade over two minutes to go as I go to press) at dinner, when the ESPN crawler showed San Diego losing at Marshall 76-60. Marshall ain't chopped liver, but they're a back-of-the-pack Conference USA club in basketball. Marshall can take care of business at home, but the Mildcats weren't up to the challenge.
It's not looking good for the Gillispie regime. Losing to San Diego and Gardner-Webb at home, as well as losing to Alabama-Birmingham in a home-away-from-home game in Louisville doesn't bode well for taking on the SEC schedule. They'll be lucky to break .500 and limp into an NIT bid.
The local pharmacies in Lexington might want to stock up on anti-depressants this winter.
Fred Thomson-backer Joe stated that "I really wish I could have started
'Blogs for Mike' but this just ain't Huckabee's year." Jason, who like
me is still hoping for a Huck buck-up in the polls, said that " it's
still too early to say that 'this just ain't Huckabee's year'."
It doesn't seem to be McCain's year, either. Being a Bush-backer on
Iraq isn't the best of selling points right now and Rudy seems to be
sucking up a good hunk of his constituency.
However, there isn't a single primary or caucus held in 2007. It's OK if 2007 isn't your year, since the votes are made in 2008. About this time four years ago, Howard Dean was the flavor of the month on the Democratic side, and eventual nominee John Kerry was back in fourth place.
There's room for McCain, or even Huckabee, to come from behind. Huckabee is polling at 7% in Iowa;
a few more points up and the media will be portraying him as a viable
alternative, and then he can take that on to the other primaries. It
might not be enough to win the nomination outright, but it might give
him enough stature to be in the discussion for the nomination in a
brokered convention season.
Yes, that's a bit of a long shot, but still a viable one this far out.
The same holds true for McCain. He's largely a known quantity with
his share of enemies; the other three members of the lead pack have
less experience on a national political stage and may well start to
fall back. If he can hang in the 10-15% range during his wilderness
stretch, he'll still be in the lead pack and in position to take
advantage of Fred, Mitt and Rudy's miscues.
As we put 2007 into our rear-view mirror, McCain is out in front nationally by a nose. It's McCain 17, Romney and Huckabee at 16, and Giuliani at 15. Fred Thompson is within striking distance of his walking stick at 12% and (let's see if we get a few Paulistas searching for their guy; I always seem to get traffic on Paul searches when I mention him) Ron Paul is a factor at 7%.
McCain did hang around 10% and largely dropped under the targeting radar of the leaders, as Thompson, Romney and Guiliani traded fire with each other for the early fall, then expanded their targeting to Huckabee in November.
It's more that the pack has come back to him than him getting back into the lead.
Huckabee made the last couple of months of 2007 his year, only to have Romney train his sights and his bankbook on him in December in Iowa; the polls are just about a dead heat there between the two after Huckabee had started to edge ahead.
The next five weeks should be a poli-sci majors dream, the most dynamic presidential nomination race in a generation at least. Oh, and Clinton, Obama and Edwards are in a three-way dead heat in Iowa and the junior senators from Illinois and New York are neck and neck in New Hampshire.
A brokered GOP convention seems to be a strong likelihood, but the Democrats could have one as well. Here's a New Year's Eve toast to smoke-free smoke-filled rooms this summer.
Well, I'm not quite a "Self-Respecting Calvinist;" although I lean in the Reformed direction in the Reformed-Arminian food fights, I wouldn't die a martyr for the idea if some jihadi Free Methodist had a knife to my throat and ordered me to recant. That being said, I'll head into the premillennialist camp if I have to choose sides on the issue; while I'm not sold on any particular flavor of eschatology within that camp, a premillennial stance seems to make more biblical sense than a post or amillennial viewpoint.
Here's the part of Daniel 9 that pulled my chatty ring this morning;
26 After the sixty-two 'sevens,' the Anointed One will be cut off and will have nothing. The people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. The end will come like a flood: War will continue until the end, and desolations have been decreed. 27 He will confirm a covenant with many for one 'seven.' In the middle of the 'seven' he will put an end to sacrifice and offering. And on a wing of the temple he will set up an abomination that causes desolation, until the end that is decreed is poured out on him.(NIV)
We didn't get to fully cover the questions, but one of the application questions is worth considering-"What would you say to the person who assets that the world will get better and better as technology advance and as governments band together to fight both natural and human-made problems?"
The pessimistic view of the future that that Daniel passage calls for would lead the dispensationalist to say {sarcasm} "yeah, riiight." {/sarcasm} However, should such a premillennial world view preclude trying to make the world a better place in the meantime? I don't think so.
Before the UN-bashers in the Peanut Gallery light up the comment section, let me quickly note that not all multilateral efforts are good ones. However, that shouldn't preclude us from being cooperative with other countries when it is in God's best interest, which doesn't always equate to being in our/the US' best interest.
Can the Antichrist use some of these neat technological tools to make his rule all the nastier? Yes, he sure could. There's been plenty of talk of database-on-a-chip implants being a prototype Mark of the Beast; that, coupled with GPS, the Internet and other tools, will make it easier to track down people the powers that be want cornered.
However, if you slow down technological progress/globalization in the name of wanting to make the Antichrist's job harder, you're likely to be working in vain. If he's supposed to come, he'll come, whether you keep ICANN under US control or not, whether we're members of the WTO or not.
Our technological policies and trade policies should look at whether such moves are good and godly for the here and now, not whether the Antichrist might be able to use then. We've gone 2000 years without the End Times going down, and there no great reason to assume that we're near the end right now. That's not to say that things couldn't spin in that direction in a hurry, but the smart money has been on things continuing on for quite a while longer.
If the manure hits the fan five years from now, feel free to have me eat my words in Heaven. However, we should set up our political economy assuming that the long haul will happen, while setting up our faith and our lives to both handle the long haul and be flexible to adapt to whatever God throws our way.
1 Then I looked up—and there before me was a man with a measuring line in his hand! 2 I asked, "Where are you going?"
He answered me, "To measure Jerusalem, to find out how wide and how long it is."
3 Then the angel who was speaking to me left, and another angel came to meet him 4 and said to him: "Run, tell that young man, 'Jerusalem will be a city without walls because of the great number of men and livestock in it. 5 And I myself will be a wall of fire around it,' declares the LORD, 'and I will be its glory within.'
Don't let urban planners see this passage, for the new Jerusalem will look like their definition of Hades, with suburban sprawl and no defined boundaries save a divine wall of fire around the perimeter. We're used to making man-made defenses and borders, but this new city
will be defined by God's glory on the inside and the fire on the
outside.
It's a big tent, as they say in the political trade, so that there isn't a limit to how big this new Jerusalem can get. That's not to say that it is universalist and that it has no standards, but that God can move that burning beltway out a few more miles if He needs to; if there are more people to bring under His rule, He'll be happy to do the change.
That metaphor could be part of our problem with evangelism, that the seeker only sees the fiery wall that will burn off his sinful impurities, many of which they'd like to hang on to. Much of the public face of the Church is that of being against various sins rather than for a risen Savior.
Our job is to bring that internal King of Glory (if I inflict the Mac Powell earwig I have going right now) outside of the walls for the world to see.
After fisking his anti-Huckabee piece, I still get put in at #4 of Randy McRoberts' favorite blogs. "Erudite in so many ways. Always thought-provoking. The professor." Hey, watch who you're calling erudite; you'll scare the readers. Next thing you know, he'll call me a practicing Homo Sapiens and scare off all my Baptist readers.
Well, I'm officially only an instructor at Sullivan U (every teacher,
save the folks in the new Doctor of Pharmacy program, is an instructor,
in an interesting bit of egalitarianism), but they might wind up moving
to give folks professorial rankings in the near future. It will be interesting whether I just get assistant or, given my graduate school schedule, associate professor when they do get around to granting such status.
I'm a jack of a lot of trades, able to talk theology, politics, economics and sports with a decent degree of insight; not too many folks can bop between eschatology, South Asian geopolitics and CMU football in a 48 hour stretch. It's enough to get 70 or so people a day to stop by, although some are merely looking for Huckabee cartoons or old lolcats.
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I'm not a Patriot-hater. However, I'd like to see the '72 Dolphins keep their only perfect record streak intact, so I will be rooting for the Giants Saturday; I have a soft spot for the Griese/Shula/Czonka/No Name Defense guys of my youth. Yes, Belichick is a jerk, and babe magnet Tom Brady is easy to be jealous of, if escorting actresses and models while making the stadium scoreboard light up like a pinball machine is your idea of the good life.
However, I can remember when my pastor in Kent would promote a teens-versus-adults touch football game as Coach Bellycheck back when he was coaching the old Browns in the mid 90s; a co-worker in the fall of '95 would call Belichick "the idiot." Also, Brady was once just a good-but-not-great QB at Michigan that wasn't expected to be MVP material in the pros.
So, if New England does manage to run the table, it is a testament to hard work and hanging in there.
Can you guys let my alma mater have a decent coach for a while?
You want to coach in the Big East? Mount Pleasant seems to be a good place to start these days. Miami used to be the MAC's "cradle of coaches" seeing former head coaches Woody Hayes (Ohio State), Bo Schembechler (Michigan), Ara Parseghian (Notre Dame) and Sid Gilman (LA Rams and SD Chargers) move on to fame elsewhere. However, CMU seems to be starting to get that status as of late.
If Jones does get the WV gig, he left town after a doozy; the Chippewas gave Purdue all they wanted, coming back from a 41-20 deficit with three unanswered TDs to tie it at 41-41. After a Purdue TD, CMU came back to tie it again at 48-48 with a minute left, only to have Purdue march down to win it 51-48.
CMU will be interesting next year; QB Dan LeFevour just missed matching Tim Tebow's 20-20 season, ending with only 19 rushing TDs and 27 passing TDs; he also became only the second quarterback to have 3000 yards passing and 1000 yards rushing in a season. A 14-game season doesn't hurt, but those are still impressive stats.
LeFevour's just a sophomore. If CMU goes 11-1 or so next year with those kind of numbers (I haven't seen their 2008 sked, but that might be feasible) he might have a shot at getting an invite to the Heisman show next year.
He might have to break in yet another head coach in the process, though.
The next question is who was behind the murder, if it wasn't a lone wacko.
The first easy finger goes at President Musharraf's crew. However, if he wanted to stop Bhutto, he could have just kept her under hard house arrest, citing past corruption charges. If the murder can be traced back to the government, support for the regime from abroad will dwindle to next to nothing and a US-led incursion to root out Taliban/al Qaeda sympathizers in the wild, wild northwest of Pakistan would be quickly forthcoming, as respecting a rogue regime's territory would be low on the west's list of priorities.
The second finger goes at radical elements wanting a less secular government. Killing off the most likely democratically-viable politician in the country will push back any meaningful democratic leanings for at least five years. The native jihadis would want a one-on-one fight with a corrupt authoritarian government rather than having to go up against a functioning democracy, and killing off Bhutto makes such a functioning democracy less likely in the near term.
The murder will have Musharraf lean towards the martial-law style of rule, making it harder for a functioning democracy to function. The passing of the opposition leader will make it hard for a viable opposition to develop; Nawaz Sharif is the other main opposition member, but he doesn't seem to be the guy to win the hearts of the average Pakistani.
It could be Musharraf, or rogue elements within the government (the ISI spy folks are easy to finger) who like the status quo and didn't want to answer to a civilian-ran government. It could also be the jihadis who would gain from the chaos.
We're back in Lexington after visiting my folks in Michigan for Christmas. No grand presents to report for Eileen and I, although my brother-in-law became Dad of the Year in my niece and nephew's eyes for camping out for two hours before the Saginaw Best Buy opened to secure a Wii for his kids (and probably himself, if truth be told).
I can see why it's a hot seller. I played some tennis, bowling and golf with my 11-year-old niece, getting beat at tennis (although I was on-serve the last two matches, but they played best of five, giving her the odd serve), winning at bowling (where I knew enough from real-life bowling to line up to the right to compensate for my hook) and throwing in the towel at golf, where I was struggling to master the Wii swing mechanics.
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It's back on the campaign trail after Christmas, where Huck gets in a hunting photo op, bagging some pheasant. That contrasts with the Clinton campaign, where they wind up bagging some peasant ;-).
On the NPR version of the piece we heard on the way home, Huckabee mentioned that the three pheasant he shot said that they wouldn't vote for him, while one with a Huckabee sticker on his rump got let go. The CNN piece has a different version of the shtick-
Huckabee, who polls show continues to hold onto his lead in Iowa
eight days before the state's caucuses — also joked the trip could
serve as a metaphorical campaign message.
"Don't get in my way," he said while pointing to the three dead birds.
"This is what happens…You vote for me, you live. You don't…there you go."
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Many schools aren't doing recess any more, and neither is Congress. The Senate is holding pro-forma sessions in order to not have Congress be in recess. How pro-forma?
The U.S. Senate was called to order for 11 seconds on Wednesday as the
last political scuffle of the year between the White House and the
Democratic-led Congress played out.
Nearly all the senators left the Capitol for the Christmas holiday last
week, but Democrats are keeping the Senate in session to block
President Bush from making any recess appointments -- a constitutional
mechanism that allows the president, during congressional recesses, to
fill top government posts for up to one year without Senate
confirmation.
Sen. Jim Webb, D-Virginia, opened and then immediately gaveled the
Senate session to a close. He spent 57 seconds in the chamber.
We'll probably have a lot of vacant slots for the next year. Not too many people are going to want to go through a mano-a-mano Senate confirmation process for a one-year appointment, since the next president will likely bring in their own people in early 2009.
Actually, a recess appointment isn't for one year, it's for the remainder of the current Congress' session, which happens to be a smidge more than a year right now. A recess appointment would run out in early January 2009, just a couple of weeks before the new president takes office.
More later. CMU-Purdue Motor City Bowl is on, and I don't get to see my alma mater on national TV too often.
I've not done a old-school fisking in a while, but this Randy McRoberts piece calls for a classic paragraph-by-paragraph breakdown. He's normally even-handed and thoughtful, but something has gotten into his craw about the Man from Hope 2.0.
I can’t support Mike Huckabee, as much as I would want to. Many
evangelical Christians will support him because he is an evangelical
Christian. I say that is insufficient.
Agreed. If he was just a believer, it wouldn't be enough. The eight year old who got baptized last fall at church knows the Lord, but she'll need more than an extra 27 years of age before she's ready to be president.
However, a decade as a governor puts Huckabee in good stead on experience, better than Romney and Thompson, loosely on a par with Giuliani and a smidge behind McCain.
Huckabee is right on a couple of the conservative hot button issues. He
is wrong on almost everything else. Those who care only about those two
hot button issues will support him, I guess. Problem is, he can’t do
anything about those two hot button issues anyway, so it won’t make any
difference.
Not quite true. He can't do much about abortion and same-sex marriage on his own, but he can name good judges to the Supreme Court that might tip the balance on those issues. The next president will likely replace Justice Stevens and possibly Ginsburg; replacing either one of those with a conservative justice will give the court a prospective anti-Roe majority and a clear majority for a traditional view of marriage.
On other issues, Huckabee is basically a liberal. Examine it for
yourself, if you like. I don’t like the prospect of another four to
eight years of out-of-control spending and increasing government
regulation of just about everything. We’ve had that for the last eight
years under a “conservative” president. Let’s not make the same mistake
again.
Is the last name McRoberts or Vezzini? You keep using that word "liberal." I do not think it means what you think it means.
If it means "anyone who wants a bit more government than I do," then you are probably right. Huckabee is a bit to your left on fiscal policy, having (1) signed off on some tax increases in Arkansas, seeing per capita tax revenues go from 93% of the national average in 1996 to 105% in 2006; that's my calculations of US Census figures. He's also (2) a bit moderate on immigration, being magnanimous to the children of illegals in Arkansas, even while proposing a fairly aggressive border-control program. In addition, he's (3) said some populist things about big CEO salaries and made some vague noises about (4) wanting fair trade.
All four of those put him at odds with the standard conservative line. However, that doesn't push him into the liberal camp, unless you think everything but the rightmost 25% of the spectrum is liberal.
On the first point, he's not alone in raising taxes. Mitt Romney oversaw a bigger tax increase in Massachusetts during his term than Huckabee did in Arkansas, even with the big "Taxachusettes" budget to start with. Yes, he's on the centrist side on fiscal policy, but none of the four leaders in the race are consistent conservatives.
On immigration, none of the big four candidates have had a long history of being immigration hawks. Rudy was as magnanimous to illegals as NYC mayor as Huckabee was, and Romney has done a near 180 on the issue. McCain was up front on the pro-normalization/amnesty side and has largely stayed there, throwing in a beef-up-the-border bone as of late.
On the last two points, those are actually paleoconservative viewpoints that play to the Pitchfork Pat wing of the party. To the best of my knowledge, I haven't seen Huckabee come forward with a coherent proposal to limit executive salaries, nor would I expect him to.
On "fair trade", there are other folks who want to stick the federal government's nose into the trade system. Check out the Mitt Romney ad that's been running here in Michigan; I've seen it three times on TV since coming up to visit my folks for Christmas
And for me, Michigan is personal. It's inexcusable that Michigan is undergoing a one-state recession. High levels of unemployment, industry is shrinking here, jobs are going away. We're going to invest in technology and research to make sure that American goods are pushing into other markets. We're also going to have to do a better job keeping our taxes down. I think I'm probably the only guy on this stage who spent most of his career in the business world. I understand how the economy works. There's a lot we can do to strengthen Michigan.
Can you say "Industrial policy," boys and girls? I thought you could. Romney sounds more like Paul Tsongas here than a red-meat conservative. The Japanese did well by it in the 70s and 80s, then proceeded to stagnate for the last two decades; if it works, it can work well, but it can also suck up government resources backing losing industries.
I've yet to see a coherent trade policy from Huckabee yet, so there's hope that he can learn a bit of international econ on the fly.
Back to the close of Randy's piece
Who are the Republican candidates that would actually do something to reverse the trend of bigger government?
Where have all the good men gone, and where are all the gods?
Where's the street-wise Hercules to fight the rising odds?
Isn't there a white knight upon a fiery steed?
No such luck. If you're looking for an all-purpose conservative hero, he ain't in the race. Ronald Reagan is not only dead, he's already served his max of two terms; it would take a miracle and a constitutional amendment to get him back in the race.
Fred Thompson comes within hailing distance of being Reaganesque, but his campaign is nearly at the ambient temperature of a Cedar Rapids playground... in December. If I may borrow from The Princess Bride again-
"Have fun storming Iowa" "Do you think he'll make it?" "It'll take a miracle."
Rudy? He might meet the "street-wise Hercules" specs, but he's no conservative outside of national security. This is the guy who endorsed Mario Cuomo for governor. Thank you for playing, you can pick up your parting gifts at the door.
John McCain? Like Rudy, a trooper on national security, but he'll turn to the center on the drop of a hat on anything else. Nice try.
Mitt Romney? If you think Huckabee is Dubya 2.0, you might recall that his dad George would get the RINO label were he politically active today; a good businessman, but a moderate politically. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
Romney seems to gravitate to whatever the political center of gravity is; in MA, he leans to the center, in a Republican presidential primary, he tacks hard right. What will General Election Mitt look like? Beltway Mitt?
Huckabee may have some centrist streaks, but he's more reliable than the rest of the field; even if I don't always agree with him, he's more WYSIWYG than the rest of the field save McCain. He's no less reliably conservative than the ones with a fighting shot at the nomination.
We don't have any conservative heroes in the hunt. We've got a couple of moderately conservative alpha males, a moderately conservative businessman/governor and a moderately conservative pastor/governor.
All else being equal, I'll go with the pastor/governor. However, your mileage may vary. Just watch where you throw that L word.
The problem seems to be that da Bulls can't hit the barn side of a broad. They are shooting field goals at 3% less than their foes, knock down three-pointers 4% less and hit free-throws 1% less. They grab three-tenths of a rebound more and turn the ball over one less time than their foes, but that doesn't do enough to offset the brick-laying.
Ben Wallace, a 47.5% shooter on his career, is only shooting 33% from the field. You expect Big Ben to be an adventure from the free throw line, but you also expect him to get his share of double-team outlet dunks. Is he joining the Rudy Gay wanna-get-away missed dunk school? Rookie Joakim Noah is scoring more in only 40% of the minutes.
It's not just Wallace. The starting guards, Kurt Hinrich and Ben Gordon, are each under 40% in their field-goal shooting. Unless Skiles suits up (at 43, he probably can shoot 40% from the perimeter even today) and starts shooting the jumpers for them, there isn't too much he can do to get people to find the bucket.
No Christmas season would be complete without a naughty Santa report; a few liquored-up Kiwis get the bad-Santa-no-cookies treatment this year.
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On a more serious note, the Thai election promises some interesting politics in the days to come. A year ago, the military ran off the populist-conservative Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and later banned his party; Thaksin was popular in the countryside and in the north of the country, but wasn't well liked by the big-city elites. Sounds like the modern GOP ;-).
The elites are likely grumbling, for they're right back where they started from.
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I'm not sure if this is good news or bad news, but Ron Paul refused to slam the door on a third-party run in 2008. He'd likely drain more votes from anti-war Democrats, especially if a she-was-for-it-before-she-was-against-it Hillary is the Democratic nominee. However, Paul would give small-l libertarian Republicans an option to vote against an more economic centrist Republican nominee like McCain or Huckabee and might even have a shot at winning Vermont.
8And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. 9An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. 11Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. 12This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger."
13Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,
14"Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests."
15When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let's go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about."
One thing to remember is that this was the Blue Collar Good News Tour; we often forget that the shepherds were about as low on the Judean totem pole as you got. The angels went not to the Chamber of Commerce meeting or the rulers of the day, but to a bunch of farm hands looking after sheep.
It might not be polite to say so these days, but there is that God-incarnate babe in the manger that throws a monkey wrench into the Santaization/comercialization of the season. El Niño doesn't make people too nervous, but the Savior who died on the cross for us does; that's why the empty tomb doesn't show up in the secular version of Easter while the Nativity scene gets a slot alongside other things...
It is "good news of great joy" that we take far to for granted, that God opted to send part of Himself to earth to die for us, for if we take the three-in-one theology of the Trinity seriously, it was literally part of Himself that He sent down. That should give us a sense of awe and gratitude that extends beyond the gift cards, sweaters and video games under the trees.
Probably, since he must feel like he's going through the Tribulation right now ;-).
One of the interesting things about Mike Huckabee's trip to John Hagee's church in San Antonio is that the coverage focused on Hagee's occasional Catholic-bashing. A lot of Catholic punditry has been nervous about a Southern Baptist pastor heading up the ticket, given the low art of Catholic-bashing oft practiced in evangelical circles. That thought came up when Huckabee got a minor dig in at Mormonism; the Catholics likely feared that they'd be next.
That's actually good for Huckabee, because what they should have asked is whether Huckabee agreed with Hagee's eschatology. For me, when I hear Hagee's name mentioned, I think of his dispensationalist, premillennial take on the end times, not Catholic-bashing. Run Bob Jones U or Sword of the Lord magazine by me, and Catholic-bashing gets in the first five responses, but if you mention Hagee, my word association is "end-times charts."
My vision of him is this hopelessly old school guy with a 60s-era LBJesque haircut on a podium with some detailed chart, 20 feet by 5 feet, where he'll point out various points on the spiritual time-line. He largely buys in to the Left Behind-style eschatology of a premillennial, pre-tribulation Rapture; here's a transcript of Hagee talking eschatology with Glenn Beck earlier this year.
What Huckabee thinks of the imminence of the Second Coming would be interesting. If you think Jesus is coming back in years rather than centuries, fixing the Social Security deficit in 2052 is a moot point. Fixing a global warming problem that won't really rear its ugly head until later this century is a non-issue as well.
There might not be a perfect correlation, but people who tend to be more staunchly premillennialist also tend to be more conservative on economics and foreign policy, having less desire to change the world that is doomed to going to Hell in a hand basket, prepping for the Antichrist. That doesn't seem to describe Huckabee, whose policies seem to be a bit more postmillennial in its take.
If you wanted to start a food-fight in evangelical quarters, ask Huckabee about dispensationalism. If he says nice things about it, he gets chalked up as a fundie and the MSM has a field day. If he disagrees with it, you get a unholy war between the more conservative Baptist and Pentecostal camp who are hard-core premillennial. and a more moderate camp that Huckabee seems to reside in.
Thankfully, the discussion was merely anti-Catholic, which is largely a bit of a red herring. It could have been a lot worse.
We went to my sister's church in Midland, Christian Celebration Center, this morning, and had an interesting sermon on holiness delivered (the link is to a PDF of the study notes). I used to attend the church, and appreciated how long-time pastor Joel Stocker can exegete a passage to the nth degree. His main verse was II Timothy 2:19-22, but it was a follow-up verse of Hebrews 12:1 that got my mind thinking.
Here's the verse in the NIV-"Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us." It's that passage that Stocker dug deep into, getting out the Greek,
so easily entangles / euperistatos / a compound of three words
eu / something that feels well or is comfortable peri / something that completely surrounds statos / stand
euperistatos / something that comfortably
stands completely around us
His in-service visual was to wrap a teenage girl in plastic wrap from chest to knees, but the better application would be a "blankie," the security blanket that many youngsters have. It surrounds us and makes us comfortable.
The thing that got me was that the blankies might not be "unholy environments that wrap us up in their ways." as Stocker's notes suggest. Bad circles of friends and bad environments might be examples of an euperistatos blankie, but it could also be creature comforts, be they physical or emotional, that get us away from what we should be doing.
Sitting back and watching the double-header game on Sunday when you should be going off to an evening service would be an blankie. There isn't anything wrong with the game per se, but it gets in the way of your walk. Being unwilling to put aside your suburban creature comforts in order to serve in some rural backwater might be another.
What blankies do you need to get rid of? What ones do I have? That's been on my mind this afternoon, and I don't have a good answer.
We're back in Midland and hooked up to my dad's internal network. We had an uneventful drive north, other than having to get around Cincinnati during rush hour.
Question. Was he Methodist or Anglican? The BBC piece said Anglican, but my 2003 piece had him down as Methodist. Either way, he's a lot freer to maneuver now that he's out of office. A Catholic PM might not have been able to bring unionist Protestants on board in Northern Ireland.
__________
Normally, Florida State has a squeaky-clean program. However, they'll be sitting down 34 players for their bowl game against Kentucky, in large part due to an academic cheating scandal. Bobby Bowden seems to be a nice gentleman, but he may have stayed past his freshness date.
I've got a little downtime before picking Eileen up after work and pointing the car north towards Michigan for Christmas; it will be the first time that my new car will have left the south; it's only been in Kentucky and Tennessee in the six months I've owned it.
A little light-heartedness is an order. I've been working on my Executive MBA FIN 542 on-line class, and decided to humanize the syllabus a bit. If you haven't discovered I Can Has Cheezburger, you're missing out on some good fun. I've lifted a couple of pictures, which seems to be OK, since they have a ready-to-go HTML code of each "Lolcat" for you to "put this pic on your blog or myspace!" I would assume that online finance syllabi would qualify.
I have this one along side the discussion on how to behave in our discussion section, warning them about using ad-homs and following the Golden Rule.
Also, I snagged this one for the homework section.
That's rather funny, since this is an on-line class, it would be hard for a dog or cat to eat your homework, although a picture of a cat at a keyboard with the caption. "Vista et ur homewerk philes. Reely!" might be one that would be even better.
This next one I don't have any good use for the class, but it's too good to not share.
Tom Tancredo has gotten the message and has dropped out of the presidential race, endorsing Mitt Romney on the way out. An interesting choice, but a logical one. Fred Thompson is probably the best immigration hawk of the lead pack, but he's fading in the back stretch while Mitt is on the rise in some national polling; NBC has him in a 20-20 dead heat with Rudy.
That's a two-edged sword. It will help shore up his right flank, especially upon immigration hawks. However, it may scare off folks who aren't immigration hawks. It might make the difference in New Hampshire, where McCain is breathing down Romney's neck.
________
Guiliani had to go to the hospital in St. Louis with "flu like symptoms" that were bad enough to turn the campaign plane back to get him help. Even though he's about my least favored candidate in the GOP lead pack (although Romney's incessant Huck-bashing could earn him a spot in the doghouse), he could still use some prayers.
I had to chuckle sadly at this line from da Mayor-
During the interview, Giuliani also said waterboarding should not be
used in interrogations, but he opened the door to using it in a
"once-in-a-lifetime, once-in-a-decade situation."
Once in a lifetime? I guess he'd be Bush 2.0, same as it ever was, same as it ever was.
Liberal Democrats have to be ornery right now; Pelosi gets behind the wheel, only to find out it's one of those amusement park cars that only go 10MPH and can't move off of the set track. When push comes to shove, moderates bolt to create a center-right governing coalition.
I had an interesting experience this evening; I went to a Huckabee Meetup here in Lexington this evening. I found the Meetup link from a blogger whose name escapes me; I'll post it when I get back to my desktop computer [Update 10:45PM- Kevin Tracy is the gentleman's name]. He was a Catholic Huck backer who I found when checking back on a Google Blog link to here on Sunday night when I was working my Smarthinking tutoring gig, (or at least being on call to work, since we had almost no tutoring traffic Sunday night); that was on the desktop, while I'm on the laptop now.
I follow through on the link, plug in my zip code and see that there is a Meetup in Lexington on Tuesday night at the big Joseph Beth bookstore. Eileen and I were planning on doing some Christmas shopping there anyways and the prospect of a hour or two to peruse one of the best bookstores on the planet (that's not just new-found Lexington homer-dom; it is a very, very nice store) was welcome news for her.
It wasn't a huge turnout, seven guys (all guys; Eileen went off and book-wormed) including a former newspaper reporter, a Church of God-Cleveland church planter and a blogger named Cory Graham who introduced himself as a Noam Chomsky liberal [Update 12/19-The spelling has been corrected; I had it Chompsky at first. There's no p in Chomsky, for he's very dehydrated.] who liked Huckabee's honesty and foreign policy and liked the Fair Tax, too. I just checked out his blog when I got back, and here's his take on the Huckster-
I was first introduced to Governor Huckabee on January 10, 2007 in his appearance on The Daily Show.
I can remember thinking to myself, “Oh wow, he’s going to be
president.” This was followed by a desire to show every single living,
breathing person on earth the clip and seemingly endless crowing about
how this soft-spoken minister from Arkansas seemed to be on his way to
Washington. He was frank, he was charming, he was Bill Clinton without
the sleaze, he was George Bush without the cowboy façade, he was Jimmy
Carter without the Jimmy Carter.
As the progress rolled on in Iowa, he quietly rose in the polls a
point at a time, until eventually people felt compelled to look into
this character. His incredible charisma and Southern Baptist values
resonated deeply with Iowa voters, and each week he seemed to be just
slightly more of a “contender” than otherwise expected. While the rest
of the Republican party clamored to “triple Guantanamo” or to invoke
9/11 in every breath, Mike Huckabee was Mike Huckabee, and voters
seemed to like that.
So, here we are. Nearly every reputable poll has a previously
little-known Governor from the state of Arkansas leading a pack of
political robots in the nation’s first real test of the political
waters. As voters, we’ve been here before. We’ve seen previously
little-known Arkansas Governors take to the streets, be themselves and
pull out astounding victories. If history has taught us anything, it’s
that a dark horse is only dark until a major victory shines the light
on their candidacy… and that apparently Hope, Arkansas is the nation’s foremost breeding ground for presidents.
The Fair Tax (a 23% federal sales tax that replaces income and payroll taxes, with a monthly "prebate" check to cover the tax on a poverty-level-income spending for your family size), not Huckabee's Southern Baptist pastor roots, were what were getting the plurality of the folks juiced. I'm not a big Neal Boortz fan; he's nails-on-chalkboard 85% of the time to me (think Rush without the humor if you've not caught his act), but he's written a book on the issue that had a following with the crowd tonight.
There was a bit of brainstorming on what to do to help in this time frame; given that Kentucky doesn't have it's primary until May, things may be moot by the time they get to us. By February 5, things may well have been decided for or against Huck; however, we may be in a three or four-way free-for-all where every delegate going to the convention counts and the late primaries may well have an impact.
We had three bloggers among the seven of us, I think this was the other one, but I forgot to get his URL; he's a Huck backer who Mr. Graham links to, so it may well be he. One strategy to be of help that was floated was to put in a good word for Huckabee in places that he's getting savaged on line; Graham mentioned that the Free Republic folks were savaging Huckabee mercilessly; I tend not to inhabit that fever swamp of the right, but the Red State folks often aren't kind to him.
The other strategy was to become, at least in our own spheres of influence, Fair Tax explainers; apologist (in the good sense) was the first word that came to mind, but "explainer" seemed a bit better. It's a radical change from our current tax code, with its share of winners and losers, but it's something that can be sold, and is actually a good wedge issue that can win over blue-collar voters if properly explained. As Graham mentioned tonight, it will be demagogued to no end by the Democrats if Huckabee is the nominee, but with the right explaining from Huckabee and other Fair Tax backers, it could win people over.
The funny thing is, it's not something that has won me over yet. I've yet to fully wrap my mind around it, and meshing the nasty-streak libertarian Boortz with the more pastoral Huckabee creates a bit of cognitive dissonance in my skull. However, if I get past my distaste for Boortz, it seems to make intellectual sense. Getting my gut past it is the key for me, and plenty of other folks.
On the good side, check out the nice Christmas ad from Huckabee. The only thing that's the least bit controversial is his mentioning that what really matters is the "celebration of the birth of Christ." Only a Scrooge, a professional atheist or a Romney backer will hate it; even the Mitt wits over at the Corner liked the ad-"In fact, no matter how the presidential campaign turns out, I'd watch a Mike Huckabee Christmas Special."
That's a front-runner's ad, playing the high ground while using the birth-of-Christ line as one of those "dog-whistle pitch[es] only Evangelicals can hear." The people behind are usually scrambling, either attacking the leader or differentiating themselves from the others. The front runner can afford the warm-fuzzies that merely lock in his position.
Feeling old? Here's something that will make you feel older; a Packer defensive back named Atari Bigby. He showed up on the ESPN highlight reel that was showing while we were out to dinner; he had two interceptions in Green Bay's win yesterday.
At 26, he would have been born in 1981, right in the middle of the Atari craze; his Packer bio said that his grandma liked the name. You can often trace names from when their namesakes were in the limelight. I recall finding a Kizzy in my rounds working in the finance wing of a hospital and figured that she'd have to be born circa 1977 while Roots was a major item; shore 'nough, it was 1978, IIRC. Same thing with a young woman named Tennille, as in The Captain an; you knew that she had to have been the product of some Muskrat Love of the mid-late 70s.
Is he an Atari Democrat? Jamaican immigrant, liberal studies major at U of Miami, dreadlock 'do. Fairly safe bet.
6 "Do not prophesy," their prophets say.
"Do not prophesy about these things;
disgrace will not overtake us."
7 Should it be said, O house of Jacob:
"Is the Spirit of the LORD angry?
Does he do such things?"
"Do not my words do good
to him whose ways are upright?
This passage hit me; the application that comes to mind isn't of a revelation/word-of-knowledge type of prophecy, but a speaking-truth-to-power type that puts the prophet in an awkward spot.
On one level, Micah is God's 527 fund, an independent cuss running attack ads on Judah's leadership. However, what he was saying about Judah's corruption was true; painful, but true.
Micah nails it in verse 7; if you're doing things right, the truth won't hurt. The prophet won't be able to say anything bad about you and your worldly foes will have to be disingenuous in order to make a case against you.
If you're doing things God's way, then the Club for Growing Godlier or MoveOnwardTowardsGod.org aren't going to hurt. They'll just encourage your campaign to expand God's kingdom.
If you aren't on the same page, the Gospel will seem like an attack ad, for it will point out where you've gone astray. However, unlike a 527, it can do more than bash a person, it can advocate for the bestest candidate ever, Jesus. He doesn't have to run for public office, he's both King of Kings and the best defense attorney in the business, for no client of His ever gets put in the slammer for their sins; He took the rap already on Golgotha.
He doesn't need to run for election; for Heaven is a benign monarchy. There are spiritual democrats out there, but thankfully, there is no election of the King.
When I was living in the Akron area while going to Kent State, West Virginia was the target of a lot of bad jokes, like the WV "Three R's" were "reading, 'riting and the road to Akron" to take a number of factory jobs there back in the heyday of the Rust Belt.
What will be interesting, as the Detroit Free Press notes, is if Rodriguez can bring his spread offense to Michigan; the heir apparent at QB, Ryan Mallett, who played well in spot duty as a freshman this year, as a tall pocket passer, not the second coming of Pat White.
Interesting poll numbers out of Illinois, which may be a spitting image of the US. Real Clear Politics' poll of national polls has the race 23 Rudy, 20 Huck, 15 Romney, 12 McCain and 10 Thompson. Illinois is coming in at 23 Rudy, 21 Huck, 14 Romney, 12 McCain and 11 Thompson. That might the race that decides who will be the nominee.
If Huckabee wins Illinois, he'll be on his way to the nomination, assuming that he wins the places where he's presently ahead, in Iowa, South Carolina, Michigan and Florida. If Rudy can only win the big coastal states and get shut out in flyover country, he'll be hard pressed to get the nomination.
It may turn out that Huckabee winds up winning a lot of 25% pluralities rather than Rudy, which might allow him to have a serious leg up on the nomination after mega Tuesday on 2/5.
Interestingly, Illinois has two favorite children in the race, as Hillary Clinton was raised in Illinois before meeting Bill off at Yale. However, their junior senator is getting the better of the junior senator from New York, 50-25.
A few items from the sports pages have caught my eye, but finals week has kept me busy; plus, some of my thoughts took some time to percolate.
The Mitchell report was the sports news of the week, confirming a lot of steroid rumors and adding the name of Roger Clemens to the mix of folks allegedly in the better-living-through-chemistry crowd. It might explain how he was able to put up All-Star numbers in his 40s, but it might also be that his trainer was making things up; a tough Texan with a work ethic might be able to deliver without artificial help at an age when most folks have retired from the game.
However, the tougher stand on steroids in recent years might give credence to Clemens' Fred Thompson school of baseball, where he waited until mid-season to get things started. The allegations had him using steroids in order to be able to get through a long season, and he may have compensated for the lack of steroids by shortening the season unilaterally.
_______
Another interesting news items was Bobby Petrino's bailing out of Atlanta in mid-season to take the Arkansas position. I don't know if too many people have made this connection (a fewhavewhen I Googled for it), but another promising young college coach took at stab at the NFL, then returned to the college game at Arkansas; Lou Holtz. Holtz lasted 13 games with the Jets before resigning a week before the end of the 1976 season (Holtz quipped that "God didn't put Lou Holtz on earth to be a pro coach."); he went back to become one of the better college coaches, taking Notre Dame to the 1988 title.
Petrino signed onto Atlanta before the team went to the dogs and lost Michael Vick; without a major tool, there wasn't much an offensive maestro could work with. He tried to make a silk purse out of Joey Harrington's ear, but it didn't work, and he realized that he probably got promoted out of what he was good at doing.
Will we see a successful Bobby Petrino doing studio work in 2035 after leading the Razorbacks to a national title in 2016? If he can get past the current quitter meme and be able to do his offensive magic on Fayetteville, possibly. As one commenter mentioned, Holtz "seems to have rehabbed his image pretty well."
I just went over the five-screen Huckabee Foreign Affairs piece. If you get past the first paragraphs, he's largely in the camp of the hawks in the Bush administration; he differs in that they should have been more forceful in most cases.
Dubya's about 60% West Texas "cowboy" and 40% New England aristocrat which often creates the worst of both worlds. When he tries to play to his parent's upbringing, with the Dana-Carvey-playing-Dad "Not gonna do it, wouldn't be prudent" cautious side coming to the fore, he doesn't get credit for it because of the cowboy persona. Then, when he lets his inner Texan out, it scares the [insert bodily function product] out of the Europeans; "Some people say that I have a swagger. In Texas, we call it 'walking.'"
Arkansas has a bit of that no-nonsense streak but not quite the swagger. Huckabee's natural state seems to be to de-ruffle feathers where possible, which is an effective evangelistic tool; it's hard to present the Gospel to folks who are mad at you. It's also hard to persuade someone to come on your side of a diplomatic issue if your style turns them off.
Here's the second paragraph, the one with the word-bite in it-
American foreign policy needs to change its tone and attitude, open up,
and reach out. The Bush administration's arrogant bunker mentality has
been counterproductive at home and abroad. My administration will
recognize that the United States' main fight today does not pit us
against the world but pits the world against the terrorists. At the
same time, my administration will never surrender any of our
sovereignty, which is why I was the first presidential candidate to
oppose ratification of the Law of the Sea Treaty, which would endanger
both our national security and our economic interests.
There's two fights going on at once, a fight between militant Islam and the west and a fight between a more market-socialist, centralized EU vision of the world and a more welfare-capitalism and decentralized US-led vision of the world. Huckabee puts himself in the latter camp in the second fight, sounding a touch Buchananesque with the "never surrender any of our
sovereignty" line.
Once you get that first paragraph out of the way, he presents a hawkish foreign policy that wants to do Iraq right, to beef up the active-duty armed forces so that we don't rely on the reserves and the National Guard as much, to contain Iran and bring pro-Iranian European powers on side, and to go after al Qaeda in Pakistan even if Musharraf doesn't like it.
This closing paragraph is worth noting-
"The process will not be quick," Ambassador Crocker told Congress of
the progress in Iraq last fall. "It will be uneven, punctuated by
setbacks as well as achievements, and it will require substantial U.S.
resolve and commitment." Does this sound familiar? To me, the statement
could also have applied to the American Revolution, the American Civil
War, World War I, or World War II. We paid a heavy price in each of
those conflicts, but we prevailed. And we will prevail now. Our
history, from the snows of Valley Forge to the flames of 9/11, has been
one of perseverance. I understand the threats we face today. When I am
president, America will look this evil in the eye, confront it, defeat
it, and emerge stronger than ever. It is easy to be a peace lover; the
challenging part is being a peacemaker.
I found myself reflecting on the word. Peacemaker. How often
do the "peace activists" actually achieve peace? Not often, since the
bad guys of the world aren't going to play nice, as the peaceniks want.
These people are peacewishers, not peacemakers. They want peace to
happen but aren't ready to do the things that would bring about peace.
In a domestic drama, the peacewisher stands back shouting "You two stop
that!" while the peacemaker steps between the fighters and says "OK!
Break it up!" The peacemaker may even have to cold-cock the most
belligerent of the parties before order is restored.
Translated to world affairs, a peacemaker may have to get physically
involved, get dirty and crack some heads if needed in order to separate
a pair of warring factions. Peacemaking is an active verb.
This will be
opposed from both ends of the spectrum. Some liberals won't want us to
take sides (moral relativism) and are afraid of using force to settle
anything. Some conservatives will oppose getting involved if there's no
"Compelling National Interest" involved. But if we are to run the
country in a godly manner, shouldn't we use our military for good where
feasible?
I like Huck's use of peace lover to replace my peacewisher. The neocons took a standing eight count this last year, but it looks like they might just be willing to get back in the fight with new management.
One of the chuckle-getters in Mike Huckabee's platform is the goal of energy independence by 2019, ten years after Huckabee takes office (if all goes well). That's more doable that it looks. I'm not an energy expert, nor do I play one on TV, but it would make our foreign policy a lot more tenable, especially if we didn't have to treat the Saudis with kid gloves.
For too long, we have been constrained because our dependence on
imported oil has forced us to support repressive regimes and conduct
our foreign policy with one hand tied behind our back. I will free that
hand from its oil-soaked rope and reach out to moderates in the Arab
and Muslim worlds with both. I want to treat Saudi Arabia the way we
treat Sweden, and that will require the United States to be energy
independent. The first thing I will do as president is send Congress my
comprehensive plan for achieving energy independence within ten years
of my inauguration. We will explore, we will conserve, and we will
pursue all types of alternative energy: nuclear, wind, solar, ethanol,
hydrogen, clean coal, biomass, and biodiesel.
I'm going to paint with some very, very broad brushes that energy experts can take apart easily, but details can be fleshed out after we get a broad outline. We can start with these stats on US energy use.
Oil
39%
Natural Gas
24%
Coal
23%
Nuclear
8%
Hydro
3%
Other
3%
Now, we can add to the stats that we import 73% of our oil and 19% of our natural gas. That's going to leave a dent, taking out roughly a third of our energy.
Current
Without
Imports
Oil
39%
10.52%
Natural Gas
24%
19.39%
Coal
23%
23.00%
Nuclear
8%
8.00%
Hydro
3%
3.00%
Other
3%
3.00%
Total
100%
66.92%
"George must do this; this gonna hurt." No, not that bad.
Let's start with doubling the number of nuclear power plants, taking some of the load off those natural gas and oil imports. That will trim 8% off the total. We're far enough away from the Cold War where some of the fears of nuclear power may have subsided enough to get us back in the nuclear game; it's the cleanest form of our major power groups as long as you hang on to the radioactive stuff.
That could be done without a whole lot of government spending. Electric utilities are going to be building new plants and if new nuke plants can be built within a streamlined regulatory structure that still gives good quality control, we could have a new line of nuclear power plants coming on line in the late 2010s.
I don't really see the coal percentage changing much and any new hydro is going to be a no-go given the ecological number new dams will do to a river. Could we crank up that "other" category?
That's an iffy category. There's room for growth, but it's not going to do too much of the job. Tripling its current count to 10% might be feasible. Solar power is starting to become cost-effective and wind power is starting to get greater use. Geothermal power could have some applications, especially in small-scale heating and cooling of a house as an aid to conventional climate control systems.
We might need a little government help to get things rolling, but high energy prices will do most of the work here. Building new homes with geothermal heating and cooling assistance and solar collectors on the roof might help bring our energy needs down nicely; a modest tax break for putting them in could help grease the skids.
A tricky concept would be a broad brush idea to cut energy consumption by 10% by the end of the next decade. At 15% change in CAFE standards (allowing for the older cars still out there, a 15% reduction in new cars might get the total down by 10% in a decade) by 2019 might do the trick for the automotive sector, which wouldn't be a huge burden on Detroit. $3/gallon gas will have consumers demanding more fuel-efficient cars; moving the fleet average from 30MPG to 35MPG would be nearly a no-brainer. 40MPH might even be doable if various hybrid technologies become more cost effective.
Can we cut home and business energy consumption by 10% in a decade? Probably. Slightly more energy efficient appliances, the new lamp-sized florescent light bulbs, better insulation and other things could be done and are being done.
OK, what about increasing domestic oil production. ANWR could crank out about 5% of our current oil needs, or about 2% of our total energy needs. Yes, it's only 2%, but it's a doable 2%, as long as you don't mind defacing a small bit of tundra in the process. There are other places where we could crank up oil production, like off of California and Florida, but I'll leave those off for now.
Here's what I have so far-
Current
Without
With
Imports
Changes
Oil
39%
10.52%
10.52%
Natural Gas
24%
19.39%
19.39%
Coal
23%
23.00%
23.00%
Nuclear
8%
8.00%
16.00%
Hydro
3%
3.00%
2.00%
Other
3%
3.00%
10.00%
10% Efficiency
10.00%
ANWR
2.00%
Total
100%
66.92%
92.92%
Not quite all the way there, but we go from having a 33% gap to a 7% gap. The vast majority of that can be done via voluntary methods, possibly encouraged by modest tax breaks, less flak for setting up nuke plants and a modest increase in CAFE standards.People will start to conserve more as energy prices go up, as things like the new florescent light bulbs start to quickly pay for themselves; many of these changes will happen on their own.
Can we close that 7% gap with stuff I haven't mentioned? Turn that 10% efficiency into 15% with a more aggressive conservation effort, but that might start to be a serious drag on the economy and the federal budget; 10% could be done without a whole lot of cash being spent from Washington. The other 2% could be done by squeezing another percentage out of alternative energy and by drilling off the lower 48 coastline.
With a savvy Republican using the bully pulpit of the White House to encourage both conservation and new production, we could come within hailing distance of Huckabee's goal without any draconian micromanaging of the economy. It might require some modest government intervention, which won't please the folks on the hard right, but it might be worth it to be able to tell Ahmadinejad or the Saudis what they can do with their oil.
I'd like the Catholic readers in the Peanut Gallery to chime in here. Is there an anti-Baptist bias in Catholic circles based on the bad rap Catholicism gets in many evangelical quarters?
Mike Huckabee is in the lead due,
it appears, to voter approval of the depth and sincerity of his
religious beliefs as lived out in his ministry as an ordained Southern
Baptist. He flashes "Christian leader" over his picture in commercials;
he asserts his faith is "mainstream"; his surrogates speak of Mormonism
as "strange" and "definitely a factor." Mr. Huckabee said this summer
that a candidate's faith is "subject to question," "part of the game."
That and a decade as governor of Arkansas. We don't have a whole lot of track record of his life as a pastor; the weekly sermons aren't available. However, we do have a track record with him in the governor's mansion.
It is true that a good hunk of his support comes from his pastoral background; evangelicals feel that he's "one of us" in a way that hasn't happened before at this level.
After getting in a dig at the Jesus'-brother affair, she gets back to a bigger issue
Christian conservatives have been
rising, most recently, for 30 years in national politics, since they
helped elect Jimmy Carter. They care about the religious faith of their
leaders, and their interest is legitimate. Faith is a shaping force.
Lincoln got grilled on it. But there is a sense in Iowa now that faith
has been heightened as a determining factor in how to vote, that such
things as executive ability, professional history, temperament,
character, political philosophy and professed stands are secondary,
tertiary.
But they are not, and cannot be. They are central. Things seem to be getting out of kilter, with the emphasis shifting too far.
The great question: Does it make
Mr. Huckabee, does it seal his rise, that he has acted in such a
manner? Or does it damage him? Republicans on the ground in Iowa and
elsewhere will decide that. And in the deciding they may be deciding
more than one man's future. They may be deciding if Republicans are
becoming a different kind of party.
We haven't seen someone with a clear evangelical faith (conservative Methodist Dubya doesn't quite count) get to within hailing distance of a Republican presidential nomination in my lifetime. Pat Robertson in 1988 comes the closest, but even he managed just a surprise second in Iowa and wasn't expected to go much further than that. I didn't support him in that run and his style may have scared off quite a few more moderate evangelicals.
Rev-Run Pat never did anything but run a TV network. Gary Bauer never did more than run the Family Research Council. As Coleman Young once quipped about Jesse Jackson, they've "never run anything but their mouths."
Huckabee ran Arkansas for a decade and rather well, if you're not allergic to slightly rising taxes when needed to improve a poorly-run state. Unlike the people who have run as champion of religious conservatives (Robinson, Bauer, Alan Keyes), Huckabee has run something other than a charity.
If you give conservative evangelical voters an option of a qualified evangelical politician rather than a professional churchman or church lobbyist, they may well pick him. If Mike Huckabee were just a Southern Baptist leader, he'd be fighting Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo for 6th place at 3% or less.
Here's the real "money graf" of the Noonan piece in this regard-
I wonder if our old friend Ronald
Reagan could rise in this party, this environment. Not a regular
churchgoer, said he experienced God riding his horse at the ranch,
divorced, relaxed about the faiths of his friends and aides, or about
its absence. He was a believing Christian, but he spent his adulthood
in relativist Hollywood, and had a father who belonged to what some
saw, and even see, as the Catholic cult. I'm just not sure he'd be pure
enough to make it in this party. I'm not sure he'd be considered good
enough.
Were Ronald Reagan pushed 28 years into the future, where the 1980 version of him was running in 2008, a successful two-term governor of California and conservative champion, he'd be getting 40%-45% of the GOP vote right now; note that it's governor Reagan we're voting for without 20-20 hindsight of how the 81-89 Reagan did.
A 2008 Reagan would be Romney without the flip-flops or the constant Mormon-sniping from the media and be able to take away part of Rudy's alpha-male vote and Fred Thompson's Law and Order vote; heck, I could see a 50-something Reagan playing the Sam Waterson's assistant DA Jack McCoy character perfectly.
Romney would have little support and would fade quickly, for he would want to be Reagan when he grew up. Fred Thompson never runs. Rudy might still be doing well and Huckabee would be struggling to break 10%.
His divorce would be a minor issue and his lack of church-going would be a minor issue; they were more of an issue in 1980 than it is today, for your social conservatives weren't 100% sold on him at the time. His Catholic dad would be a non-issue, as it was a non-issue in 1980, unless there were some dark corners of the south where it got mentioned without it coming to notice.
Back to the money phrase-Reagan "had a father who belonged to what some
saw, and even see, as the Catholic cult."
Let me bring in my title character, anti-Catholic Baptist tract artist Jack Chick. He's still with us at age 83, but like I had Pete Wilson's "ghost" of immigrant-bashing haunting the GOP (and being channeled by Tom Tancredo today), we can have Jack Chick's "ghost" of Catholic-bashing haunting Baptist Mike Huckabee.
Mind you, Chick is, per his Wikipedia, "an Independent Baptist, a premillennial dispensationalist, and a follower of the King-James-Only Movement." However, he's still a Baptist; quite a few Baptists, especially the independent Baptists who make the Southern Baptist conservatives look like Episcopalians, agree with him. They're a minority in evangelical circles, but far from insignificant; hence, the large number of Chick tracts that are out there.
Mike Huckabee is a moderate-to-conservative Southern Baptist; he's gotten flak from conservative Southern Baptists for not being conservative enough. However, for people like Noonan and Novak, a Baptist is one of those folks with the Chick tracts bashing the Catholic Church as a vehicle of the devil, not differentiating from the hard core Fundamentalists like Chick and the more ecumenically-inclined Huckabee. They see Huckabee getting a minor dig in at Mormons and expect that they're going to be next.
Huckabee is blue-collar version of Dubya, with a Baptist seminary degree rather than an Harvard MBA; he's not the second coming of Jack Chick. If he can convince folks like Peggy Noonan of that, he'll be on his way to the nomination.
The IEA said Iraqi crude production is now running at
2.3 million barrels per day, compared with 1.9 million barrels at the
start of this year.
It puts the rise down to the improving security situation in Iraq, especially in the north of the country.
The way things are going, the policy of the next president will be rather moot, for things will be normal enough for the lion share of the US force to come back home.
__________
Kentucky doesn't vote until May, so we're not a hot spot on the campaign trail. Jeri Thompson was in Louisville earlier today; her husband couldn't make it; he woke up in a Cedar Rapids funeral home after his campaign had been mistaken for a corpse.
Good news for the Huckabee campaign; they're now leading in Florida per Rasmussen. What's even more interesting is that Rudy is now in third behind Romney; it's now 27 Huckabee, 23 Romney and 19 Rudy.
4 Where there are no oxen, the manger is empty,
but from the strength of an ox comes an abundant harvest.
I figured it was time to bring the Edifiers back after a long stretch where they've been spotty. I opted, at least for today, to be like Mike; Huckabee, that is, who is on record of going through a chapter of Proverbs most every morning, one of the less controversial items that came out in the NYT piece from Wednesday. Given that there are 31 chapters, it's almost tailor-made for a monthly rotation; given the date, he's probably going over chapter 14.
On to the passage...
This is one that is harder to do a good hermeneutic on. What are the oxen in our lives? Probably not the car that gets us to and from work or a lawn-mower or tractor who lets us do any outdoor chores that we have.
We're more used to the term "workhorse" for someone who is a hard worker; for the football fan, it envisions the running back who's 32 carries for 143 yards stat line shows up after he cranked out another first down on a time-chomping fourth quarter drive. However, the oxen are the fullback and offensive line who make it possible for the back to get the yardage. The horse gets ridden into town and gets shown off; unless you're Mongo in Blazing Saddles (clip is PG, with a barnyard expletive and a punching out of a horse), you don't ride an ox to town.
For the modern Christian, it's the "quiet time" habits that power the rest of their lives; without a good habit of prayer and study of the Word, our public lives suffer and we're not all that productive.
Without those spiritual oxen, we don't do a lot of spiritual work.
I like Michael Novak. He's a sharp public philosopher and does an excellent job of describing how free markets work in a godly political economy. However, he seems to have let his politics get ahead of both his work and his witness as an upstanding Christian fellow with this dig.
These days, though, it has become imperative for some Christians to come out
publicly for Mitt, now that his religion has come under unfair attack. I am no
expert on Mormon theology, but I do profoundly admire the good family life and
good individuals it keeps sending forth into the world. Those are signs I read
clearly.
And last night and today I was too sick at heart at Mike Huckabee's low and
dirty dig at the Mormon faith, along disgustingly false lines. In running a
clean campaign, the devil is in the details. Here Huckabee made the devil into a
dirty headline. It seems to be a fatal mistake. Since Huckabee has shown himself
to be such a good-humored, folksy man, this aside was entirely unnecessary, and
emphatically wrong. He should disown it, and publicly apologize, very quickly.
In any case, that's the last straw. Someone has to protest, in the name of
Christianity itself, that spreading bigotry and hatred for the sake of winning a
political campaign is wrong. I for one don't want to let this issue of bigotry
and suspicion pass by without protest — and without open support for its victim.
The least Americans can do is speak up for each other on matters of religious
liberty.
I'm assuming that Novak is talking about the commentary in the NYT piece that came out today-
...Huckabee surprised
me with a question of his own: ‘‘Don’t Mormons,’’ he
asked in an
innocent voice, ‘‘believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?’’
The Church of Jesus Christ of Later Day Saints web site states just that, as I pointed out earlier today. LDS officials may duck the issue in their public statements about as much as Huckabee has ducked being critical of Mormons (that was his only negative comment to date in the campaign), but it's still part of LDS doctrine. Thus, the accusation that this was "disgustingly false" is bearing false witness against Huckabee, since what he said happened to be true.
I don't have a major problem with Novak being in favor of Romney; as a free-marketeer, he probably likes him better than Huckabee, like others in the National Review crowd. However, I don't think that one comment makes Huckabee out to be a "low and dirty" campaigner.
Novak might be sensitive about nasty critiques of Catholic doctrine by hard-core evangelicals and might see a bit of Jack Chick-style bigotry in Huckabee's comments, since Catholic-bashing is too often a low art in Baptist circles (I'm currently going to a Southern Baptist church, so I'm bashing my own bunch here). However, that doesn't seem to be justified here.
Mr. Novak is open to prove me wrong, but it seems like he is typecasting Huckabee as a fundamentalist bigot for stating a bit of Mormon doctrine; Catholics encounter Southern Baptists of the Chickian style far too often and he may be assuming the worst. That in itself is a bit of bigotry.
The government said on Wednesday it would ban the sale of samurai
swords because the weapons had been used in a number of serious,
high-profile attacks.
The Home Office said the swords would be added to the Offensive Weapons
Order from April next year, meaning they could not be imported, sold or
hired.
However collectors of genuine Japanese swords and those used by martial arts enthusiasts would be exempt from the ban.
“In the wrong hands, samurai swords are dangerous weapons,” Home Office Minister Vernon Coaker said.
“We recognize it is the cheap, easily available samurai swords which
are being used in crime and not the genuine more expensive samurai
swords which are of interest to collectors and martial arts
enthusiasts.”
In any hand, they're dangerous. It's whom they're dangerous to and who is allowed to be dangerous that is the question.
This law has more than a bit of elitism that actually echoes medieval Japan, where only the samurai were allowed to have swords and the commoners were underarmed. In modern Britain, the elite who can afford the expensive stuff can have them, while commoners are left on the outside.
One would think that a Labour government would look after the little guy rather than the elite, but the nanny-state mindset of government protecting the populous from themselves must take precedent.
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