From Joe Carter at EO, we find a gem:

10. Why Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals?

Recent surveys have indicated that conservatives, on average, report being happier than liberals. Two psychologists wanted to know why, so they re-analyzed data from several large national and international surveys. The conservative-happiness relationship was not explained by differences in demographics or thoughtfulness but was largely explained by conservatives’ greater rationalization of inequality, including belief in a meritocratic world. According to the authors, such beliefs serve a “palliative function” or act as an “emotional buffer” when confronted with inequality. The same was true overseas, especially in countries with lower standards of living. Moreover, the authors found that the happiness gap between liberals and conservatives in the United States has widened over the last three decades as inequality has increased here.

Alternate explanation: Lack of covetousness makes one happier.

If indeed part of the reason is that conservatives view inequality as less problematic I’d offer perhaps it’s less disturbing to not be bothered by inequality because it’s intrinsic to reality. The old maxim, “Yes, the game (life) is rigged, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t play.” Everyone’s abilities are unequally bestowed, and our luck in finding a way to maximize the abilities we do have to our benefit is unequally distributed as well. Furthermore, our parents and their parents all had unequal abilities and in an unequal fashion bestowed as they saw best what advantages they could on their children … unequally. This is not unjust. It is just a fact of life and nature.

I tell my children that if they are bored, that’s not a problem intrinsic to the universe around them, it’s a problem with them. The universe has plenty to interest everyone all the time (especially in the absence of TV and computers).

By the same token, if you’re bothered by inequality between men, that’s a problem with you, not the universe.

Mr Obama has denounced Mr Clark’s remarks on foreign policy and Mr McCain’s service, being shot down, tortured, and so on. The remark:

When moderator Bob Schieffer interjected that “Barack Obama has not had any of those experiences, either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down”, Clark responded: “Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.”

Well, no. But, Mr Obama is running for President. Is he doing that out of loyalty to his country and a sense of duty … or is it out of a personal drive for power or personal aggrandizement. That is a question that doesn’t need to be asked of Mr McCain. He put his life on the line for the country. Mr Obama has not. The distinction remains. Mr Obama, in theory, may be as patriotic as the next veteran like Mr McCain and thousands of others. But … unlike the veterans and those serving … and I might add like me, his (and my) claims of patriotism remain untested by fire.

No it does not qualify one for President, but it does give us some valuable information about the man and his character. Information which is lacking in the case of Mr Obama.

As the promise of Universal Healthcare continues to be sold to the American public by Democrats, the anecdotes fly. Look here; a case failure of our healthcare system! Look there; another person falls through the cracks!

The problem is, it’s the big picture that continues to put the lie to the selling of socialized medicine. As I’ve noted before, the system in Oregon will deny cancer patients life-saving or -extending medicine, but will gladly pay for life-ending “treatment”. You can decry all you want the profit motive of the private enterprise system, but with socialized medicine the profit motive is just as motivating, with a bigger bureaucracy larger than any insurance company you can name calling the shots.

And as Christians, is this the kind of system that we want to be encouraging? We’d have rationed healthcare (all socialized systems wind up here, sooner or later), equally poor quality, and a respect for life on par with Oregon’s.

But hey, it would be “equal”. Wonderful.

This bit of “hope” and “change”, however, has already been done on this scale. And how has it worked? Let’s talk to one of the founding fathers.

Back in the 1960s, [Claude] Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform and recommended that his home province of Quebec — then the largest and most affluent in the country — adopt government-administered health care, covering all citizens through tax levies.

The government followed his advice, leading to his modern-day moniker: “the father of Quebec medicare.” Even this title seems modest; Castonguay’s work triggered a domino effect across the country, until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.

Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in “crisis.”

“We thought we could resolve the system’s problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,” says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: “We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.”

Read the rest of this entry

• Google changing brains one googler at a time?
• A two part essay on war. Part one. Part two. Two women on war. Two views.
• A survey which is “not even close” which may impact the election.
• A path from pro-choice to pro-life recounted.
• And toss the key.
• Nerfing the world … or not.

As I mentioned a month ago, my three eldest kid would be doing short-term missions trips this summer.  Two of them went to Waveland, Miss. earlier, helping with Katrina relief.  The third flew out yesterday to Costa Rica for a week.

They’ll be working with Pura Vida Missions, running Vacation Bible school classes held in parks and public places in neighborhoods with a mission group, and helping in an orphanage. 

Please pray for her safety and her witness, as well as for comfort at home.  :)  Costa Rica’s a long way away.  Thanks.

[tags]Pura Vida Missions,religion,Christianity,missions,Costa Rica,Christian and Missionary Alliance[/tags]

Mr Obama is (rightly) demonized by the pro-life writers for saying,

Look, I got two daughters — 9 years old and 6 years old,” he said. “I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.”

Hmm. Now I’ve two remarks to add to the fray on that. I wonder if this was on his mind, was he also (in subtext) offering:

I don’t want to be punished with a grandchild (for my failure to teach them morals and values) .

For after all, that is also in the mix. And in any sane family arrangement, if your child becomes a pre-teen mom … it is likely grandma and yourself who will be bearing a large part of the child-rearing until your child is ready and on her feet in her life’s journey. That could take a decade or more. This responsibility of course, would negatively impact the time he has available for raising his children … and to be honest I’d question sharing the time commitment of raising two children well with that required for running for President (and also being one).  So one might ask, “When are you going to teach them about values and morals?”

One also wonders, how removing consequences for actions “teaches morals and values”. Nerfing the world, removing all consequences from our choice is the pivot point for what this view of abortion. Declare non-human and outside that sector of society (the unborn) and we don’t have to deal with the consequences yet another sector of our choices. Great.

And to stave off at least one line or argument recall Mr Obama fully supports late term abortion which is certainly inside everyone’s notion of fetus as having a right to life, after all if one induced labor and brought it to term … the child would live without extreme measures to sustain life required. Mr Obama after all signed on to legislature trying require hospital staff to kill any children “which accidentally are delivered alive.” One wonders how he contrasts that with his exegesis of the parable of the Good Samaritan.

…masquerading as "cause and effect".  Meryl Yourish notes that the Associated Press is making yet another truce-breaking mortar barrage by the Palestinians sound like Israel’s fault.

Notice the order of the events in the paragraphs. Israel closed the crossings, and THEN the Palestinians fired rockets. The AP is framing the situation as an Israeli cause—”refusing” to open the crossings—and a Palestinian effect—firing rockets and mortars. As if those are the natural progression. What the AP is no longer doing is calling the rocket fire a violation of the truce. The Israeli refusal to open the crossings is following the terms of the truce, which the AP knows full well, having published many articles detailing the truce. First, the attacks were supposed to stop. Then Israel would send more goods into Gaza. If three days went by without an attack, more goods would go in. Since the Palestinians are violating the truce, Israel is doing exactly as was agreed, and not sending in more goods or opening the crossings. But the AP is not reporting this honestly. The news service is trying to make its readers think that Israel is violating the truce by “refusing” to open the crossings.

Meryl has been taking aim, almost daily, at the misleading and biased reporting by the AP on this topic for quite some time.  It’s a target-rich environment.

[tags]Israel,Palestinians,Gaza,Hamas,liberal media bias[/tags]

Your taxpayer dollars at work.  Michelle Malkin has the story.

If you don’t know what ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is all about, you better bone up. This left-wing group takes in 40 percent of its revenues from American taxpayers — you and me — and has leveraged nearly four decades of government subsidies to fund affiliates that promote the welfare state and undermine capitalism and self-reliance, some of which have been implicated in perpetuating illegal immigration and encouraging voter fraud. A new whistleblower report from the Consumer Rights League claims that Chicago-based ACORN has commingled public tax dollars with political projects. Who in Washington will fight to ensure that your money isn’t being spent on these radical activities?

OK, so why should you care that a "community organization" out of Chicago plays dirty politics?  A real yawner, right?  What’s next, reporting that the sky is blue? 

Malkin gives you a reason to care, by noting who in particular probably won’t be doing any fighting.

Don’t bother asking Barack Obama. He cut his ideological teeth working with ACORN as a "community organizer" and legal representative. Naturally, ACORN’s political action committee has warmly endorsed his presidential candidacy. ACORN head Maude Hurd gushes that Obama is the candidate who "best understands and can affect change on the issues ACORN cares about" — like ensuring their massive pipeline to your hard-earned money.

Malkin continues with details of voter fraud (pending cases, but also the largest case in Washington state where they were convicted), using federal housing money for electioneering, and mortgage advice that would land them in jail if they were a lender in today’s market. 

Stanley Kurtz has an article with even more details of ACORN’s methods ("in your face", Code-Pink-type confrontation), it’s political aims (socialist), and Obama’s ties to the organization (a lot deeper than we were first led to believe).  If you want to flesh out Obam’s highly-vaunted "community organizer" credentials, you need to read Kurtz’s peek into ACORN.  A small excerpt:

To understand the nature and extent of Acorn’s radicalism, an excellent place to begin is Sol Stern’s 2003 City Journal article, “ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities.” (For a shorter but helpful piece, try Steven Malanga’s “Acorn Squash.”)
Sol Stern explains that Acorn is the key modern successor of the radical 1960’s “New Left,” with a “1960’s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism” to match. Acorn, says Stern, grew out of “one of the New Left’s silliest and most destructive groups, the National Welfare Rights Organization.” In the 1960’s, NWRO launched a campaign of sit-ins and disruptions at welfare offices. The goal was to remove eligibility restrictions, and thus effectively flood welfare rolls with so many clients that the system would burst. The theory, explains Stern, was that an impossibly overburdened welfare system would force “a radical reconstruction of America’s unjust capitalist economy.” Instead of a socialist utopia, however, we got the culture of dependency and family breakdown that ate away at America’s inner cities — until welfare reform began to turn the tide.

Being a "community organizer" may sound like a refreshing thing to have on a presidential candidate’s resume, but, as with most things, it all depends on what one was organizing for. 

For another peek into ACORN, here’s an article from a guy who was gung-ho about the group itself.  Well, until he actually joined it.

So now, after Wright and Pfleger and Ayers and all the other people he kept company with but has thrown under the bus, is ACORN next?  He could pull out his standard line, "this is not the ACORN I knew", but that excuse is wearing rather thin. 

If he doesn’t distance himself from a group he worked for for 3 1/2 years, then his radical leftist views will be all the more evident.  If he does back away (and if he can do that for his pastor of 20 years, ACORN is fair game), then he continues to show himself to be a man who either has made very poor decisions all of his life, or shows himself to be cravenly and politically expedient when dealing with his inconvenient past.  Either way, he shows himself to be someone we don’t want in the Oval Office.

[tags]ACORN,Barack Obama,community organizer,Chicago,socialism,Sol Stern[/tags]

"And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press,  or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms; or to raise standing armies, unless necessary for the defense of the United States, or of some one or more of them; or to prevent the people from petitioning, in a peaceable and orderly manner, the federal legislature, for a redress of grievances; or to subject the people to unreasonable searches and seizures of their persons, papers or possessions." — Samuel Adams

Emphasis mine.  Apparently, Adams never envisioned liberal judicial activists.

[tags]Samuel Adams,Supreme Court,Second Amendment,gun rights,US Constitution[/tags]

• Big big big screen.
• 8 down, 5 to go?
• On the games.
• Speeding up change, in the military.
• With tongue firmly not in cheek.
• Guns and gurls.
• On SCOTUS.

Today, the Jewish Atheist noted in response to the my proposal that “death has no sting” in the context of the death penalty:

Regarding your last paragraph, I’m aghast that you are so dismissive of the possibility of error.

Errors in long term imprisonment discovered decades after the crime can’t “undo” the incarceration and loss of freedom, relationships damaged, and youth incurred.

Of course not. But it’s a thousand times better than death, right? This isn’t some hypothetical, btw. This stuff happens.

Secondly, I’m Christian, and as such have ontological freedom granted by Baptism and my Faith. Death has no sting … really.

Maybe you should think about whether Christ would be as cavalier about other people’s lives. If death has no sting, I think you’re doing something really, really wrong.

There are a few that issues that come up here. Read the rest of this entry

Which political party has this as its platform?

Meet the Needs of Working, Unemployed and Farm Families
– Raise the minimum wage to $12 an hour.
-Unemployment insurance for all workers.
– Moratorium on farm foreclosures
– Labor law reform to remove barriers to workers who want to join a union.
– No privatization of Social Security. Increase benefits.
– Universal prescription drug coverage administered by Medicare. Universal health care system.
– Restore social safety net. Welfare reform that includes job training, supports and living wages.
– Full funding for equal, quality, bi-lingual public education. No vouchers.

Make Corporate Giants Pay
– Repeal tax cuts to the rich and corporations.
– Close corporate tax loopholes.
– Restitution to workers’ pensions.
– Strong regulation of financial industry.
– Regulation and public ownership of utilities
– Prosecute corporate polluters. Public works program to clean our air, water and land
– Aid to cities and states. Federally funded infrastructure repair and social service programs

Foreign Policy for Peace and Justice
– No to war with Iraq – End military interventions
– Repeal Fast Track and NAFTA, stop Free Trade Area of the Americas(FTAA). No secrecy.
– Save Salt II Agreements, reject Star Wars and Nuclear Posture Review
-Abolish nuclear weapons
– End military interventions.
– Cut military budget and fund human needs.

Defend Democracy and Civil Rights
– End racial profiling.
– Repeal the death penalty.
– Enforce civil rights laws and affirmative action.
– Repeal USA Patriot Act.
– Legalization and protection of immigrant rights.
– Public financing of elections. Overall election law reform including Instant Runoff Voting.
– Youth and student bill of rights. Guarantee youth’s right to earn,learn and live.

Click here to find out.  Amazing how closely it tracks the platform of the major party you probably thought it belonged to.  You can probably pick out the individual items, or groups of them, and argue that they are good policy regardless of who approves of them.  However, it does make you wonder, with so much in common, if the destination of the two parties hasn’t always been the same place, especially since, in very recent days, some folks have been tipping their hand.

[tags]Democrats,socialism[/tags]

• On the Square looks at the myth of the crackup of the religious right.
• Mr Obama’s words amplified.
• Mugabe policy considered.
• China, America and Taiwan.
• Priests palaver, and locating the problem within abortion as contraception.
• Gosh, he seems such a nice man … not.
• Islam in Indonesia … and conflict.

The SCOTUS today offered a decision putting the US Constitutional law in line with Noahide law, that only if one takes a life it is just to take a life. Specifically that capital punishment is forbidden for a state to enact in response to the a particularly vicious rape of an 8 y/old girl in Louisiana. My remarks follow:

• If a people grant the authority for such to the state, it has the right to take life via due process.
• As a proponent of pushing authority down and not federalizing and centralizing power, I disagree with this as wise decision. States and in fact smaller regions should have the power to act. What is a capital crime may not be the same in backwoods Louisiana compared to tony New Hampshire burbs compared to Montana ranches.
• If capital punishment would be to be offered for other than treason and murder … this sort of case would be it.
• I think the best argument against capital punishment for a variety of crimes is that the expense of the required appeal process exceeds that of life internment. If we want to have capital punishments we should stop paying lawyers (and others involved in the legal process) so much.
• I’m less impressed by the problem of “no recovery” from error. After all there are two points against that argument. Errors in long term imprisonment discovered decades after the crime can’t “undo” the incarceration and loss of freedom, relationships damaged, and youth incurred.  Secondly, I’m Christian, and as such have ontological freedom granted by Baptism and my Faith. Death has no sting … really.

While other Christian groups and denominations may have doctrinal issues with the Latter-day Saints, they do line up on a number of political issues.

SALT LAKE CITY – The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is asking California members to join the effort to amend that state’s constitution to define marriage as being between a man and a woman.

A letter sent to Mormon bishops and signed by church president Thomas S. Monson and his two top counselors calls on Mormons to donate "means and time" to the ballot measure. A note on the letter dated June 20 says it should be read during church services on June 29, but the letter was published Saturday on several Web sites.

Church spokesman Scott Trotter said Monday that the letter was authentic. He declined further comment, saying the letter explains the church’s reasons for getting involved.

The LDS church will work with a coalition of churches and other conservative groups that put the California Marriage Protection Act on the Nov. 4 ballot to assure its passage, the letter states.

In May, California’s Supreme Court overturned a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage, saying gays could not be denied marriage licenses.

"The church’s teachings and position on this moral issue are unequivocal. Marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and the formation of families is central to the Creator’s plan for His children," the four-paragraph letter states.

Mormons say they have 750,000 member in California, who could have a big impact.

What’s not clear in all of this, regardless of the addition of the Mormons to the fray, is how California will deal with the genie they’ve already let out of the bottle; what to do with marriage licenses that the amendment would directly affect.  This quandary, brought to you by Judicial Activism(tm), is the result of liberals in government not letting the legislative process do its work and trying to usurp it.  Some complained here in Georgia that the constitutional amendment that passed here was unnecessary since we already had a law against same-sex marriage.  The California situation is a prime object lesson for why that argument was, at least, disingenuous. 

[tags]California,Latter-Day Saints,Mormons,same-sex marriage[/tags]