The Unchurched Among Us

MANIFESTO

It's that time of year when my church tries to recruit people to serve on its myriad committees. For a variety of reasons, this hasn't been an easy task.

Primary among them, I think, is the fact that there just aren't a lot of people available. For more than a decade, attendance and membership have been dropping—even when we had a strong permanent pastor.

Recently, Ross Douthat blogged about the weakness of mainstream Protestantism, opining that the only Christian strongholds remaining are the Church of Rome and evangelical Christians. In my view, this is especially unfortunate as the Church of Rome still can't shake off its pederast reputation, and evangelical Christians are about as close-minded a group as can be imagined. Clearly, many unchurched don't find such institutions appealing.

It'd be nice if the UCC and other moribund denominations could get rid of their cowardice (E.g., they couldn't renounce the Rev. Jeremiah Wright fast enough.) and actually sound like they believe in something, but I don't see that happening any time soon. Unfortunately, the unchurched among us will remain that way until there's something for them to get excited about.

Obama and the Tax Code

MANIFESTO

While I've always thought of myself as being the last to know about virtually anything, I suppose I can give myself more credit when it comes to some issues. One of these is the plutocrats' attack on the middle class.

It was clear to me when Gorgeous George and his cronies passed the hideous tax law of 2002 that the deck had been stacked against those making less than $250,000 per year. The last ten years have done virtually nothing to assuage that situation. Indeed, the situation got appreciably worse in 2008 when the only entities that politicians seemed to care about were the too-big-to-fail multi-billion dollar banks. The debt-ridden (and suddenly jobless) hoi polloi could go apparently go hang.

Now, finally, Barack Obama (with much help from Warren Buffett—perhaps the only wealthy American left with a conscience) has discovered that US tax rates might be a tad unfair. Still, I have to wonder: Did this realization come about because the president now has a multi-millionaire political opponent who paid less than 15% of his income in taxes for the past few years?

Call me cynical, but I wish Mr. Change-We-Can-Believe-In had been a little more energetic in his pursuit of tax code change prior to an election year where he's feeling heat from an opponent who's been able to take legal advantage of the system.

The Soul of America

Talking Points Memo points out this morning that Mitt Romney's

rhetoric casts [the 2012 presidential election] with Obama as nothing less than an existential struggle for America’s future.

Well, of course it does.

Didn't BO win the 2008 election in exactly the same way? By promising via "change we could believe in" to eradicate the excesses of the Bush years? This "change" was to include, among other things, ending the use of torture, ending spying on Americans, and ending two senseless wars. We all know how empty those promises turned out to be.

So Romney can talk about American entitlement programs all he wants. While it's obviously a smoke screen for Iowa Republicans' racism, his call for radical change is hardly unprecedented.

Newt and the Christians

MANIFESTO

Quick: Who won the 2008 Republican Iowa caucuses? If you didn't guess Mike Huckabee, you'd be wrong.

And why, pray tell, did Huckabee prevail? It had everything to do with Christianity:

The Republican contest was essentially about one thing: religion. Evangelical Christians accounted for a remarkable six in 10 GOP caucus-goers, and they favored Huckabee, a Baptist minister, over Mitt Romney, who's Mormon, by a broad 46-19 percent.

Fast forward to 2012 where we find that

Newt Gingrich has stepped into the breach and now stands alone as the most popular GOP presidential candidate in The Des Moines Register’s new Iowa Poll.

So if we can assume—and there's no reason not to—that 60% of Iowa Republican voters are evangelical, it should be remarkable that the former Speaker of the House is so popular there.

This is a man who, after all, has been married three times and has had untold extramarital affairs. It should stand to reason that the nominally pious should derogate such behavior.

But the truth of the matter is that the evangelicals don't care about matters like these. In Gingrich they see a candidate who rails against "those people" who need food stamps to survive.

Like the Tea Partiers, evangelicals continue to demonstrate that they are simply a bunch of greedy and racist homophobes who care only about their own precious souls and couldn't care less about Jesus's teachings regarding the poor and oppressed.

Theirs is a selfishly vile way to go through life, but one can certainly see why the perfidious Gingrich would be so appealing to them.

Semantics

MANIFESTO

To the WCBS reporter who said this morning "The holiday shopping season got off with a bang this weekend": You might want to reconsider your word choice.

The Komisarjevsky Trial, cont'd.

Yesterday's testimony centered on Komisarjevsky's strict religious upbringing, and it ain't pretty: Foster parents praying over the poor bastard because they thought he was possessed. The state should be ashamed of itself in allowing moronic holy rollers to damage already damaged kids.

I certainly think Komisarjevsky should be executed, but with an abusive foster brother and crazed foster parents, the poor sucker didn't have a chance.

The Real Problem With CL&P

MANIFESTO

It stands to reason that if a private corporation is charged with providing what should be a public service, services will perforce suffer. And so it is with CL&P (and its owner, Northeast Utilities).

I've probably been as big an apologist for CL&P as anyone. I just didn't see how the company could have been any more efficient in its response to Hurricane Irene two months ago. And, indeed, I have CL&P to thank that I'm one of a minority of its customers with power on this Halloween night.

However, when people smarter than I note that CL&P is grievously understaffed and so simply cannot react to any extraordinary circumstances, I have to wonder about how the state of Connecticut (and the rest of the country) has allowed a setup like this to occur.

It goes without saying that any public company's first obligation is to its shareholders. As a result, it must make as much profit as it can, and if this means retaining a skeleton staff, so be it.

For the second time in two months, the Constitution State is seeing how that capitalist notion can play out.