Politics – Page 64 – Really Right

Mike Huckabee and Tookie Williams

While no analogy is perfect, enough of the facts are the same to compare the cases of Stanley “Tookie” Williams and Wayne DuMond.

First, Stanley “Tookie” Williams was a street gang member who was convicted of multiple murders and sentenced to death. While in prison, he had a born again experience and gave his life to Christ. As a result of his conversion, he began writing various articles and tried to encourage young people to avoid street gangs. Because of his anti-gang advocacy, many people thought that his sentence should be commuted and the death penalty should not be carried-out. Even many people that normally support capital punishment thought that the governor—Arnold Schwarzenegger—should pardon “Tookie”.

“Tookie” was finally executed about two years ago.

In 1985 Wayne DuMond was convicted of raping Ashley Stevens.

DuMond said that, while he was awaiting trial, masked men burst into his home, tied him up with fishing line and cut out his testicles. By the time Mr Huckabee became governor in 1996, he had met DuMond’s wife and was promising to release him. After advice from medical experts — thought to have told him that DuMond was still capable of rape — Mr Huckabee allowed the decision to be taken by the parole board, which released DuMond in September 1999.

In 2001 DuMond raped and killed Carol Sue Shields, 39, in Missouri and is also said to have been responsible for the rape and murder of Sara Andrasek, 23, who was pregnant. He died in prison two years ago of natural causes.

While the media doesn’t pay much attention to religion, Mike Huckabee’s faith was understood to be an issue in the decision to release DuMond. Many have speculated that Huckabee was convinced that DuMond had a conversion experience in jail and that facts surrounding his rape conviction were politically motivated. (Ashley Stevens-the victim of the rape-was a distant cousin of Bill Clinton.) The conversion, castration and Clinton connection were enough that many pushed for DuMond’s pardon.

The common thread in both cases is the claim of religious conversion as the basis for some type of preferential treatment for those convicted of crime.

I don’t fault the criminals for wanting to get out of incarceration. I do have a problem with ignorant but well meaning Christians that don’t understand the proper role of church and state. Below is a portion of an article that explorers these roles:

Forgiveness Requires Restitution
by David Chilton

The condemned man sat in his cell awaiting execution. James Morgan had been convicted of murder and sentenced to death under the justice system of 17th-century Massachusetts—the Puritan Colony par excellence.

The Puritans have often been stigmatized as narrow-minded legalists, unconcerned about the plight of “sinners” in their midst. To the contrary, the Puritans, as good Calvinists, believed that all people—themselves included—are depraved and sinful, in need of the grace of God and the mercy of fellow men.

Accordingly, the Rev. Cotton Mather and other ministers visited Morgan in his cell and urged him to pray for repentance and forgiveness. To their delight, Morgan heard them and soon gave evidence of a sound, sincere conversion.

The whole Puritan colony joyously responded to Morgan’s change of heart. They held a special worship service, where Morgan testified to his newfound faith. He was embraced and received as a brother in Christ, with all the rights and privileges of a citizen of the heavenly kingdom.

The congregation sang a psalm of praise, thanking God for His goodness to James Morgan, the sinner who had become a saint.

Then they took him to the gallows and hanged him.

Clearly Huckabee has either confused the roles of church and state or doesn’t know the difference. As a former minister, Huckabee clearly has the credentials of being an expert in the role of church in our society. Based on his actions in this case and statements that he has made during the campaign on other public policy issues one can only conclude that Huckabee lacks a core of conservative principles.

Can Evangelicals Trust Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney finally gave “The Speech” about his religious views. I read the transcript and thought it was a wonderful speech. The best line in it was:

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

This is the same view expressed in the Declaration of Independence where we are reminded that our rights come from God not government.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . .

This is the watershed issue in our culture. Those that agree with the Founders are Conservative. Those who believe rights come from government are Liberals.

I think this speech will help Romney with evangelicals but I’m not sure that it will be enough. I think evangelicals are haunted by Jimmy Carter, George H Bush and Bill Clinton. We remember “reading my lips” and “never worked so hard for the American people” as preludes to broken promises and tax hikes. We remember Carter and Clinton gutting our military and trying to peacefully co-exist with terrorists.

Romney’s problems with evangelicals are not really theological but ethical. We are asked to trust that he is a conservative—one of us—but his track record as a politician and his words as a presidential candidate do not agree. What is his epiphany? What caused the change? Evangelicals happily acknowledge that God has the power to do this in the hearts of men but Romney does not credit God with the change. According to Romney he has been consistent the whole time to his faith in God. Both he and Harry Reid are LDS and they are polar opposites on political and social issues yet both in good standing with the folks in Salt Lake City.

Another reason that trust in Romney is thin is our experience in California with Arnold Schwarzenegger. We threw a known conservative—Tom McClintock—under the bus and went with Arnold because Arnold was a fiscal conservative that told us he could work with Democrats. Now Arnold is counted as the eighth most influential Liberal in the United States and has sold-out to the homosexuals and environmental extremists. Arnold has papered over the debt in California by transferring obligations to 30-year bond measures instead of correcting the structural issues that created the deficit spending. Furthermore, while Arnold Schwarzenegger has raised over 120 million dollars for his campaign coffers the Republican Party in California is bankrupt and two million dollars in debt!

Conservatives want to be charitable with Romney. We need converts to our cause to change the direction of our country. We need the children of the ‘60s to embrace the values of their fathers. Jesus told us to forgive our brother if he offends us even seven times seventy times. Conservatives went way beyond that number a decade ago and still we want to forgive. We just want a measure of assurance that Romney will govern with the same values he wants to campaign on.

Halting Hillary & Huckabee

I was browsing the Internet last night and happened to be at the main page of the Drudge Report when my three year old jumped into my lap. He asked me who was that lady in the photo. I answered that she wants to be President of our country. He then responded, “I don’t like her.” Wow! No wonder his middle name is Reagan.

As we enter the final stretch to Iowa, Mrs. Clinton is blasting Barack Obama on the wedge issue of how long Obama has wanted to be president. Why a kindergarten class in Indonesia counts I really don’t know. I bet there was a time when he wanted to be an astronaut too.

In the last several weeks, Hilary has repeatedly stated that she wants to be President again.

Meanwhile Obama is campaigning with all the enthusiasm of a child that is overmedicated with Ritalin. He doesn’t seem to want the nomination very badly.

On the Republican side, Mike “I need a miracle” Huckabee is being touted by the media as the new maverick of the party. I think the media really views him as a spoiler that is undercutting serious candidates that might have a chance of beating their favorite Democrat.

I have heard comparisons of Huckabee to candidate Jimmy Carter in 1976. Many evangelicals voted for this southern governor because he was a “born again” Christian. As we later found out with Carter, Baptists are notoriously antinomian and their faith rarely influences their views of government and public policy.

If elected, Huckabee would drift aimlessly from issue to issue buffeted by the trials and tribulations of a Democrat controller legislative branch until he was swamped by the maelstrom and had his administration smashed on the rocks. In other words, without core values and conservative principles Huckabee can never be an effective President because the Democrats will roll him at every opportunity and render him ineffective.

Obama and Huckabee Iowa Surge Dubious

In the latest polling for the Iowa caucus, both Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee are moving ahead of the pack and challenging the long-standing front-runners in their respective parties. This sounds really interesting but is it hype or reality?

I think that polling is not the “science” that it used to be. Consider the obstacles to the modern day pollster.

First, most polling is done by telephone. It is the cheapest way to have two-way conversations with potential voters. From voter data such as that available from your county clerk, a pollster can know how often that you have voted in past elections and want your party affiliation is. This information coupled with the demographics of your neighborhood can give them a good idea of who you voted for in the past. There are many questions that they ask in the course of a poll to verify their guesses by comparing actual answers with their predictions.

Part of the challenge to pollsters is to get a statistical cross-section of the electorate. Their model assumptions about voters are important to the accuracy of the result that they get. Have you ever wondered how 1,200 people are polled and in a headline the next day we are told with certainty what 300 million Americans think about presidential popularity or Hillary’s latest healthcare idea?

The biggest challenge to this model is technology. A large percentage of people under age thirty have only cellular phones and not a landline. These folks are not listed in Ma Bell’s directory. People also have IP telephony and other means of communicating that are not listed. This coupled with traditional unlisted phone numbers on landlines makes contacting a cross-section of voters even more difficult. The only thing that is saving their models of the electorate is that many in this age group are not high propensity voters. Older, high propensity voters tend to have traditional phones.

Another challenge is who is actually answering the phone? Most times that a telemarketer calls my phone, we hang-up on them. Due to the number of polls done in modern political campaigns and the small population of a state like Iowa, I think many folks are burned-out answering their phones too. Are the results showing shifts in the candidate preferences of Iowa voters accurate or are the number on non-responding folks causing results to be weighted differently to keep the pollsters in business?

Most people made up their minds months ago and it would take a big event to change their preference. Neither Obama nor Huckabee can point to such an event. (Yes, some might argue that Hillary and driver licenses for illegals qualify but we will have to see.)

If given my assumption about the lack of a big event, the logical place to go to explain any shift in voter preferences is that the “undecided” are finally settling on their choice. My problem with this is two-fold. First we must ask is this “undecided” voter who up ‘til now has not been paying attention really firm in their commitment to a candidate and second, will they actually go to the polls and vote?

Lastly, going into the holidays will detract from campaigning. This is a season for family and the sacred not secular. This will result in committed people voting and those with little interested getting distracted and not making the extra effort to vote. I doubt anyone knows how to model this because it has never happened before. The timing of Iowa is an unquantifiable variable that should not be minimized.

I could go on but I think I have made my point. The polls are entertaining but should not be trusted. There are too many variables that make Iowa difficult to call prior to January third.

Dobson Should Embrace Rudy

Conservatives are once again poised to assemble their famous “circular firing squad” and should Rudy Giuliani emerge as the Republican presidential candidate, they plan on pulling the trigger.

James Dobson and a group of other evangelicals are threatening to throw their support to a third party candidate—to be named later—if Rudy is the nominee. This is the result of Rudy’s longtime support of legalized abortion. This smacks of the Ross Perot effort in 1992, which resulted in the election of Bill Clinton. Clinton won with 43 percent of the vote.

This presidential cycle will likely see a credible third party challenger from the Left due to the dissatisfaction of the anti-war fanatics. Dobson’s gambit will likely be a pale imitation of their efforts. If Dobson and company put up a third party challenger, it will be to the detriment of evangelicals and when it fails, it will justify the marginalization of social conservatives in future public policy debates.

Rudy is better on the war than any of the Democrats. If we are dead or in economic ruins, then all the social policies that we spend so much time fighting about won’t matter because we won’t be here to have the debate. Our national existence is on the line in 2008. Once the Sword of Islam is dealt with then we will have to time to look at these other issues.

Furthermore, should Rudy appoint the kind of judges that he says, we might end-up with Roe v Wade being gutted regardless of what Rudy said on the campaign trail. Why? Simple really. The kind of judges that support the War on Terror and law & order issues will tend to be the strict constructionist judges that would favor curtailing the overreaching intrusion of the courts beyond the limits of the Constitution.

Rudy certainly couldn’t pick any worse than did Reagan and Bush senior. Republicans have a terrible track record of picking justices for the Court. Picking judges reminds me of the old joke about marriage. It has been said that marriage is like fishing, you don’t really know what you caught until you get it in the boat. Ditto for Supreme Court judges.

The irony of Dobson’s position is that to get the result he wants, his best chance is to join with Rudy.

Short Sale and Taxes

(As you might recall mortgage is from two Latin rules “mort” meaning death and “gage” meaning grip.)

With all the mortgage troubles that folks are experiencing, some folks view a “short sale” as a way to get out from under their debt. However, you might be in for a surprise. The portion that the bank looses in the transaction might be considered taxable income to you by our friends in the Eternal Revenue Service. Yeah, you could be the astonished recipient of a Form 1099C from your lender.

There are IRS tax rules in place for when lenders are forced to foreclose because home owners have become delinquent in their mortgage payments. You will owe taxes on the difference between what the lender gets for the home and the outstanding mortgage loan balance. The same is true for a mortgage short sale. You will owe taxes on the amount of your loan or mortgage that the bank or lender has forgiven. That’s right, you are taxed even when you don’t receive any actual money.

IRS instruction for Form 1099C

If a federal government agency, certain agencies connected with the Federal Government, financial institution, credit union, or an organization having a significant trade or business of lending money (such as a finance or credit card company) cancels or forgives a debt you owe of $600 or more, this form must be provided to you. Generally, if you are an individual, you must include all canceled amounts, even if less than $600, on the “Other income” line of Form 1040.

Remember, the first rule of holes is stop digging. See a tax professional before you go down this path.

What is Next for President Bush?

Yesterday, talk radio, voters and a bi-partisan group of Senators saved George Bush from himself. Bush has always had a blind spot when it comes to illegals from Mexico. He was ready to push for this type of amnesty legislation when he was first elected in 2000 but his plans were thwarted by the terror attacks on 9/11.

Unfortunately, President Bush is incapable of seeing border security as an integral part of the War on Terror. The evidence is plain for any unbiased person to see but it just doesn’t register in his view of the world. To say that his time as governor of Texas was formative for his views is an understatement. When it comes to Mexican illegals, he is trying to turn the whole country into a Texas type paradigm. He keeps looking at the issue with the same impotence that many state officials do. It is a Federal problem. He just doesn’t get the concept that he is on the other side of the looking glass now and he not only has the opportunity to fix it but the obligation.

Bush lacks the vision and the desire to solve the broken immigration system. His managerial skills have compounded the problem. Instead of appointing good people to be strong in areas where he is weak, he has appointed longtime friends and people of like mind, often with disastrous results. Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court and Alberto Gonzalez as Attorney General are two examples.

Either we are at war or we become ostriches to the threat of radical Islam. President Bush seems to oscillate between both beliefs. I wish he would return to the path of stopping terrorists and act accordingly. His neglect of most domestic issues at the expense of winning the war is not the best alternative but understandable. If he wants to do something constructive domestically, he should help get Republicans elected in 2008, especially, in the White House. Committing political suicide and destroying our national sovereignty is not a constructive or rational policy.

Hopefully, the President will take a cold shower and go to Crawford for a week of barbequing and reflection and return to Washington ready to work for the American people. We need his help and leadership not more backstabbing of the folks who voted for him. Secure the borders, win the war, confirm the judges.

Lileks & Limbaugh Highlight MSM Stupidity

Today seems like stupidity in journalism day. First I read that the Minneapolis Star Tribune has dumped the James Lileks as a regular columnist. Lileks is probably the only thing worth reading in that paper. Listening to him each week on Hugh Hewitt is consistently one of the best segments on his program. Lileks is always laugh-out-loud funny.

Next I turn on Rush Limbaugh, and find out the television station that I watch each evening is all up in arms about the Rush Limbaugh parody “Barack the Magic Negro.” First, this parody is two months old. Second, Barack has been asked about the parody and did not take offense. Third the reporters never bothered to get the context about the song. They act like Limbaugh made the whole song up just so he could say “negro” on the air and bash Obama.

Any regular listener to Limbaugh knows that Rush took a series of articles written by Liberals who were dumping on Obama because of his race and strung them altogether to point out that these allegedly enlightened Liberals are just a bunch of racists who look at skin color and not qualifications. For Liberals it’s all about categories, groups and quotas. Dr. King wanted folks evaluated by “the content of their character” but his alleged successors are exactly the opposite. This is the classic definition of hypocrisy and low hanging fruit for Limbaugh to use to bash them as they so richly deserve.

Walter Martin often stated “a text without a context is a pretext, usually for error.” Local television station KOVR has proved once again the truth of that axiom.

Republican Chair Caught Stealing

Finally this has gone public. Our local Republican Central Committee has been covering this up for several months. It’s unfortunate that the liberal media has to break the story because we can’t police ourselves.

The local Chair of the county party helped herself to over $35,000 and others in the party covered it up. The story can be found at Sacramento Bee Newspaper (registration is required).

The resignation of former Sacramento County Republican Party Chairwoman Donna Schalansky has become the flash point in an internal party battle that centers on whether thousands of dollars of reimbursements she received were in violation of state law.

State law requires information about “third-party payees” be disclosed for reimbursements of $500 or more. But financial disclosure forms filed with the secretary of state’s office show Schalansky received 29 payments of $500 or more—a total of $35,922—between 2003 and 2006 without receipts showing who received the payments for which she was reimbursed.

Thus far no audit has been done and none is schedule. Members are not being allowed to see the books and no complete treasurer reports are being given out at the meeting. I have it on good authority that others are involved and that this may involve the state party as well.

Musings on the Ides of March

I have been wondering lately who has the worst public relations and marketing division. After a few seconds of thought I came up with the following list:

United States Department of Defense (especially the US Army) for its ongoing work in Iraq. Most Americans can name as many military victories by our Army in Iraq as New Yorkers can name political accomplishments by Hillary Clinton; namely, none.

The Republican Party whose specialty is the circular firing squad. Republicans spend so much time stabbing each other in the back that there is nothing left to oppose the Democrats. (Hence the appropriateness of this topic on this particular date.)

Microsoft After five years and at least as many billions of dollars in development markets Windows Vista with “Wow”. What a great slogan. You can even say it backwards.

Speaking of Vista, I will soon be installing my copy of Windows Vista Ultimate on my new super computer. Once I get it running I will post my review.