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Commentary

Featured blog: Pursuing Holiness

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I’ve been featuring a lot of conservative women lately, and not just Marsha Blackburn and Michele Bachmann. Earlier this week I featured Dawn Eden, who is a champion of chastity, and Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse who champions parenting, men and the family. (I found a very frank, funny podcast by Dr. J where she is speaking to a Catholic church about chastity, marriage and parenting – her podcast feed is here)

How are women different than men?

Here are some ways that women are different than men:

  1. women tend to favor gun control, because guns are loud and scary
  2. women tend to emphasize having their needs met by Christianity over theology and apologetics
  3. women tend to favor compassion and forgiveness over responsibility and moral obligations

Well, let’s just see what Laura over the Pursuing Holiness blog thinks about all of that!

1. Laura likes guns

She writes:

Consider, for example, the New Bethel Church in Louisville, KY. Pastor Ken Pagano has decided to have a Gun Day at church. The Gun Day will include patriotic music and gun safety information. After all, recent shootings at churches have illustrated the need for responsible, defensive gun ownership.

I thought to myself, Sweet, maybe I should convert to the Assemblies of God and be a part of this.

Read the rest here.

2. Laura likes God

She writes:

What if church was about worshiping and learning about a holy and sovereign God?  A radical idea, I know.

…What’s the point of filling a church with benchwarmers, or in turning a church into a community organization where people perform service in order to fulfill their own moral code instead of for the glory of God?  We have a country full of people and groups intent on self-gratification.  If the church is no different, people may as well sleep in on Sundays.

Read the rest here.

3. Laura likes moral obligations

She writes:

Is there something morally wrong about being required to pay for [medical] services we willingly received? It’s far more morally wrong to have people throw in the towel and just refuse to pay, but even that is an option that society chooses to accept via bankruptcy laws.

I really don’t understand why people are buying into the idea that it’s some massive, morally unsound, unfair burden to pay for the medical services that they willingly received.  It’s entirely fair.  You asked for those services, you accepted them, and now you need to quit whingeing and pay up.

Read the rest here.

Laura’s blog is called Pursuing Holiness.

News

Obama’s car regulations will kill more Americans than the Iraq war

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The Heritage Foundation reports on Obama’s proposed regulations on fuel economy.

Time for practice. Time to pile into the…Toyota Prius? Maybe the Yaris. Or surely the Smart Car will do. Those are three of eleven cars that meet President Obama’s new emissions standards that include “nothing larger than a midsize sedan, even when you include hybrids.”

Eleven choices of vehicle? The soccer moms will not be liking that.

But it gets worse. It’s going to cost another 50,000 jobs added on to Obama’s massive count.

Keith Henessey writes: (H/T Competitive Enterprise Institute)

NHTSA estimated that a similar option would cost almost 50,000 U.S. auto manufacturing jobs over five years.

See Table VII-1 on page 586 of the NHTSA analysis.  NHTSA estimated that the TC=TB option, which I’m using as a proxy for the Obama plan, would result in the following job losses among U.S. auto workers:

MY 2011

MY 2012

MY 2013

MY 2014

MY 2015

8,232

24,610

30,545

36,106

48,847

Compared to the Bush draft final rule, this is 37,000 more jobs lost.

Since I know this table is inflammatory, I will anticipate some of the responses:

  • This is an estimate for the job loss from the TC=TB option analyzed by NHTSA in 2007.  This is the closest proxy for the Obama rule, and I’m convinced it’s a good proxy until someone demonstrates otherwise.  But technically, it’s not a job loss estimate for the Obama proposal.
  • This estimate was done in a different economic environment (late 2008), and before the U.S. government owned 1.5 major U.S. auto manufacturers.  My guess, however, is that these changed conditions should push the estimated job loss up from the above estimate, rather than down.
  • There’s a false precision in the above table.  It’s just what NHTSA’s model spits out.  …I don’t put any weight on the precise annual estimates.

And it gets even worse than that.

Steve Milloy writes about the really bad problem on Green Hell blog: (H/T Gateway Pundit)

The Obama administration’s proposed mileage standards that will be announced today may kill more Americans at a faster rate than the Iraq War — his signature issue in the 2008 presidential campaign.

Obama’s standards will require automakers to meet a 35 miles-per-gallon standard by 2016 — four years earlier than the same standard imposed by the Energy Security and Independence Act of 2007.

As discussed in my new book Green Hell, the only way for carmakers to meet these standard is to make smaller, lighter and deadlier cars.

The National Academy of Sciences has linked mileage standards with about 2,000 deaths per year. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that every 100-pound reduction in the weight of small cars increases annual traffic fatalities by as much as 715.

In contrast in the more than six years since the Iraq war began, there have been 4,296 deaths among American military personnel.

The Iraq war cost 550 billion and 4300 lives. And for this we got more liberty and security. Obama is spending trillions and trillions of dollars, and he wants to kill 2,000 Americans per year? I am not even talking about his subsidies to kill more unborn babies at home and abroad. This is on top of that!

News

The Family Research Center evaluates Barack Obama’s first 100 days

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Has Obama been a good President for Christians? Should Christians have voted for him? How well has he done at fulfilling his campaign promises to pro-life and pro-marriage social conservatives?

Watch this 7-minute video and see for yourself how prudent it was for Christians to put their faith in Obama’s promises. (H/T Gateway Pundit)

The Cloak Room lists the decisions of interest to Christians and social conservatives from the first 100 days of Obama’s regime.

I think we should judge presidential candidates on their record, not on their speeches or their appearance. How did Obama vote before his campaign started? Did the Christians who voted for Obama take the time to find out?

This video follows the story of the Democrats’ Hate Crime bill, which allows the government to imprison bloggers and Christians, (much like Iran’s theocratic government). My original post on Obama’s attempts to intimidate Chrysler’s creditors, thereby undermining the Constitution and the rule of law, is here. And it has now been corroborated over at Hot Air, here.

Regarding the intimidation of Chrysler’s creditors, Hot Air has a follow-up story from the Business Insider:

Creditors to Chrysler describe negotiations with the company and the Obama administration as “a farce,” saying the administration was bent on forcing their hands using hardball tactics and threats.

Conversations with administration officials left them expecting that they would be politically targeted, two participants in the negotiations said. …

The sources, who represent creditors to Chrysler, say were taken aback by the hardball tactics that the Obama administration employed to cajole them into acquiescing to plans to restructure Chrysler. One person said described the administration as the most shocking “end justifies the means” group they have ever encountered.  Another characterized Obama was “the most dangerous smooth talker on the planet- and I knew Kissinger.” Both were voters for Obama in the last election.

One participant in negotiations said that the administration’s tactic was to present what one described as a  “madman theory of the presidency” in which the President is someone to be feared because he was willing to do anything to get his way. The person said this threat was taken very seriously by his firm.

Hot Air comments:

Well, that’s certainly reassuring.  The man at the helm during one of the biggest economic crises in decades is a madman who will act in an unpredictable and irrational manner if he doesn’t get his way.  It sounds like they paint Obama as either a lunatic or a petulant child.

The “madman theory” of the Presidency? Is that what uninformed Christians who voted for Obama expected?

UPDATE: Ace has more here and here. (H/T Commenter ECM) And Hot Air (Ed Morrissey) has more here.