Monthly Archives: November 2012

“Woody Wednesday” Sam Tanenhaus on Woody Allen’s Black Magic

November 14, 2012 – 6:39 am

To Rome with Love Trailer Official 2012 [HD] – Alec Baldwin, Jesse Eisenberg

To Rome with Love hits theaters on June 22nd, 2012.

Cast: Woody Allen, Alec Baldwin, Penelope Cruz, Jesse Eisenberg, Greta Gerwig, Ellen Page, Judy Davis, Alison Pill, Roberto Benigni, Isabella Ferrari, Sergio Rubini, Antonio Albanese, Fabio Armiliata, Alessandra Mastronardi, Ornella Muti, Flavio Parenti

“To Rome with Love” is a story about a number of people in Italy – some American, some Italian, some residents, some visitors – and the romances and adventures and predicaments they get into. The film stars Allen, Alec Baldwin, Roberto Benigni, Penelope Cruz, Judy Davis, Jesse Eisenberg, Greta Gerwig and Ellen Page.

To Rome with Love trailer courtesy Sony Pictures Classics.

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A review of Woody Allen’s “To Rome with Love:”

Sam Tanenhaus on Woody Allen’s Black Magic

Jun 18, 2012 1:00 AM EDT

 

The legendary filmmaker returns to his old obsessions-sexual avarice and megalomaniacal control.

It’s the first Monday in June, 10 days before Woody Allen’s new movie, To Rome With Love, will open the Los Angeles Film Festival, and Allen, dressed as usual in brown, is perched on a chair in the screening room in his functional office on the ground floor of an anonymous Park Avenue building.

It used to be he strictly limited publicity for his films, even banning glowing quotes from newspaper ads, which instead were as stark as his signature black-and-white title cards (“Written and Directed by Woody Allen”). But times have changed for Woody, and for moviegoers, and he now acknowledges the need to hustle his product. He flew to Rome for the world premiere in April and now patiently holds still under the umbrella strobe, genially bantering with the photographer, Platon, who confesses he is uncommonly nervous. “I’ve learned so much about life from you,” he says. Allen deadpans his reply: “I’ve learned not to believe anyone who says that.”

Everyone chuckles, though it is not at all clear he’s joking. Allen’s fabled career has had exhilarating ups, but also abysmal downs, and praise has often been followed by attack. At one low point, in 2002, when he was locked in a bitter lawsuit with his onetime producer, Jean Doumanian, The New York Times, which in better days had consistently proclaimed Allen’s genius, counted a “grand total of eight people” in the seats of the Times Square discount house that was the sole local venue of his latest flop (Hollywood Ending) and speculated that “his long moment as cultural icon may be over.”

Since then Woody has stormed back, perhaps not bigger or better, but more popular than ever, with a sequence of solid hits filmed abroad. Midnight in Paris, released last year, won Allen his third Oscar for best original screenplay, along with a nomination (his seventh) for best director. More remarkably, it is Allen’s top all-time box-office success, earning well over $110 million worldwide.

The shoot finished, we move next door to Allen’s editing room and sit on facing chairs amid unopened cartons and cluttered surfaces, the space resembling the garage of an unhandy suburbanite rather than the atelier of a celebrated filmmaker. “This has always been such a little rathole,” he says. “I’ve been here 30 years or so, and it suffices. We edit in here. We take it in there. We look at it. We hate it.”

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Woody Allen (Platon for Newsweek)

At 76, he has aged with unholy grace: the mussed carrot-top, now the cloud tint of jiffy-bag innards, has scarcely thinned; the oblong face remains a mobile mask of amused perplexity; the wiry physique, thanks to daily exercise, still exudes the vigor of the athlete he once was—a skilled-enough boxer, in his teens, to have trained for the Golden Gloves competition. His one obvious debility, no joke for a master of spoken idioms, is defective hearing; his phone, keyed to ear-splitting volume, trilled six times before he asked, in puzzlement, “What’s that?” Unperturbed, he continues calmly, not bothering to raise his voice.

Allen in person is nothing like the nebbishy mess of phobias and insecurities he has been impersonating, on stage and screen, for half a century, dating back to his days doing stand-up in Greenwich Village clubs like The Bitter End. He has the reputation, in fact, for almost terrifying self-assurance and will brusquely dismiss established stars (casualties include Michael Keaton, Sam Shepard, and Christopher Walken) if they fail to meet his exacting standards on the set. But monomania has made him his era’s greatest comic presence, the one true heir of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Allen, however, measures himself against stiffer competition. “I think I’ve now made almost 45 films,” he says. “Some nice ones. No masterpieces. I don’t kid myself. It’s not false modesty. If you look at Rashomon, The Bicycle Thief, The Grand Illusion, as masterpieces, [then] no: I don’t have a film I could show in a festival with those films.”

It is unlikely To Rome With Love will be shown beside them either, though its deft intermixing of four separate story lines, each a gentle farce about innocents beguiled into wrong or risky choices, is superbly executed by its all-star ensemble, which includes Roberto Benigni, Alec Baldwin, and Penélope Cruz. All worked for minimum fees, lest they bust Allen’s roughly $17 million budget, tiny by current standards. Italian critics noted diverting moments—for instance, the scene in which a late-blooming opera singer (the great tenor Fabio Armiliato) is wheeled onto the stage in a portable shower, where he scrubs himself while singing an aria from Pagliacci. But many were disappointed. They had come to the screening expecting a major statement—about Rome, about cinema, about life—from the “most European of American directors.” And they didn’t find one.

That a Brooklyn-born comic whose résumé includes boxing a kangaroo and singing to a dog, should be solemnly lionized in the culture capitals of the continent (since 2001 he has filmed in London and Barcelona along with Paris and Rome), might seem ludicrous, the premise of an Allen “mockumentary” à la Take the Money and Run or Zelig. But for Woody it is a simple fact of life—or rather, of cinema, and its awkward mingling of art and commerce. “For the last 25 years, maybe 30 years, I’ve been doing better in Europe and around the world than in the United States,” he says. “It’s hard for me to raise money here whereas in the European countries and in fact all over the world—China, Russia, Israel—they call me and say, ‘Please come here and we’ll finance.’”

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‘Annie Hall’ (1977) marked his evolution from funny man to major artist. (Brian Hamill / United Artists-Photofest)

It is also, to a great extent, a chosen exile, a matter not only of money but of control. Allen insists on total autonomy—over scripts, casting, editing. Even the stars he recruits see only the pages in the script that contain their own parts. This imperiousness dates back to the brief golden period in American film, lasting from the late-’60s to the mid-’80s, when audiences greeted each new movie as an installment of its director’s commanding vision.

Woody began with slapstick romps (Bananas, Sleeper) that won a cult following on college campuses. Then came Annie Hall, a vehicle for his former girlfriend, Diane Keaton. Released in the spring of 1977, it was a sensation, with its up-to-the-minute news of prosperous, cultured people who sorted through their lives against a backdrop of well-upholstered uptown apartments. Fine as the movie was, the timing was even better. New York in the mid-’70s was in crisis. There was a threatened bankruptcy in 1975, a citywide blackout in 1977 that resulted in arson, lootings, riots, and mass arrests. A serial killer, “Son of Sam,” was stalking quiet neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens. The cinematic touchstone was Taxi Driver ( 1976 ), Martin Scorsese’s inferno of murder and vice, set in Times Square.

Annie Hall offered a countervision, hopeful and aspirational. So did Manhattan ( 1979 ), with its exquisite black-and-white panoramas of the island’s visual splendors, and Hannah and Her Sisters ( 1986 ), much of it shot in the sprawling, cozy Upper West Side apartment of Mia Farrow, Allen’s leading lady and off-screen companion. Together these films, each a “canto in [Allen’s] ongoing poem to love and New York City,” as the critic Pauline Kael wrote at the time, helped New Yorkers recover their high sense of self. Manhattan once again was Oz, and Woody its wizard, conjuring up its long-forgotten mystery and allure. For many, inside the city and beyond, he was New York. Almost overnight, the funnyman and gag writer was being mentioned in the same breath as Stanley Kubrick and Francis Ford Coppola.

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The director with Penelope Cruz and Alessandro Tiberi on the set of ‘To Rome With Love’. (Massimo Percossi / EPA-Landov)

It helped that Woody was steeped in sophisticated homegrown influences: the biting subversive wit of Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, the pacing of Broadway technicians like George S. Kaufman and Garson Kanin, the bookish smarts of Philip Roth. All of this placed Woody not so much ahead of the competition as apart from it, playing a different game, in defiance of cheap movie-land thrills. Hollywood might love Woody, but he refused to love it back. The same fans who lined up at Manhattan cinemas when the latest Allen gem opened (after reading the predictable rave from Vincent Canby in the Times) exulted when Woody, nominated year after year for Oscars, declined to attend the ceremony or even to watch it on TV, instead keeping his Sunday-night gig at Michael’s Pub, where he played the clarinet with a Dixieland combo.

Then came the abrupt descent. In 1992 he and Farrow bitterly split over Allen’s affair with Farrow’s 21-year-old adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn (who is now his wife). The ensuing custody battle was a tabloid festival (“Mia Has Nude Pix,” “Tell It to the Judge”). The king of the one-liner was reduced to a punchline and worse, a kind of civic embarrassment. Sparkling Allen jests—“Don’t you see the rest of the country looks upon New York like we’re left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers? I think of us that way sometimes, and I live here.”—sounded tinny and smug. Many recalled Joan Didion’s scathing observation in 1979 that Allen and his audience dwelled together in a privileged “subworld,” adding, “the peculiar and hermetic self-regard in Annie Hall and Interiors and Manhattan would seem nothing with which large numbers of people would want to identify.”

Most shocked of all were Allen’s legions of female fans. Many had swooned for this most unlikely of leading men—undersized, sensitive, vulnerable, “in touch with his feelings.” Now they heard him insist, in a line that might have been lifted from one of his scripts, that “the heart wants what it wants”—in this instance a woman 35 years his junior. Seduced by Woody, his admirers had missed the deeper messages in his art, its tricky blurrings of fact and illusion. Growing up in Brooklyn, dreaming of a life in showbiz, he had learned magic, particularly sleight of hand, adept enough at age 14 to audition for television programs. This early history shaped his later art. Allen himself has labeled his technique “misdirection,” and once told the critic and film historian Richard Schickel, “I lead the audience to believe something, but the movie is really going to be about something else.”

He applies the formula most ingeniously in his subtle mixing of autobiography and invention, filtered through the roles played either by himself or various stand-ins. The schlumpy, childlike “Woody” character is in fact sexed-up and calculating, just like Chaplin’s randy “little fellow.” And like Chaplin, Allen favors young actresses. “People get the impression that these films are autobiographical in an acute way,” he told an interviewer in 1986. “In Manhattan they were completely convinced I wanted to marry a 17-year-old girl”—his costar, Mariel Hemingway. In that case he seems to have fooled himself.

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An affair with Soon-Yi Previn (left), adopted daughter of Mia Farrow (center), shocked Allen’s fans. (Ann Clifford / DMI-Time Life Pictures-Getty Images)

In other cases the message is more ambiguous. Annie Hall and Manhattan, though disguised as soulful, romantic “breakup” pictures, are in reality dark, Pygmalion-like tales of sexual avarice and narcissistic control. There is similar “misdirection” in Crimes and Misdemeanors—perhaps the last of Allen’s great New York films. The character most like him isn’t the glum, moralizing documentary filmmaker played by Woody. It’s the vulgar, preening, power-mad TV mogul played by Alan Alda, who barks “ideas” into the portable tape recorder he pulls out of his pocket, much as the young Woody Allen, his motor always running, would interrupt a conversation to scribble one-liners.

So too in To Rome With Love. Beneath the sunny surface, and the pretty-postcard images of the Piazza di Spagna, lurk hints of Allen’s black magic. In the best told of the four tales, a flirtatious, self-dramatizing actress (Ellen Page) comes to visit a happy young American couple (Jesse Eisenberg and Greta Gerwig) who are living in Rome. From the beginning it’s clear where the story is headed, but as the seduction unfolds, the lines gradually blur. Who is really at the center of this story, the earnest student abroad or the casual tourist, glibly quoting snippets from Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats? And who is the actual stand-in for Woody?

Allen himself obliquely supplies an answer, when he remarks on his public persona. “People always have the mistaken impression that I was an intellectual when in fact I’m not,” he says. “I first started to read because the women that I liked when I was a teenager were always culture vultures and bluestockings. And I tried my best, and they had no time for me. I read so I could hold my own in conversation with them and not get written off.” Those women, he adds, were of a particular type: “The look that Jules Feiffer used to draw, the black-leather bag, hair down, that Greenwich Village look. No makeup.” If the description sounds familiar, that’s because it’s nearly identical to the fantasy woman in “The Whore of Mensa,” Allen’s classic New Yorker parody from 1974, with its rapier insight that for the culturally avid middle class, the great books had become a kind of aphrodisiac.

It is not surprising that Allen is still plumbing his earliest obsessions. Major artists have always done this, particularly as they age and begin to weigh facts of life expectancy against the drive to keep creating, to find new ways to answer old, haunting questions. In Allen’s case, the numbers look uncommonly good: his father lived to 100, his mother to 95.

And Woody, for his part, is already thinking about his next film. The script is completed, and he’s assembling the cast. He’ll be “shooting four or five weeks in San Francisco, and two weeks in New York.” Two weeks isn’t much of a homecoming, but it’s a start. “I try to sneak in an American picture when I can,” he says. Good to hear. His exile has lasted long enough.

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“Woody Wednesday” Allen new movie

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Sam Tanenhaus on Woody Allen’s Black Magic

To Rome with Love Trailer Official 2012 [HD] – Alec Baldwin, Jesse Eisenberg To Rome with Love hits theaters on June 22nd, 2012. Cast: Woody Allen, Alec Baldwin, Penelope Cruz, Jesse Eisenberg, Greta Gerwig, Ellen Page, Judy Davis, Alison Pill, Roberto Benigni, Isabella Ferrari, Sergio Rubini, Antonio Albanese, Fabio Armiliata, Alessandra Mastronardi, Ornella Muti, Flavio […]

Review: Allen’s ‘Rome’ delivers lackluster love

Penelope Cruz at “To Rome with Love” premiere Published on Jun 15, 2012 by CBSNewsOnline The Los Angeles Film Festival kicked off with Woody Allen’s latest film starring Penelope Cruz. KCAL 9′s Suzanne Marques reports from downtown L.A. at the premiere of “To Rome With Love.” _______________ Review of “To Rome with Love.” Review: Allen’s […]

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By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Comments (0)

Terri Blackstock’s husband led to Christ while listening to Adrian Rogers on AFR

November 14, 2012 – 1:32 am

Picture of Adrian Rogers above from 1970’s while pastor of Bellevue Baptist of Memphis, and president of Southern Baptist Convention. (Little known fact, Rogers was the starting quarterback his senior year of the Palm Beach High School football team that won the state title and a hero to a 7th grader at the same school named Burt Reynolds.)

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Uploaded by on Sep 29, 2009

This bestselling author writes from the heart when her latest novel details a drug-addicted daughter and a mother who never lets go…

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A couple of months ago I was listening to American Family Radio and I heard Terri Blackstock give her testimony. She said her decision to write Christian Suspense Novels was made after her husband listened to Adrian Rogers on American Family Radio and put his faith in Christ. That affected her and caused her to grow spiritually. Here  is her story below:

Testimony

In many ways, I could be described as a Prodigal Daughter, even though I never openly rebelled against God.

I was raised in the church and saved at 14. I walked closely with Christ through my teen years. However, as I reached college age, I grew lukewarm in my faith. Though I attended church, I stopped praying and reading the Bible, and I focused more on things of the world than on spiritual things.

When I began writing romance novels in 1982, I struggled briefly over whether to write books that dealt openly with sex. I managed to rationalize it, however, and when my work became popular, I told myself that God was making it all happen.

When my 13-year marriage ended in 1990, it was a terrible tragedy for me, but I now believe God used it to help me turn back to Him. I moved back to my hometown, where I found a church that offered a divorce recovery ministry and an active singles program. Through that ministry, I began getting my life back on track. I met my husband Ken through the church and we married in 1992.

But I still wasn’t able to give up my romance writing. I told myself I was reaching more people that way than I could writing Christian fiction. I disregarded the fact that what I was writing was helping no one — in fact, my work was full of lies that pointed people away from God instead of to Him.

In 1994, Ken realized he had never had more than an intellectual knowledge of Jesus. He came to know Christ as his Lord and Savior, and became the spiritual leader that I had yearned for all my life.

Ken’s example rekindled my own fire for Christ. I finally saw that my work was an obstacle between Christ and me, and a stumbling block for others. It didn’t matter how many people read my work; if I couldn’t tell them what I knew — what would solve their problems and change their lives — it was of no good.

Since I’ve made my commitment to write books that glorify God, He has opened door after door for me. I am excited about using my gift to challenge other Christians and point unbelievers to Him.

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Uploaded by on May 5, 2009

A short video about the life of perhaps the greatest preacher of our modern era.

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Dr. Adrian Rogers’ Salvation Story

Uploaded by on Mar 16, 2010

A touching story about when Adrian Rogers accepted Jesus Christ as his Savior.

Adrian Rogers – How to Know God Personally

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The Balanced Budget Amendment should cap government spending

November 14, 2012 – 12:28 am

Walter E Williams – Balanced Budget Amendment

Uploaded by on Apr 25, 2011

Spendthrift politicians and runaway spending. Is a balanced budget amendment the answer? Professor Williams looks at the situation

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Will Rogers has a great quote that I love. He noted, “Lord, the money we do spend on Government and it’s not one bit better than the government we got for one-third the money twenty years ago”(Paula McSpadden Love, The Will Rogers Book, (1972) p. 20.)

The Balanced Budget Amendment should cap federal spending at 18 percent of GDP. I wish that percentage could be even lower.

The Answer Is a Balanced Budget Amendment

By from the October 2011 issue

The question is how to solve our problem of unsustainable debt.

The United States of America is on the road to bankruptcy, with a federal debt of more than $14.2 trillion, almost half of which is owned by foreign countries. (Communist China alone owns fully a quarter of the foreign-held portion). The problem is so well known that it almost came as an anticlimax when Standard & Poor’s recently downgraded U.S. debt from its coveted AAA rating to an unheard-of AA+. As for the budget deficit, it is expected to total $1.3 trillion for this year alone, with tax revenues of about $2.3 trillion and total expenditures of about $3.6 trillion. If a household ran its budget like that, we would say it was headed for a rude shock.

Making matters worse is that our debt is structural rather than cyclical: the federal budget is in deficit both in good economic times and bad. When George W. Bush took office in 2001, the gross federal debt was $5.76 trillion. When he left eight years later, the debt was up to $10.626 trillion, an increase of $607 billion a year. During Barack Obama’s presidency it has risen by $1.7 trillion a year and now almost 40 percent higher than when he took office. Deficits of this size are quite simply unsustainable.

The only way to fix this mess is to radically cut federal spending, cap the budget with pay-as-you-go spending rules, and then enact a balanced budget amendment (BBA).

The most important point is that we need to cut spending, not raise taxes. Total federal spending as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has skyrocketed from around 18 percent, when George W. Bush became president, to more than 25 percent today. This shows that our current deficit problem is entirely due to overspending. If tomorrow we cut spending back to the levels of January 20, 2001, when Bush took office, the deficit would almost disappear.

Then we need to cap and balance the budget, once we’ve cut overall spending back to 2001 levels. To do this effectively, we need to enact a federal BBA to the U.S. Constitution. This amendment should have several features.

First, it should require that the president submit to Congress each year a balanced federal budget with no fiscal gimmicks. Presidential failure to do so would be an impeachable offense. Congress should be constitutionally required to hold a vote in both houses on the president’s proposed budget within three months, with the president and Congress having up to six months to adopt a final budget in any given calendar year (this requirement should be waivable during any time of declared war for up to two years). If they fail to do that, all federal spending except for payments on the debt should be frozen at levels 10 percent lower than in the preceding fiscal year. To help impose this, any one of the several states should have standing to sue in the Supreme Court’s original jurisdiction for enforcement of this requirement.

Second, the BBA should cap federal spending at 18 percent of GDP. A spending cap of this proportion would keep the federal government at the size it was under President Bill Clinton — hardly onerous or severe. The amendment should require a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress to enact any new taxes or to raise tax rates. Votes to raise the national debt limit should also require a two-thirds majority. These provisions are essential to prevent a BBA from becoming just an excuse to raise taxes.

THE USUAL RESPONSE to calls for such an amendment is that we ought not tamper with the Constitution. Critics of a BBA also claim it is not needed since a majority of Congress could balance the budget today if it really wanted to. There are at least five reasons why those critics are dead wrong.

First, it is a core principle of American constitutionalism that there be no taxation without representation. The American Revolution was fought in part to prevent taxation by a British Parliament in which Americans were not represented. When Congress borrows 40 cents of every dollar it spends, as it is doing today, it passes the burden of paying for current spending on to our children and grandchildren who cannot vote right now — nothing less than taxation without representation.

Second, a core purpose of the Constitution is to protect fundamental principles like freedom of speech and of the press from being whittled away during moments of legislative passion. Exactly the same argument holds true with respect to spending more money than the government collects in tax revenue. Constitutionalizing the balanced budget requirement is as necessary as constitutionalizing the protection of freedom of speech and of the press. This is an argument that was first made more than 30 years ago by Noble Prize laureate Milton Friedman. It is just as true today as it was then.

Third, there is an economic reason why it is easier to assemble lobbies for government spending than it is to assemble a nationwide lobby for a balanced budget. Consider the farm lobby that argues for agricultural price supports, or the AARP that lobbies for benefits for the elderly. It is cheaper and easier for small groups with a shared common interest to lobby Congress than for a large, diffuse majority of the American population to do the same. That’s why the silent majority is silent. A BBA in the Constitution would prevent the special interests from ripping off the children and grandchildren of the silent majority. James Madison wrote in The Federalist No. 51 that the secret of constitutional government was to make ambition counteract ambition. The way to check and balance over-spending is to constitutionalize a pay-as-you-go rule while making tax increases hard to enact.

Fourth, yet another economic reason for a BBA is that it would reduce risk and thereby promote investment. When people are looking for a place to invest, one of their first questions is how risky is the investment and how large is the potential reward. Foreign and American investors since World War II have invested in the U.S. and in its debt because our Constitution of checks and balances makes it hard to do crazy things like nationalize industries or set up a single payer health insurance monopoly.

A BBA would reduce further the risk of investing in the U. S., and that would promote investment and economic growth by constitutionally committing itself not to overspend. The risk of inflationary devaluation of the dollar would thus go way down. This in turn would bolster the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. It would also prevent federal borrowing from crowding out private sector borrowing in the U.S. This would free up a capital for investment in job-creating ventures.

A fifth argument for the BBA paradoxically grows out of one of the arguments commonly made against it: it would be purely symbolic. Or as James Madison would have said, “a mere parchment barrier” against overspending.

This criticism fails for many reasons. A BBA of the kind I argue for would have enforcement teeth. Presidential failure to submit a good-faith balanced budget would be a specific ground for impeachment. Then too, if Congress failed to enact a balanced budget, state governments could sue for an across theboard spending cut of 10 percent.

But suppose Congress wimps out and enacts a BBA without teeth. Would such a symbolic victory be worth anything? The answer again is clearly yes. Almost every state has some form of a balanced budget requirement in its constitution or law. The fact is that balanced budget requirements actually do work at the state level. This strongly suggests they would work at the federal level as well.

CONSTITUTIONAL PROVISIONS, even symbolic ones, set the agenda of political debate. The Second and Tenth Amendments clearly do that in the U.S. today, even though the federal courts almost never enforce them. A BBA would work very much the same way.

The case for a BBA is so powerful that Germany and Switzerland — both models of fiscal sobriety — actually require a balanced budget in their own constitutions. And now Germany and France have actually proposed requiring that all Eurozone countries amend their national constitutions to require a balanced budget. What is good enough for almost every state in the Union and for many countries of Europe is certainly worth trying at the federal level here.

So what harm could come from enacting a BBA to the U.S. Constitution? Is there any argument against such an amendment that outweighs the arguments in favor of it?

One concern conservatives have is that it might lead to tax increases. I share that concern and therefore would couple it with a super-majority requirement for tax increases. That should make a BBA clearly appealing to conservatives of all stripes. But what if such an amendment gets ratified that does not protect against tax increases? Would we then be worse off?

I think the answer is no. It is harder politically for Congress to tax real people living today than it is to borrow money from the children and grandchildren of the silent majority. People living today will mobilize in many ways against tax increases. The correct solution is to cut, cap, and balance, but I would not let concerns about tax increases stop us from doing what virtually every state constitution does.

Another real concern for conservatives is that a BBA could lead to dangerous cuts in spending on national defense. This concern I share. The U.S. is a world leader and the greatest force for liberty and economic opportunity in history. We must always be ready to defend liberty worldwide.

The problem is, however, that current levels of deficit spending — almost half of which is financed by foreign countries — is itself a threat to U.S. global might. We simply cannot defend liberty in Asia, for example, if we continue to borrow massively from the Chinese. We cannot defend freedom in Arab countries while being so dependent on Saudi Arabia and others for imported oil and purchases of our debt. The status quo is at least as threatening to America’s military might as is living under a BBA, for the status quo is not sustainable.

Finally, some conservatives argue that the solution to congressional deficit spending is a line item veto amendment giving the president the same power over spending enjoyed by a majority of state governors. I am quite skeptical about such an amendment because of the enormous power it would shift from Congress to the president. Imagine for a moment that President Obama could threaten senators or representatives with line item vetoes of locally important spending projects unless they voted his way on socialized medicine. Or on a card check law reform making it easy to fraudulently form a union. Do we really want to cede that much power from Congress to the president? I do not think so.

In sum, we need to cut, cap, and balance. To do that permanently, we must enact a BBA. Nothing less than the future of government of the people, by the people, and for the people is at stake.

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About the Author

Steven G. Calabresi is a professor of law at Northwestern University and a co-founder of the Federalist Society.

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in spending out of control | Comments (0)

President Obama should be protecting unborn children!!!!(Part 5)

November 13, 2012 – 12:37 pm

Francis Schaeffer

Uploaded by on Feb 7, 2012

Happy Birthday to someone who made a Big Difference. I’m John Stonestreet, and this is The Point. Visit http://www.thepointradio.org for more commentaries about life, culture, and current events.

______________

Francis Schaeffer, Part 2

These posts are all dealing with issues that President Obama did not help on in his first term. I am hopeful that he will continue to respond to my letters that I have written him and that he will especially reconsider his view on the following import issue. President Obama should be protecting unborn children!!!!

What Is Abortion?

Article ID: DA375

By: Hank Hanegraaff

The following is an excerpt from article DA375 by Hank Hanegraaff. The full article can be found by following the link below the excerpt.

Those who continue to fight legislation restricting abortion are in reality not “pro-choice.” Rather, they are singularly “pro-murder.” While the rhetoric has served to camouflage the carnage, abortion is really nothing more than the painful killing of an innocent human being.

What Is Abortion?- Painful

It is painful because the methods employed to kill a preborn child involve burning, smothering, dismembering, and crushing. Dr. James Dobson offers a terrifying description of one method of abortion called Dilation and Extraction (D & X):

Over two days the cervix is dilated. Then an ultrasound device and forceps are used to reach in and grab the baby’s feet. The little body is pulled downward until just the head remains in the cervix. Next the abortionist grasps the nape of the neck and cuts open the back of the skull with blunt scissors. A device called a cannula is then inserted into the wound and the brain material is sucked out. If kidneys or other organs are desired, they are removed while the child is still partially in the vagina. Initially at least, these surgical procedures are performed on a live baby who has not specifically been anesthetized (although the mother’s medication may reduce some of the pain).9

Abortion is also performed by a procedure called Dilation and Curettage (D & C), in which a tiny hoe is used to chop the baby’s body to pieces. The body is then scraped off the wall of the uterus and subsequently reassembled to ensure that no remaining parts have been left behind. Other methods include:

• Saline Solution — a salt solution is injected into the amniotic fluid, burning the skin off the baby who, after thrashing in the uterus for a number of hours, is reduced to a shriveled corpse;

• Suction — presently two-thirds of all abortions in the United States and Canada are carried out using a suction tube, which tears the child apart and deposit the pieces into a jar;

• Hysterotomy — similar to a Caesarean section, except it is designed for the express purpose of killing rather than saving the baby;

• Prostaglandin — the injection of a chemical into the uterine muscle, causing it to react violently, thus expelling the preborn child (the few children who survive decapitation resulting from the violent contractions are exterminated after delivery).

What is Abortion?- Killing

Abortion involves killing because the zygote, which fulfills the criteria needed to establish the existence of biological life (including metabolism, development, the ability to react to stimuli, and cell reproduction), is indeed terminated.

What is Abortion?- Innocent

While it is true that everyone is conceived and born in sin, preborn children are innocent because they have done nothing wrong. They deserve protection, not capital punishment.

What is Abortion?- Human Being

The living baby in the mother’s womb is a human being because he or she is the product of human parents and has a totally distinct human genetic code. This truth that abortion terminates the life of a human being is substantiated by science:

• As Dr. Micheline Matthew-Roth, a principal research associate at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Medicine, puts it, “It is scientifically correct to say that an individual human life begins at conception, when egg and sperm join to form the zygote, and this developing human always is a member of our species in all stages of its life.”10

• French geneticist Jerome L. LeJeune bore eloquent testimony to the truth of Dr. Matthew-Roth’s remarks when he gave the following testimony to a United States Senate sub-committee: “To accept the fact that after fertilization has taken place a new human has come into being is no longer a matter of taste or opinion. The human nature of the human being from conception to old age is not a metaphysical contention, it is plain experimental evidence.”11

• Perhaps Dr. Hymie Gordon, professor of medical genetics and a physician at the prestigious Mayo Clinic, best summarized the perspective of science when he said, “I think we can now also say that the question of the beginning of life — when life begins — is no longer a question for theological or philosophical dispute. It is an established scientific fact. Theologians and philosophers may go on to debate the meaning of life or purpose of life, but it is an established fact that all life, including human life, begins at the moment of conception.”12

Long before science substantiated the truth that abortion is the painful killing of an innocent human being, the psalmist summarized the view of sacred Scripture with these words:

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

Psalm 139:13-16

March 30th, 2009 by CRI | Type: Standard

Filed Under: Abortion, Articles Tags: , , ,

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Comments (0)

Open letter to Congressman Steve Womack

November 13, 2012 – 7:58 am

The Honorable Steve Womack
United States House of Representatives
1508 Longworth House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515-0403

Dear Congressman Womack,

I just got finished writing my Congressman Tim Griffin of Little Rock, but since I have a lot of relatives in your district too I thought I would write you too. The time you were elected you joined 87 Freshman lawmakers in Washington and I have been watching closely to see how conservative all of you voted. I must say that I was extremely proud that many in this Freshman class of 2010 voted against the debt ceiling increase deal of August 2011. I just got finished writing Jeff Landry of Louisiana, Idaho First District Congressman Raúl R. Labrador, Kansas Congressman Tim Huelskamp, Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI), and telling that I wrote several letters to Speaker John Boehner quoting their exact words why they voted against the debt ceiling increase in 2011!!!! I AM HOPING THAT YOU WILL JOIN THEM NOW IN OPPOSING A DEBT CEILING INCREASE UNLESS WE GETA BALANCED BUDGET AMENDMENT PASSED FIRST.

I have written a lot on the blog in the last year about the debt ceiling argument. It has been one of the top issues I have dedicated my time to and as result of coming up with interesting issues like that I have experienced over 300,000 hits in the last 12 months on my blog.

Basically on my blog I have spent most of my time on budget issues and the pro-life issues but I also deal with popular culture and sports.

I mentioned earlier that I have written lots of your Tea Party friends in Congress too about this issue of the debt ceiling issue, and I have written a series of letters to the Speaker of the House John Boehner. Here is how I start out in some of those letters:

I know that you will have to meet with newly re-elected President Obama soon and he will probably be anxious for you to raise taxes and  federal spending, but he will want you to leave runaway entitlement programs alone. When that happens then you have one thing you can hold over his head and that is the debt ceiling.

You must stand up to him and tell him that you can not raise it. In December of 2012 or January of 2013 at the latest we will be shutting down the government if we don’t increase the debt limit according to the LA Times. You got to listen to the Tea Party heroes like Rep. Todd Rokita,  Ben Quayle (R-AZ), Jeff Landry (R, LA-03),  Raúl R. Labrador , Tim Huelskamp,  Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI),  , Brooks, Mo (AL – 5), Buerkle, Ann Marie (NY – 25),Chabot, Steven (OH – 1),Duncan, Jeff (SC – 3), Fleischmann, Chuck (TN – 3) ,Gowdy, Trey (SC – 4) ,Griffith, H. Morgan (VA – 9) , Harris, Andy (MD – 1) ,Huizenga, Bill (MI – 2) , Mulvaney, Mick (SC – 5) , Pompeo, Mike (KS – 4) , Ribble, Reid (WI – 8), Rigell, E. Scott (VA – 2) , Ross, Dennis (FL – 12) ,Schweikert, David (AZ – 5), Scott, Austin (GA – 8) , Scott, Tim (SC – 1) , Southerland, Steve (FL – 2) , Stutzman, Marlin (IN – 3) , Walberg, Timothy (MI – 7) , Walsh, Joe (IL – 8),and Woodall, Rob (GA – 7) .

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, cell ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com, www.thedailyhatch.org

Related posts:

Open letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner (Part 7)

John Boehner, Speaker of the House H-232, The Capital, Washington, DC 20515 Dear Mr. Speaker, I know that you will have to meet with newly re-elected President Obama soon and he will probably be anxious for you to raise taxes and  federal spending, but he will want you to leave runaway entitlement programs alone. When that happens then you […]

Open letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner (Part 6)

John Boehner, Speaker of the House H-232, The Capital, Washington, DC 20515 Dear Mr. Speaker, I know that you will have to meet with newly re-elected President Obama soon and he will probably be anxious for you to raise taxes and  federal spending, but he will want you to leave runaway entitlement programs alone. DON’T LET THEM RAISE THAT […]

Open letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner (Part 5 on debt ceiling)

John Boehner, Speaker of the House H-232, The Capital, Washington, DC 20515 Dear Mr. Speaker, I know that you will have to meet with newly re-elected President Obama soon and he will probably be anxious for you to raise taxes and  federal spending, but he will want you to leave runaway entitlement programs alone. When that happens then you […]

Open letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner (Part 4 on ‘TEFRA Debacle of 1982′)

  John Boehner, Speaker of the House H-232, The Capital, Washington, DC 20515 Dear Mr. Speaker, I know that you will have to meet with newly re-elected President Obama soon and he will probably be anxious for you to raise taxes and  federal spending, but he will want you to leave runaway entitlement programs alone. DO NOT TAKE THE […]

Open letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner (Part 3 on debt ceiling)

John Boehner, Speaker of the House H-232, The Capital, Washington, DC 20515 Dear Mr. Speaker, I know that you will have to meet with newly re-elected President Obama soon and he will probably be anxious for you to raise taxes and  federal spending, but he will want you to leave runaway entitlement programs alone. When that happens then you […]

Open letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner (Part 2 on raising taxes)

 Open letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner (Part 2 on raising taxes) John Boehner, Speaker of the House H-232, The Capital, Washington, DC 20515 Dear Mr. Speaker, I know that you will have to meet with newly re-elected President Obama soon and he will probably be anxious for you to raise taxes and  federal spending, but […]

Open letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner (Part 1 on debt ceiling)

John Boehner, Speaker of the House H-232, The Capital, Washington, DC 20515 Dear Mr. Speaker, I know that you will have to meet with newly re-elected President Obama soon and he will probably be anxious for you to raise taxes and  federal spending, but he will want you to leave runaway entitlement programs alone. When that happens then you […]

John Boehner in Little Rock, I wish he would propose real spending cuts!!!!

Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times noted: House Speaker John Boehner was spotted in Little Rock yesterday — lunch at Whole Hog Cafe and at Cajun’s Wharf during the evening hours. My spin on John Boehner is very simple. He needs to be brave enough to join those conservatives in the House that really do […]

Democrats punt the ball on real spending cuts and Boehner doesn’t do much better

The Arkansas Times Blog reported today: Debt ceiling non-compromise updates BOEHNER: Screaming “Hell no you can’t!” Ah, the good old days. Slate has a running update of the debt ceiling debate in Washington. So far it looks like Speaker of the House John Boehner will have the votes in the House to pass his plan. […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in President Obama, spending out of control | Comments (0)

Open letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner (Part 7)

November 13, 2012 – 7:25 am

John Boehner, Speaker of the House

H-232, The Capital, Washington, DC 20515

Dear Mr. Speaker,

I know that you will have to meet with newly re-elected President Obama soon and he will probably be anxious for you to raise taxes and  federal spending, but he will want you to leave runaway entitlement programs alone. When that happens then you have one thing you can hold over his head and that is the debt ceiling.

You must stand up to him and tell him that you can not raise it. In December of 2012 or January of 2013 at the latest we will be shutting down the government if we don’t increase the debt limit according to the LA Times. You got to listen to the Tea Party heroes like Rep. Todd Rokita,  Ben Quayle (R-AZ), Jeff Landry (R, LA-03),  Raúl R. Labrador , Tim Huelskamp,  Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI),  , Brooks, Mo (AL – 5), Buerkle, Ann Marie (NY – 25),Chabot, Steven (OH – 1),Duncan, Jeff (SC – 3), Fleischmann, Chuck (TN – 3) ,Gowdy, Trey (SC – 4) ,Griffith, H. Morgan (VA – 9) , Harris, Andy (MD – 1) ,Huizenga, Bill (MI – 2) , Mulvaney, Mick (SC – 5) , Pompeo, Mike (KS – 4) , Ribble, Reid (WI – 8), Rigell, E. Scott (VA – 2) , Ross, Dennis (FL – 12) ,Schweikert, David (AZ – 5), Scott, Austin (GA – 8) , Scott, Tim (SC – 1) , Southerland, Steve (FL – 2) , Stutzman, Marlin (IN – 3) , Walberg, Timothy (MI – 7) , Walsh, Joe (IL – 8),and Woodall, Rob (GA – 7) .

What future does our country have if we never even attempt to balance our budget. I read some wise words by Congressman Jeff Landry (R, LA-03) regarding the  debt ceiling deal that was passed on August 1, 2011:”Throughout this debate, the American people have demanded a real cure to America’s spending addiction – a Balanced Budget Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately, today’s Washington deal transforms last week’s strong Balanced Budget requirement into a toothless suggestion.”

If we are going to get the budget to balance it will take a Balanced Budget Amendment to force us to do so. There is no other way around that fact!!!

Ted DeHaven noted his his article, “Freshman Republicans switch from Tea to Kool-Aid,”  Cato Institute Blog, May 17, 2012:

This week the Club for Growth released a study of votes cast in 2011 by the 87 Republicans elected to the House in November 2010. The Club found that “In many cases, the rhetoric of the so-called “Tea Party” freshmen simply didn’t match their records.” Particularly disconcerting is the fact that so many GOP newcomers cast votes against spending cuts.

The study comes on the heels of three telling votes taken last week in the House that should have been slam-dunks for members who possess the slightest regard for limited government and free markets. Alas, only 26 of the 87 members of the “Tea Party class” voted to defund both the Economic Development Administration and the president’s new Advanced Manufacturing Technology Consortia program (see my previous discussion of these votes here) and against reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank (see my colleague Sallie James’s excoriation of that vote here).

One of those Tea Party heroes was Congressman Jeff Landry (R, LA-03). Last year I posted this below concerning his conservative views and his willingness to vote against the debt ceiling increase:

Congressman Landry’s Statement on Today’s Debt Ceiling Deal

Millard Mulé
 

WASHINGTON, DC – Congressman Jeff Landry (R, LA-03) issued the following statement regarding today’s debt ceiling deal:

“I’m sure by Washington standards, today’s deal is a great accomplishment; but by American standards, it comes up short. Throughout this debate, the American people have demanded a real cure to America’s spending addiction – a Balanced Budget Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately, today’s Washington deal transforms last week’s strong Balanced Budget requirement into a toothless suggestion. And today’s Washington deal puts at risk the security and pay of our brave men and women in uniform. It’s disheartening that Washington continues skirting the problem, instead of passing long-term solutions to end it. As evident by my decision today, I stand with the American people and choose to put the next generation above my next election.”

__________

__________

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com, www.thedailyhatch.org, ph 501-920-5733

___________

Related posts:

Government shutdown coming, will there be any tea party heroes available to stand up to Obama?

DEBT LIMIT – A GUIDE TO AMERICAN FEDERAL DEBT MADE EASY. Uploaded by debtlimitusa on Nov 4, 2011 A satirical short film taking a look at the national debt and how it applies to just one family. Watch the guy from the Ferris Bueller Superbowl Spot! Produced by Seth William Meier, DP/Edited by Craig Evans, […]

Some Tea Party heroes (Part 1)

DEBT LIMIT – A GUIDE TO AMERICAN FEDERAL DEBT MADE EASY. Uploaded by debtlimitusa on Nov 4, 2011 A satirical short film taking a look at the national debt and how it applies to just one family. Watch the guy from the Ferris Bueller Superbowl Spot! Produced by Seth William Meier, DP/Edited by Craig Evans, […]

Some Tea Party heroes (Part 8)

Rep Himes and Rep Schweikert Discuss the Debt and Budget Deal Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute in his article, “Hitting the Ceiling,” National Review Online, March 7, 2012 noted: After all, despite all the sturm und drang about spending cuts as part of last year’s debt-ceiling deal, federal spending not only increased from 2011 […]

Some Tea Party heroes (Part 7)

Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute in his article, “Hitting the Ceiling,” National Review Online, March 7, 2012 noted: After all, despite all the sturm und drang about spending cuts as part of last year’s debt-ceiling deal, federal spending not only increased from 2011 to 2012, it rose faster than inflation and population growth combined. […]

Who are the Tea Party Heroes from the 87 Freshmen Republicans?

Here is a study done on the votes of the 87 incoming freshman republicans frm the Club for Growth. Freshman Vote Study In the 2010 election, 87 freshmen House Republicans came to Washington pledging fealty to the Tea Party movement and the ideals of limited government and economic freedom. The mainstream media likes to say […]

Tea Party Conservative Senator Mike Lee interview

Tea Party Conservative Senator Mike Lee interview Here is an excellent interview above with Senator Lee with a fine article below from the Heritage Foundation. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) came to Washington as the a tea-party conservative with the goal of fixing the economy, addressing the debt crisis and curbing the growth of the federal […]

Some Tea Party heroes (Part 6)

I feel so strongly about the evil practice of running up our national debt. I was so proud of Rep. Todd Rokita who voted against the Budget Control Act of 2011 on August 11, 2011. He made this comment:   For decades now, we have spent too much money on ourselves and have intentionally allowed our […]

Some Tea Party heroes (Part 5)

Rep. Quayle on Fox News with Neil Cavuto __________________ We have to get people realize that the most important issue is the debt!!! Recently I read a comment by Congressman Ben Quayle (R-AZ) made  after voting against the amended Budget Control Act on August 1, 2011. He said it was important to compel “Congressional Democrats and […]

Some Tea Party heroes (Part 4)

What future does our country have if we never even attempt to balance our budget. I read some wise words by Congressman Jeff Landry (R, LA-03) regarding the  debt ceiling deal that was passed on August 1, 2011:”Throughout this debate, the American people have demanded a real cure to America’s spending addiction – a Balanced Budget […]

Some Tea Party heroes (Part 3)

I read some wise comments by Idaho First District Congressman Raúl R. Labrador concerning the passage of the Budget Control Act on August 1, 2011 and I wanted to point them out: “The legislation  lacks a rock solid commitment to passage of a balanced budget amendment, which I believe is necessary to saving our nation.” I just […]

Some Tea Party heroes (Part 2)

Congressmen Tim Huelskamp on the debt ceiling I just don’t understand why people think we can go on and act like everything is okay when we have a trillion dollar deficit. Sometimes you run across some very wise words like I did the other day. Kansas Congressman Tim Huelskamp made the following comment on the […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in President Obama, spending out of control, Taxes | Comments (0)

New movie about Abraham Lincoln (Part 4)

November 13, 2012 – 7:24 am

Still of Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln

13 September 2012
Photo by David James, SMPSP – © 2012 – DreamWorks II Distribution Co., LLC. All Rights Reserved.

I have written a lot about Abraham Lincoln in the past as you can tell from the “related posts” noted below. Most of my posts were concerning the movie “The Conspirator” which is one of my favorite movies.  I enjoyed reading about all the historical people involved with Lincoln. Boston Corbett is the man who shot Booth. Louis Weichmann was originally a suspect but he later became one of the chief witnesses for the prosecution.  John Wilkes Booth was the first man to kill an American President. Louis Powell attempted to kill Secretary of State Seward.  Mary Surratt was in the center of the conspiracy we are told, but is that true? (I believe the evidence shows that it was true that she was guilty of that.)

Julia Shaw

November 9, 2012 at 2:01 pm

Daniel Day-Lewis stars in the new movie “Lincoln” directed by Steven Spielberg. Photo: DreamWorks II Distribution Co., LLC.

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln debuts in Washington, D.C., this week.

It features a stellar cast: Tommy Lee Jones, David Strathairn, Sally Field, and Daniel Day-Lewis as our nation’s 16th President.

Day-Lewis is known for method acting. But which Lincoln will he portray? Will he play into the liberal myth of Lincoln as “the father of big government”? Will he reflect an equally pernicious stereotype: a tyrant who supposedly deprived Southern sympathizers of civil rights? Or will Hollywood manage to show us the real Lincoln, a man who stood up for limited, constitutional government?

The script is based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. But screenwriter Tony Kushner (of Angels in America and Munich fame) persuaded Spielberg to focus on the Thirteenth Amendment. Ah, so Day-Lewis will be the “Great Emancipator.”

“I have always hated slavery,” Lincoln repeatedly said. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”

Slavery was also contrary to “the leading principle—the sheet anchor of American republicanism.” Lincoln described the Declaration of Independence in his typical, colorful terms. It was, he said, an apple of gold, while the

Union, and the Constitution, are the picture of silver, subsequently framed around [the apple]. The picture was made, not to conceal, or destroy the apple; but to adorn, and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple—not the apple for the picture. So let us act, that neither picture, or apple, shall ever be blurred, or bruised, or broken.

That is, the core of America is the principle of human equality articulated in the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution exists to preserve and facilitate the equality principle by protecting it in the rule of law.

Thus, Lincoln recognized that the Constitution set forth a framework of limited government. He could not do everything he desired—such as abolishing slavery. Many took him to task for that. Abolitionists, Lincoln noted, “seemed to think that the moment I was president, I had the power to abolish slavery, forgetting that before I could have any power whatsoever I had to take the oath to support the Constitution of the United States and execute the laws as I found them.”

Lincoln’s nearly impossible task was to guide the nation through a bloody civil war that would eradicate the evil of slavery and mold the North and South into “a more perfect Union.” Should he have allowed the Union to fall apart and potentially condemn the continent to the petty wars of confederacies? Should Lincoln have maintained the Union but surrendered the constitutional republic?

“When the time came for Lincoln as Chief Executive to preserve and protect the Constitution,” explained historian Herman Belz, “his great and essential contribution was to make moral and philosophic distinctions concerning the meaning of liberty, equality, and republican government that restored the authority of the Founding.”

Here’s what Lincoln did: On January 1, 1863, acting on his authority as commander in chief, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed the slaves in rebel states. This proclamation did not abolish slavery everywhere, nor did it “repeal state constitutions and laws establishing slavery.” But it was a tremendous act of statesmanship that paved the way for the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.

The Thirteenth Amendment eradicated the vicious institution of slavery and vindicated the equality principle at the heart of the Declaration. The Fourteenth Amendment performed many feats: affirming the citizenship of the newly freed men and women, guaranteeing them the protection of the rule of law, clarifying the status of political leaders from rebel nations, and repudiating the Confederate war debt. The Fifteenth Amendment ensured that the right to vote would not be abridged on account of race. Congress received the power to enforce these amendments (a power it refused to exercise for some time, but that’s another story).

Day-Lewis may capture the gawky walk, looming height, and knitted brow of the man who knew the future of the republic rested on his actions, but let’s be clear: The true legacy of Lincoln is not simply that he ended slavery. It’s that he ended slavery while preserving the Constitution and the Union. He completed the Founding by vindicating the apple of gold without smashing the frame of silver in the process.

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By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Comments (0)

Open letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner (Part 6)

November 13, 2012 – 7:08 am

John Boehner, Speaker of the House

H-232, The Capital, Washington, DC 20515

Dear Mr. Speaker,

I know that you will have to meet with newly re-elected President Obama soon and he will probably be anxious for you to raise taxes and  federal spending, but he will want you to leave runaway entitlement programs alone. DON’T LET THEM RAISE THAT TOP TAX BRACKET ANY HIGHER!!!

If you want the rich to pay a bigger percentage of the nation’s tax revenues then keep their tax rates low!!!

Evidence from England Shows that If You Want to “Soak the Rich,” Keep Tax Rates Low

September 26, 2012 by Dan Mitchell

I’ve pulled evidence from IRS publications to show that rich people paid a lot more to Uncle Sam after Reagan reduced the top tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent.

The good ol’ days

But the Gipper wasn’t the only one to unleash the Laffer Curve. The United Kingdom saw similar dramatic results when Margaret Thatcher lowered the top tax rate from 83 percent to 40 percent. Allister Heath explains.

During the 1970s, when the tax system specialised in inflicting pain, the top one per cent of earners contributed 11pc of income tax. By 1986-87, with the top rate down to 60pc, that had increased to 14pc. After the top rate fell to 40pc in 1988, the top 1pc’s share jumped, reaching 21.3pc by 1999-2000, 24.4pc in 2007-08 and 26.5pc in 2009-10. Lower taxes fuelled a hard-work culture and an entrepreneurial revolution. Combined with globalisation and the much greater rewards available for skilled workers, Britain’s most successful individuals earned a lot and paid a lot in tax.

In other words, Margaret Thatcher’s supply-side tax rate reductions paid big dividends, both for the economy and for the Treasury.

Unfortunately, just as American politicians have forgotten (or decided to ignore) the lessons of the Reagan era, British politicians also have gravitated to a class-warfare approach. Allister points out that this is having a negative impact.

Yet times are changing, and not just because of the recession. HMRC recently slashed its forecasts for revenues from the top 1pc. It now believes the number of people expected to report £500,000 or more in earnings will fall by a tenth this year; those on £2m are set to drop by a third.

Why have the numbers headed in the wrong direction? There are almost certainly lots of factors, but tax policy has moved in the wrong direction and presumably deserves part of the blame. The top income tax rate is now 45 percent. The value-added tax has jumped to 20 percent. Allister provides more details.

Capital gains tax is too high. Luxury homes transactions are falling because of higher stamp duty. Britain is now a high tax economy; this is distorting work and investment decisions, gradually shifting talent and capital overseas. The overwhelming majority of high earners are already contributing disproportionately to the exchequer; tightening the screws further will be disastrously counter-productive. The lesson of the past 30 years is clear: the best way to entice the rich to pay even more tax is to keep rates low and allow them to get even richer.

I have to admit that I don’t want anyone to pay more tax, but I’m even less happy about punitively high tax rates. So I’m reluctantly willing to let the clowns in government have more money in exchange for a tax system that is more conducive to economic growth.

Here’s my Laffer Curve video, which explains more about the relationship of tax rates, taxable income, and tax revenue.

The ultimate goal, of course, is to shrink the central government so that the legitimate functions of the state can be financed at very low tax rates. Heck, if the United States and the United Kingdom had the kind of limited governments that existed 100 years ago, neither nation would even need a flat tax. A few user fees and excise taxes would suffice. Now that’s hope and change.

P.S. I periodically share two great Reagan videos, which can be seen here and here, but I also have a couple of inspiring videos of Thatcher in action, which can be viewed here and here.

__________

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com, www.thedailyhatch.org, ph 501-920-5733

___________

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By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in President Obama, spending out of control, Taxes | Comments (0)

Johnny Cash (Part 5)

November 13, 2012 – 7:07 am

I really liked Johnny Cash.

Here is an article about his faith:

Real Hard Cash

Russell D. Moore on the Path of the Man in Black

There was an empty seat at this year’s MTV Music Video Awards​. The late Johnny Cash​ wasn’t there. It’s not as though Cash frequented the Generation X​/Y annual awards program. He was old enough to be the grandfather of the most seasoned performer on the platform. Still, two years ago, even while he was sick in a hospital, the Man in Black was there.

At the 2003 awards show, Cash’s video “Hurt” was nominated for an award—up against shallow bubblegum pop acts such as that of Justin Timberlake​. Cash didn’t win. But the showing of the video caused an almost palpable discomfort in the crowd. The video to the song, which was originally performed by youth band Nine Inch Nails​, features haunting images of his youthful glory days—complete with pictures of his friends and colleagues at the height of their fame, now dead.

As the camera pans Cash’s wizened, wrinkled face, he sings about the awful reality of death and the vanity of fame: “What have I become? My sweetest friend/ Everyone I know goes away in the end/ You could have it all/ My empire of dirt/ I will let you down, I will make you hurt.”

Whereas Nine Inch Nails delivered “Hurt” as straight nihilism, straight out of the grunge angst of the Pacific Northwest’s music scene, Cash gives it a twist—ending the video with scenes of the crucifixion of Jesus. For him, the cross is the only answer to the inevitability of suffering and pain.

Fleeting Fame

“It’s all fleeting,” he told MTV News​. “As fame is fleeting, so are all the trappings of fame fleeting; the money, the clothes, the furniture.” This could not be in more marked contrast to the culture of the popular music industry (whatever the genre), a culture of superficiality, self-exaltation, and sexual libertinism.

Perhaps this is the reason Cash remained—to the day of his death—a subject of almost morbid curiosity for a youth culture that knows nothing of “I Walk the Line.” At the 2003 awards show, 22-year-old pop sensation Justin Timberlake, beating Cash for the video award, demanded a recount. Why would twenty-something hedonists revere an old Baptist country singer from Arkansas?

In one sense, the Cash mystique was nothing new. For the whole length of his career, onlookers wondered what made him different from the rest of the Hollywood/Nashville celebrity axis. Much of it had to do with the “man in black” caricature he cultivated. Cash joked that fans would often say to him, “My father was in prison with you.” Of course, Cash never served any serious jail time at all, but he could never shake the image of a hardened criminal on the mend. People really seemed to think that he had “shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.”

That’s probably because of just how authentic and evocative his songs of prison life were. “Folsom Prison Blues,” for instance, just seems to have been penned by someone lying on a jailhouse cot listening to a train whistle in the night: “There’s probably rich folks eating in a fancy dining car/ They’re probably drinking coffee and smoking big cigars/ Well, I know I had it coming/ I know I can’t be free/ But those people keep a’movin’, and that’s what tortures me.”

The prison imagery seemed real to Cash because, for him, it was real. He knew what it was like to be enslaved, enslaved to celebrity, to power, to drugs, to liquor, and to the breaking of his marriage vows. He was subject to, and submissive to, all the temptations the recording industry can parade before a man. He was a prisoner indeed, but to a penitentiary of his own soul. There was no corpse in Reno, but there was the very real guilt of a lifetime of the self-destructive idolatry of the ego.

It was through the quiet friendships of men such as Billy Graham​ that Cash found an alternative to the vanity of shifting celebrity. He found freedom from guilt and the authenticity of the truth in a crucified and resurrected Christ. And he immediately identified with another self-obsessed celebrity of another era: Saul of Tarsus​. He even authored a surprisingly good biography of the apostle, with the insight of one who knows what it is like to see the grace of Jesus through one’s own guilt as a “chief of sinners.”

He Connected

Even as a Christian, Cash was different. He sang at Billy Graham crusades and wrote for Evangelical audiences, but he never quite fit the prevailing saccharine mood of pop Evangelicalism. Nor did he fit the trivialization of cultural Christianity so persistent in the country music industry, as Grand Old Opry stars effortlessly moved back and forth between songs about the glories of honky-tonk women and songs about the mercies of the Old Rugged Cross.

To be sure, Cash’s Christian testimony is a mixed bag. In his later years, he took out an ad in an industry magazine, with a photograph of himself extending a middle finger to music executives. And yet there is something in the Cash appeal to the youth generation that Christians would do well to emulate.

Other Christian celebrities tried—and failed—to reach youth culture by feigning teenage street language or aping pop culture trends. How successful, after all, was Pat Boone​’s embarrassing attempt at heavy metal—complete with a leather outfit and a spiked dog collar?

Cash always seemed to connect. When other Christian celebrities tried to down-play sin and condemnation in favor of upbeat messages about how much better life is with Jesus, Cash sang about the tyranny of guilt and the certainty of coming judgment. An angst-ridden youth culture may not have fully comprehended guilt, but they understood pain. And, somehow, they sensed Cash was for real.

The face of Johnny Cash reminded this generation that he has tasted everything the MTV culture has to offer—and found there a way that leads to death. In a culture that idolizes the hormonal surges of youth, Cash reminds the young of what MTV doesn’t want them to know: “It is appointed to man once to die, and after this the judgment.” His creviced face and blurring eyes remind them that there is not enough Botox in all of Hollywood to revive a corpse.

Cash wasn’t trying to be an evangelist—and his fellow Bible-belt Evangelicals knew it. But he was able to reach youth culture in a way the rest of us often can’t, precisely because he refused to sugarcoat or “market” the gospel in the “language” of today’s teenagers.

One of Cash’s final songs was also one of his best, an eerie tune based on the Book of Revelation​. His haunting voice, filled with the tremors of approaching hoof-beats, sang the challenge: “The hairs on your arms will all stand up/ At the terror of each sip and each sup./ Will you partake of that last offered cup?/ Or disappear into the potter’s ground/ When the Man comes around?”

Cash’s young fans (and his old ones too) may not have known what he was talking about, but they sensed that he did. They recognized in Cash a sinner like them, but a sinner who mourned the tragedy of his past and found peace in One who bore terrors that make Folsom Prison pale in comparison.

The Dark Side

Johnny Cash is dead, and there will never be another. But all around us there are empires of dirt, and billions of self-styled emperors marching toward judgment.

Perhaps if Christian churches modeled themselves more after Johnny Cash, and less after perky Christian celebrities such as Kathy Lee Gifford​, we might find ourselves resonating more with the MTV generation. Maybe if we stopped trying to be “cool,” and stopped hiring youth ministers who are little more than goateed game-show hosts, we might find a way to connect with a generation that understands pain and death more than we think.

Perhaps if we paid more attention to the dark side of life, a dark side addressed in divine revelation, we might find ourselves appealing to men and women in black. We might connect with men and women who know what it’s like to feel like fugitives from justice, even if they’ve never been to jail. We might offer them an authentic warning about what will happen when the Man comes around.

And, as we do this, we just might hear somewhere up in the cloud of witnesses a voice that once cried in the wilderness: “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.”

Russell D. Moore is the author of Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches. He lives with his family in Louisville, Kentucky, where he serves as Dean of the School of Theology and Senior Vice-President for Academic Administration at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and as preaching pastor at Highview Baptist Church. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Comments (0)

Open letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner (Part 5 on debt ceiling)

November 13, 2012 – 7:06 am

John Boehner, Speaker of the House

H-232, The Capital, Washington, DC 20515

Dear Mr. Speaker,

I know that you will have to meet with newly re-elected President Obama soon and he will probably be anxious for you to raise taxes and  federal spending, but he will want you to leave runaway entitlement programs alone. When that happens then you have one thing you can hold over his head and that is the debt ceiling.

You must stand up to him and tell him that you can not raise it. In December of 2012 or January of 2013 at the latest we will be shutting down the government if we don’t increase the debt limit according to the LA Times. You got to listen to the Tea Party heroes like Rep. Todd Rokita,  Ben Quayle (R-AZ), Jeff Landry (R, LA-03),  Raúl R. Labrador , Tim Huelskamp,  Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI),  , Brooks, Mo (AL – 5), Buerkle, Ann Marie (NY – 25),Chabot, Steven (OH – 1),Duncan, Jeff (SC – 3), Fleischmann, Chuck (TN – 3) ,Gowdy, Trey (SC – 4) ,Griffith, H. Morgan (VA – 9) , Harris, Andy (MD – 1) ,Huizenga, Bill (MI – 2) , Mulvaney, Mick (SC – 5) , Pompeo, Mike (KS – 4) , Ribble, Reid (WI – 8), Rigell, E. Scott (VA – 2) , Ross, Dennis (FL – 12) ,Schweikert, David (AZ – 5), Scott, Austin (GA – 8) , Scott, Tim (SC – 1) , Southerland, Steve (FL – 2) , Stutzman, Marlin (IN – 3) , Walberg, Timothy (MI – 7) , Walsh, Joe (IL – 8),and Woodall, Rob (GA – 7) .

I read some wise comments by Idaho First District Congressman Raúl R. Labrador concerning the passage of the Budget Control Act on August 1, 2011 and I wanted to point them out: “The legislation  lacks a rock solid commitment to passage of a balanced budget amendment, which I believe is necessary to saving our nation.”

I just don’t understand why we don’t have a Balanced Budget Amendment in this country. In Arkansas we have balanced our budget every year because we have a Balanced Budget Law!!!

Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute in his article, “Hitting the Ceiling,” National Review Online, March 7, 2012 noted:

After all, despite all the sturm und drang about spending cuts as part of last year’s debt-ceiling deal, federal spending not only increased from 2011 to 2012, it rose faster than inflation and population growth combined.

We need some national statesmen (and ladies) who are willing to stop running up the nation’s credit card.

Ted DeHaven noted his his article, “Freshman Republicans switch from Tea to Kool-Aid,”  Cato Institute Blog, May 17, 2012:

This week the Club for Growth released a study of votes cast in 2011 by the 87 Republicans elected to the House in November 2010. The Club found that “In many cases, the rhetoric of the so-called “Tea Party” freshmen simply didn’t match their records.” Particularly disconcerting is the fact that so many GOP newcomers cast votes against spending cuts.

The study comes on the heels of three telling votes taken last week in the House that should have been slam-dunks for members who possess the slightest regard for limited government and free markets. Alas, only 26 of the 87 members of the “Tea Party class” voted to defund both the Economic Development Administration and the president’s new Advanced Manufacturing Technology Consortia program (see my previous discussion of these votes here) and against reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank (see my colleague Sallie James’s excoriation of that vote here).

One of those Tea Party heroes was Congressman Labrodor of Idaho. Last year I posted this below concerning his conservative views and his willingness to vote against the debt ceiling increase:

Labrador Statement on Budget Control Act

Aug 1, 2011 Issues: Budget and Spending
 
 

Washington, D.C.—Idaho First District Congressman Raúl R. Labrador today issued the following statement following the passage of the Budget Control Act of 2011.

“The debt ceiling agreement that was considered by Congress today represents a good plan to resolve the uncertainty surrounding the debt ceiling debate.  It immediately cuts federal spending and implements new spending caps to prevent government expansion when our economy begins to recover.  While this bill has the potential to reduce the size of our budget and the trajectory of government spending, this bill doesn’t go far enough to make the changes necessary to get us out of our fiscal mess.

“I promised my constituents that I would come to Congress to fundamentally change the way the federal government operates. While this legislation is a good first step towards that goal, it also relies on the time honored Washington tradition of delegating problems to commissions instead of solving them ourselves. It places more confidence in its Super Commission than is warranted.  The legislation also lacks a rock solid commitment to passage of a balanced budget amendment, which I believe is necessary to saving our nation. With the help of the new members of Congress, the standard operating procedure in Washington has begun to change from spending recklessly to cutting spending sensibly, but there is a lot more that needs to change.  ”

__________

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com, www.thedailyhatch.org, ph 501-920-5733

___________

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Who are the Tea Party Heroes from the 87 Freshmen Republicans?

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Tea Party Conservative Senator Mike Lee interview

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Some Tea Party heroes (Part 6)

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Some Tea Party heroes (Part 5)

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Some Tea Party heroes (Part 4)

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Some Tea Party heroes (Part 3)

I read some wise comments by Idaho First District Congressman Raúl R. Labrador concerning the passage of the Budget Control Act on August 1, 2011 and I wanted to point them out: “The legislation  lacks a rock solid commitment to passage of a balanced budget amendment, which I believe is necessary to saving our nation.” I just […]

Some Tea Party heroes (Part 2)

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By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in President Obama, spending out of control, Taxes | Comments (0)