News

Some examples of some very direct speech from politicians

Leave a comment

A collection of very strange said by normally reticent and taciturn politicians.

Education in New Jersey

New Jersey is the biggest educational debacle in the entire USA.

Chris Christie, governor of New Jersey takes on the teacher unions. (H/T Hot Air)

He then opened the floor to questions. A few were softballs, including the declaration by Clara Nebot of Bergenfield that Christie is “a god” to her relatives in Florida.

But borough teacher Rita Wilson, a Kearny resident, argued that if she were paid $3 an hour for the 30 children in her class, she’d be earning $83,000, and she makes nothing near that.

“You’re getting more than that if you include the cost of your benefits,” Christie interrupted.

When Wilson, who has a master’s degree, said she was not being compensated for her education and experience, Christie said:

“Well, you know then that you don’t have to do it.” Some in the audience applauded…

“Your union said that is the greatest assault on public education in the history of the state,” Christie said. “That’s why the union has no credibility, stupid statements like that.”

Holy snark! Can you even say that? I don’t think politicians can even talk like that. Except he did.

If some of these unionized teachers think they are so highly qualified as to be paid top dollar for producing no results, then why don’t they find a real job in the private sector – where people actually have to produce to turn a profit? Unless parents have a choice, there is no guarantee that public school teachers are worth a dime. No one is choosing to buy their product, they are forced to buy it. Let parents choose schools, then we’ll find out how good some of these unionized public school teachers really are. The good ones should even be paid more.

Alabama campaign advertisements

Now let’s look at some campaign ads running in Alabama. I’ll bet my Canadian and British readers have never seen anything like this before. Better sit down before you watch these – because they are going to seriously rock your world.

National Security

Rick Barber is running in Alabama. (H/T Hot Air)

US marines are very direct.

Tort Reform

Tim James is running for Governor in Alabama. (H/T Hot Air)

Nuisance lawsuits kill businesses and raise unemployment.

Oklahoma state Senate is pro-life

Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, the Republicans in the state Senate overrode the veto of pro-life laws by the pro-abortion Democrat Governor.

Oklahoma lawmakers have won yet another face-off with pro-abortion Democratic Gov. Brad Henry, after the state Senate overrode the governor’s veto of an enhanced abortion statistics reporting law on Tuesday.

The stakes were riding high for pro-life advocates. The Oklahoma House of Representatives on late Monday afternoon overwhelmingly overruled Henry’s third veto this year of Oklahoma pro-life legislation, by an 84–13 margin. But while the House had votes to spare to reach its two-thirds veto-proof majority, the Senate could not afford to lose one of the thirty-two members that voted for the bill in the first round, in their override attempt.

…the Senate joined the House and voted 33 – 15 to override the pro-abortion veto, actually gaining pro-life advocates one more vote.

Seriously, I would love to live in northern Texas or northern Alabama. Or Oklahoma as a third choice, because why did they elect a pro-abortion Democrat for Governor? Does anyone know the story there? Was it an April Fool prank gone awry? Was it a dare?

Polemics

William Lane Craig answers a question from our own commenter Martin

2 Comments

Here’s the original comment from Martin.

I thought this was a pretty good objection, and I said so. Well, Martin submitted it as a question to Bill, and Bill replied.

Here is his question to Dr. Craig, which is similar to what he asked before:

I’ve been thinking about the fine tuning argument, and while I like it and think it carries some weight, something about it bothers me. It seems to suffer from “life chauvinism.”

In a poker hand a royal flush has intrinsic value and thus being dealt that hand is highly improbable and quite amazing. But that’s because the rules of the game define a royal flush as having value before the hand is dealt.

What is the justification for asserting that life is the royal flush?

Life could be defined as an “amazing and improbable phenomenon” X1. Singing gas could be defined as “amazing and improbable phenomenon” X2. Rainbow planets with rings of fire could be X3. And so on.

Each phenomena is equally improbable and can only come about by a certain setting of the universal constants. Why assert that X1 has intrinsic value? Couldn’t X2 “complain” that we are being phenomenonists by claiming that X1 is best?

It just seems to me that the rules about royal flushes are being made up only after the hand has been dealt.

Martin

And you can read Dr. Craig’s reply here. He starts by saying this “This is a very good question, Martin, about which I’d like to think more. But here are some preliminary reflections.”

I like this response because I actually had to study Bayes Theorem for my machine learning classes in grad school. So this was good because I actually get to use computer science for something useful for a change. (By the way, my New Zealand readers, I used the Weka machine learning software library).

Wow! We have the smartest commenters. Just last week that woman who I like was asking me about divine aseity. Like I know what to say about that. Well, I did say something to her that seemed to make sense to her, but she still has more questions. That’s Bill’s current area of research, you know.

On Guard

By the way, I know some of you have no idea who Bill Craig is, and I am afraid I will have to smite you with my foam bat for this grave infraction. But there is a way out. You can read chapter 1 of Bill Craig’s new book “On Guard” right here on his web site. It’s an introduction to apologetics from the top Christian apologist of all time. And if you like it, you can order it and read the whole thing. It’s dirt cheap on Amazon.com.

News

If government is paying the piper, then government is calling the tune

2 Comments
Veronique de Rugy

Check out this post from GMU economist Veronica de Rugy on Big Government. (H/T ECM)

First, she puts up this chart.

Veronique writes:

On this chart we can see the changes over time in the composition of personal income in the United States since 1929. The most notable trend is the increase in the portion of personal income coming from government transfers (mainly social Security payments, unemployment benefits, food stamps, and personal and business tax credits.)  And the increase isn’t minor: the proportion of total personal income constituted by government money has grown from 0.9% to 17.2%.

Complementary decreases of wage earnings as percentages of total personal income (from 59.5% to 52.3%) are also going on.

The problem with government giving people money is that it creates a culture of dependency, as with Greece. Politicians take money from job-creating business-owners, or from productive individual workers, and they redistribute it to whiny unproductive, immature victim groups like unions, in order to buy their votes. Eventually, the government goes too far making promises and the productive people just stop or slow their working or they move away, since they keep less and less of their own money for the same amount of work and risk-taking.

And that’s when welfare checks of the losers dry up, and they have no choice but to riot and kill people. Why do they riot? Well, if they were earning their own money by working, then they would know that they are responsible for themselves, not government. They would understand that something might go wrong, and they would know that they had to cut their spending and save for a rainy day. So when things do go bad, they would have known how to live cheaply off of their savings while they find another job.

But people who take welfare don’t save – they think the money will always be there. What do they do when the taxpayers slow or stop production? They have no skills, and they have no savings. They can’t just find a new government because a new government isn’t going to find any more money from somewhere – there isn’t any left. So the only way to get their welfare back is to revolt – which is exactly what the socialists in Greece are doing right now. They’ve been spoiled rotten and they want their welfare back, like little babies crying for their mommies.

It’s sick. And this is what Obama and the Democrats idolize, because that’s how they grew up – begging their rich parents for money and bailouts for their own irresponsible behaviors. Their policies aren’t thought through – it’s just reliving their silver spoon childhoods of never having to work for anything.

Would you like to know what Republicans are like? Consider Michele Bachmann.

At 13, Bachmann was forced to become almost financially independent after her parents divorced. She used her babysitting money to buy her own clothes and lunches at school and saved up enough to purchase her first pair of contact lenses. Between college semesters at Winona State University, she took her hardworking streak to Alaska where on one memorable day she cleaned 280 salmon.

She also quit her job as a tax litigation attorney to homeschool her five kids, because she didn’t like the job the public schools were doing. Her business runs a small business, and she helped him to start it. That’s what Republicans do. We work. And we give.

We need to stop increasing the size of government so they can “take care” of all our needs. We need to take care of all our needs, and to take care of our neighbor’s needs, too. That’s capitalism. Having something to share from what you can make from your own industry and labor.