Jailed for Bible Studies

Fox news has been abuzz with a story about a Pastor Michael Salman who has been jailed 60 days and fined for holding Bible studies in his home.  In this case, the home looks somewhat commercial with parking for 20 behind the structure.  However, Phoenix approved this as a private residence, but now wants to stop Salman from holding frequent Bible Studies on the premises.  Video can be found on foxnews.com on Kelly’s Court or read about it on examiner.com which says that comments are overwhelmingly against the city.  City of Phoenix cites traffic concerns and say that his house is an unpermitted church.  Many lawyers say Salman has a good case for civil rights violation since the First Amendment says, “ Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…or the right of the people to peacefully assemble…”  And considering that a lot of people have parties with more than 20 participants, it is interesting that Phoenix doesn’t go after Tupperware dealers or any other home party dealers.

It strikes me that the pastor doesn’t need a permit.  The city does in order to abrogate the right of Christians to gather.  And they will applyfor it in November.  Yet you see this with increasing occurrence, cities trying to restrict churches because somebody complained about the noise and Sunday is the only day they have to sleep in.  So city officials being city officials often think that sleeping in trumps freedom of religion. 

You know what is missing here?  No one appreciates our Constitution and the faith it is based upon.  They don’t understand it; they don’t much like it; they didn’t learn about it in school.  Because if they did, they’d be aghast.  The original concept of our republic stemmed from Christian Liberty.  That is, if God makes a unique relationship with each of His children, then that supercedes all else.  Who am I to stand in the way of another person’s walk with the Almighty, the Creator, and the One Who governs all providence? I’d be a fool to do so.  Hence each individual must have unalienable rights, Freedoms, given, not by the state, but by the Lord of All. This is not just a Christian belief but also a Judaic one as well.  If Freedom falls, any tyrant can come in to define what liberties and slaveries he thinks we may deserve.  Then the Constitution proceeds to define a republic, modeled somewhat on the representative government of the tribes of Israel of the Bible and the concepts of  Locke and Burke and others together with lessons from the failed experiment of the Articles of Confederation.  But all this thought about who should govern, how should they govern was heavily influenced by the Great Awakening that had swept the colonies in the 1740’s. John Adams, principle architect of the Constitution, was asked where the inspiration for it came from and he named 4 pastors of the day and their sermons.   We were a Christian nation in concept, even if not totally Christian in belief.  Say, did you learn this in public school? Or was your class like mine where they beat around the bush and no one knew why the Declaration and Constitution took the approach it did.

Thus the assault on Christian Liberty, just because there is a permit or code violation would have been a no-brainer for our forefathers.  They would have demanded the darned code or permit be changed pronto.  And concerning the business of defining Christian activity within the 4 walls of a building is preposterous.   Show me where in the Bible a Christian church is a building.  Jesus never told us what kind of a building to worship in, what day to worship, or even how to conduct a worship service.  His faith model was life’s activities and what your heart contains.  If then, God leads an individual to practice their faith inside a home or across the backyard fence or on the outskirts of the city dump, what is that to the government?  We the people hold our faith most dear and the lousy constructions of men—the government—answers to us.  

Baseball Guys Night

Guy’s night while she is at a church meeting.  I am watching the Nationals score 5 runs in the first inning of the All Star game.  Don’t know how it will turn out.

Prince Fielder won the home run derby… again.  That guy is the perfect home run derby champ.  He swings for the fences on every pitch.  Often doesn’t hit real big league pitching and bats about .230 but hits big homers.  So when the derby allows them to hit at lob pitches, he’s unbeatable.  Ironically, he is not a fielder and fumbled a catch for the first error of the game. However, glad to see KC’s Billy Butler make the game.  Wish I was there.

I often wonder about the players chosen.  Fans vote for perennial names instead of true all stars.  Dan Uggla is a great second baseman but hitting .221 isn’t exactly all star starter territory. But I don’t understand a lot of things.  Why did they move the Brewers to the National League and then a few years hence move the Astros to the American?

Our newspaper wrote a story about the guy in Muscotah, Kansas who is starting a museum for Joe Tinker.  Funny I don’t remember Muscotah.  It must be tiny.  When I was at KSU, I was in charge of monthly reports from weather volunteers for 310 recording stations around the state.  So I guess I know every town except Muscotah.  Still, they got spunk in Muscotah.  Painted the round water tower to look like a baseball.  Went around town begging Tinker memorabilia for the museum.  Who was Joe Tinker, you may be asking.  He was one of the original inductees into the Hall of Fame  for his play from 1900-1916.  He and Evers and Chance invented the 6-4-3 double play.  And they became so good at it, that they left a wave of frustration in their wake as their Cubs won 4 pennants from 1906-10.  Shortstop Joe was about a .221 hitter like Uggla, but a masterful short-stopper, and consistently the best fielder in baseball. Long time ago.

Speaking of guy things, Transportation Secretary, Ray LaHood, said today that he was pleased to see Lexus now had a hybrid car.  “Who would have dreamed two years ago that Lexus would have a hybrid.  This shows the administration’s initiative of asking for more green vehicles is working.”  Yeah, well only one problem.  Lexus has had hybrids since 2005.  Now forget that this dude is a major administration official.  Forget that as Transportation Secretary he should know or at least have staff who can check such things.  HE’S A GUY! And just as guys should know a bit about baseball, guys should know about their wheels! Imagine what the news media would have done to Sarah Palin had she made a gaffe like this.  And she’s not a guy!  La Hood (from the French, “the hood”), drives what????  What's under his hood?  Oh, that’s right, he’s a union guy so he has ridden in a limo since the time he was elected. Doesn’t change oil, either.

We need to stop these clowns before they get another 4 years. Donna Brazille says we don’t have a chance. Let me paraphrase:  “…How do you beat an unbeatable team? Romney to Rubio  to Chance…” (or substitute your favorite for second baseman)

Ha! Furcal hit a triple! Holliday hit a single! Tony’s smilin’.  Just like old times.

Lady Godiva

I would bet that if you asked 100 people on the street what Lady Godiva did, almost all would say she rode a horse naked.  But if you asked them if this was a legend or true, I would bet that most people would just say it's an old legend.  Not so, it actually happened July 9, 1040.  And I would bet that even fewer could say why she rode naked.  She did so to get her husband, Lord Merci, to remove his tax on the people.  You might say that Lady Godiva was the first Tea Partier.  And almost nobody realizes today that taxes were rare things, only levied when the kingdom was in peril, usually levied by tyrants and other hated rulers, and often pertained to only the nobility, i.e. the rich.  So when Oblamer says he only wants to tax the rich, he has good company in tyrants and rulers held in contempt.

Dates, dates.  Apparently the Continental Congress voted on July 2, 1776 to abolish all ties with England and adopted the Declaration of Independence.  But the printer took two days to publish copies for distribution.  When they were finally available on July 4, the Liberty bell rang to alert the people.  Jefferson and Franklin thought that July 2 would be duly observed by future generations, but they were wrong.  July 4 was adopted.  On July 9, Washington read the Declaration to his army.  The British came and drove Washington out of New York but that was in August. So the battle didn't start, the Declaration was not signed, but July 4 is our national holiday.

But then you ask why the colonies signed a Declaration of Independence and most people would flunk.  A lot of folks think it was because "No Taxation without Representation."  That is only one of over 20 reasons for secession and it is #14 on the list.  The first dozen are about abuse of power.  Evidently the 'straw that broke the camel's back' for the colonies was the king's refusal to allow them to convert the Indians to Christianity.  The King was head of the Anglican church and he distrusted all the other Christians of the colonies.  Plus, Indians made a good buffer against colonists going over the mountains, like Daniel Boone and his crew did.  On the other hand, the Americans found that Indians who adopted Christian faith suddenly became good friends, trading partners, scouts and guides, and no longer tried to burn down the cabin.  Sharing the gospel was their duty!  So they formed cooperative Bible Societies to distribute scriptures to the Indians and Missionary societies to speak to them about faith.  King George disallowed these endeavors and it really steamed the colonists.  Then he took away their right to militias and guns, sent his minions to harass with government regulations, taxed them as in insult, and mandated citizens buy his army dinner and provisions.  Sound like anybody you know?

Coming Campaign Events

July 14 is Kaw City's 110th anniversary and 40th anniversary of New Kaw City AND a dedication of a new park area next to the Deer Statue just north of the City Bldg.  An Old Fashioned Ice Cream Social is planned and Vaughan'll be there cutting watermelons.  (So if your pregnancy gives you a yearning for watermelon and ice cream, come join the fun.)

July 16-22 is Cavalcade in Pawhuska and Vaughan plans to attend some night but don't know when.

August 101 Ranch Real Wild West Rodeo is coming and again Steve plans to  meet and greet as he always does. 

Drop by at any of these events and talk or even give him an ear full.  That's what your State Representative is for.

Paint your wagon

Steve and I finished working on his 16 ft. flatbed trailer, making it into a campaign wagon.  It looks like the Sooner Schooner but says “Steve  Vaughan State House” on the canopy.  Tag put some retainer pipes on the sides. We used plumbing pipe and then altered and re-altered our design.  In the end, we decided that there was a better way to have done it, but it turned out quite cool the way we did it.  Then we were off to the Pawhuska Independence Day parade and Lake Ponca fireworks slicing watermelons for giveaway. 

Our Christmas Market Oklahoma is moving along quite swell.  We now have over 15 people working on the event, have scheduled the city mobile stage for the music, have arranged with an electrician to put in temporary power, mapped the event, and every group is doing their thing from decorations to food to marketing to vendors.  And again, we have made a lot of wrong turns and would do it better next time, but the thing will surely come off as a great new festival for our town (I hope.  But hope is not a strategy.). 

Someone calculated that the Apostle Paul walked over 28,000 miles in his 4 known missionary journeys.  So that is about 5 miles a day of walking for 20 years.  The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.  If Paul had not been a determined walker, he would have gotten nowhere. 

What I see when I work with folks is utterly too much analyzing and communication.  I go to the lumberyard and employees are talking, talking, talking on these darned walkie talkie things and never load your lumber.  So I wrote the company’s CEO and told him I was a small business guy and noticed this behavior. Take away their stupid phones! His company seems to have learned because they no longer do that.  Go to a committee meeting at church and people sit around philosophizing continually about church life.  We need to do those meetings without chairs.  Like the lumberyard walkie talkies, we are using a chair crutch as an excuse for little activity.  I once talked to a bishop who told me he had 59 churches in his area and 20 were without pastors.  “Every church I talk to,” he said, “wants an entrepreneurial pastor.  Trouble is, only 3% of pastors are entrepreneurial.” You know how to tell if a guy is entrepreneurial?  See if he hates meetings.  See if he humbly admits he has spun his wheels on projects a lot. See if he tirelessly works on a mission from all angles.

The conventional wisdom is that an entrepreneur thinks his product through, assembles his staff and under wonderful directions, gets a stunningly splendid product into the market.  Pah! He gets off his kiester and tries something.  If it works part way, he makes adjustments, adjustments, adjustments. It’s chaotic at times.  He manages to avoid bankruptcy several times.  Or he doesn’t and comes back to try again.  Others look at him and say, “the poor devil just doesn’t know when he is beat!” 

And so it was that Paul was run out of synagogues repeatedly but kept walking.  Vaughan just keeps going to events and shaking hands.  “Kissing babies” he laughs.  But through that tireless listening, he understands his folks, gains their trust, gets their good ideas for legislation, and gets supporters to walk beside him.

An entrepreneur likes to have a partner who spurs him when things get discouraging or does what his talent lacks.  And you can learn to be this kind of person, the way a farm kid gets lectured about “when you see work to be done, get started without being asked.”

Gotta go.  Got things to do. 

The Campaign to Kill Obamacare

While everyone talked about the mandate to buy insurance in Obamacare, PPACA,  I think we should tell about some of the other horrors.  It will be big news to your friends, especially the Dems.

Obamacare brings in a national database that tromps over 200 years of statutory restrictions on sharing medical records, tax records, and correspondence.  With a click of a button, here’s what anyone with access can learn about you.  (I made it into twin acronyms, HIRE TGIF)

Health and medical records (like the stuff 2 centuries of courts have said cannot be admitted as evidence)

ID information (like the stuff you guard so your identity isn’t stolen)

Religious and political records (remember that cult you hung around in 1969?)

Emails

Telephone and computer usage

Genetic codes

Information on purchasing and your lifestyle

Financial and tax records

Violation of 4^th and 5^th Amendments is implicit in this database—“unreasonable seizure” and the right to intellectual property.

Health Care exchanges.  This is weird topic and your brain goes batty trying to read the specifics.  But here’s the gist.  To shift the costs of paying for the now uninsured 30 million or so to the states, you have to charge the insured more.  And to make sure they don’t duck this, the government has to have strict templates on what kind of insurance is sold.  A Health Care exchange (like a stock exchange) is where you go to buy the “allowed” kinds of insurance.  The dream of the authors is to have only one policy, the government one-size-fits-all policy available, so the exchanges will continue to limit options until that happens. 

Now comes the stranger-than-strange parts of HC exchanges as written in PPACA.  If a state doesn’t set up an exchange, the feds will do it on behalf of the contrary state.  Federal HHS will then impose about double the number of Medicaid recipients that are now on Medicaid (putting most of the lower middle class on ‘welfare medicine’) But somebody who wrote about the exchanges forgot something.  The feds can only subsidize policies through state set-up and state run exchanges, not the ones HHS sets up.  Then the Supreme Court ruled that if states don’t want this Medicaid expansion, they can opt out and the Feds cannot blackball states that want this.  So a lot of states, maybe all but a few highly liberal ones, will probably opt out.  They don’t have the funds to pay this massive expansion of Medicaid.  Employers with more than 50 employees are required to have a company health policy or pay fines.  But again, Igor the socialist congressional aide, forgot a provision.  This penalty is only imposed if one of those employees falls into the subsidized-by-feds category.  Hence no exchange, no subsidies and no employer penalties.  So if a lot of states opt-out, PPACA falls apart in funding.

Remember we were told 3 important facts when Obamacare was being sold.  1. It would improve access, 2. If you like your situation, you can keep it. 3. It’s not a tax.  Well it turns out access and keeping your doc is falling by the wayside rapidly as doctors quit or plan to quit, hospitals are threatened financially.  Then Supremes called the whole thing a tax law.  And so it is, $4.2 trillion cost over 10 years on 155 million households equals $2800 per household per year. And it’s almost not a graduated tax whatsoever.  The guy who makes $30,000 a year pays $2085 and folks making over $250,000 pay about $3000.  21 taxes on everything from investment gains to bio-diesel to medical devices to Flex Savings Accts used by parents of special needs kids.

Obamcare also set us a vast bureaucracy of 47 federal agencies and 55000 federal workers, 16000 IRS agents.  (Called creating jobs?)

The First Amendment is violated.  If you have religious beliefs against abortifacients, it still makes your policy pay for those. But now that the law has been held to be a tax, there is a 200 year old precedent that a third party cannot be made to pay a tax bill.  That is, the insurance companies cannot be made to pay for what the church will not.   

Okay, so what can we do?  First states should opt out of the Medicaid expansion and not set up a Health Care Exchange.  It is also recommended that Oklahoma encode constitutional restrictions in our own state’s database of med records, OHIET.  Some have said that the entirety of PPACA can never be repealed.  Well, let’s try anyway.  If Obama is re-elected the act could be taken down in stages—the database, the unconstitutional claims on the citizenry, end-it-don’t-mend-it for the exchanges, and finally what’s left is next to nothing worthwhile so we could repeal after mortally wounding the law.  In the wake of repeal we should enact market-based solutions and reforms that let patients have more choice, as many Republicans have proposed.  And of course the best solution is to vote out the President and every sympathizing Democrat from dogcatcher on up.  Especially members of the House of Lords…er, I mean the Senate.   

Can You Haggle?

Can You Haggle?

Carlos was a friend of mine and an illegal alien—but working on his  legality through a local church.  One of our foreign exchange kids was explaining to his teenage daughter that she had gotten a coveted American Drivers License.  Why coveted?  Because you can get it at 16 rather than 18 in the home country.  So our exchange student could go home and drive for 2 years while all her friends were envious. How much did it cost?  $26.  At that point, Carlos, who couldn’t understand directions to the supermarket but could understand dollars, exploded.  “Ten dollar!” he shouted in exasperation.  “Never more than 10 dollar!  Talk down to 3 or 4!”  So then after a good laugh, I had to explain to Carlos that in USA, you can’t haggle over the price of a driver’s license; DMV gets very irritated if you try, and the price is what they say, $26.

The liberal Georgie Ann Geyer writes under syndication in our paper. She exasperated about how she couldn’t believe that conservatives and libertarians didn’t like the Affordable Care Act.  Why that mandate is just like the state’s requirement to buy insurance and a driver’s license, she triumphantly explained, as if the reader had never heard of this explanation.  (Yeah, I know.  Such originality! But then these are the people who used to continually repeat the rumor about the 80 mpg carburetor that Big Oil and Big Auto had colluded to cover-up.) Yeah, except a DL is $26, car insurance about $260 and this “Affordable” Care Act is $2800 a year per household.  To improve the analogy, they are requiring not only that you buy insurance but  that you must buy a car as well, even if you don't drive.  Moreover, this fee/penalty/tax is not progressive.  Lower middle class folks pay $2800, just like the rich who hang around with Georgie at Martha's Vineyard.  That is, lower middle class guys, who have two jobs, one in construction and another as a janitor, like Carlos, pay the same.  You think we could haggle?