Tom’s Big Picture

Mike Huckabee is a particular interest of mine.  He’s a man who encapsulates so much of what’s wrong with contemporary churches, politicians and the voters who elect them that it defies the imagination.  He’s a guy who’s just smart enough to be literate, but blessed with a charisma that makes him think he’s special and knows better than smarter people with their boring statistics, facts and logical arguments.  He goes with his heart, his gut, on everything (and thinks himself superior to others for doing so!) and his watered-down evangelical religion tells him his every first impression and instinct is actually one of the persons of God, the Holy Spirit.  It’s a black hole of pure unreflective ego.

One of Huckabee’s manifestations of this egoism was his massive pardoning of criminals in Arkansas whenever one of his Southern Baptist minister buddies told him that someone convicted of a crime deserved a second chance.  The thug who just killed four police officers in Seattle was one of them.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/20 … newsletter

Huckabee has proudly declared on many occasions that he disdains the separation of church and state, insisting that his strict Baptist piety should serve as the bedrock of public policy. Nowhere in his record as governor was the influence of religious zeal felt more heavily than in the distribution of pardons and commutations, as his own explanations have indicated. During those years he granted more commutations and pardons than any governor during the previous four decades, many of them surely justified as a response to excessive penalties under the state’s draconian narcotics laws. But others were deeply controversial, especially because so many of his acts of mercy appeared to depend on interventions by fellow Baptist preachers and by inmate professions of renewed Christian faith.

No doubt word spread among the prison population that the affable governor was vulnerable to appeals from convicts who claimed to be born again. Clemmons too was among those who benefited from Huckabee’s tendency to believe such pious testimonials. “I come from a very good Christian family and I was raised much better than my actions speak,” he explained in his clemency application in 2000. “I’m still ashamed to this day for the shame my stupid involvement in these crimes brought upon my family’s name … I have never done anything good for God, but I’ve prayed for him to grant me in his compassion the grace to make a start. Now, I’m humbly appealing to you for a brand new start.”

You have to hand it to George W. Bush when he was governor of Texas.  When Pat Robertson was begging him to pardon a photogenic, born-again female murderer on death row, he resisted and allowed justice to run its course.  He understood, perhaps because he was a less emotionally-driven Methodist, that God’s forgiveness must be independent of man’s justice (or maybe he just wanted to have a political future, which itself is more rational than Huckabee’s actions).  Otherwise you create feedback loops (like in the Arkansas prison system) where people start faking religious conversions to get out of jail.  You want honest, no-strings-attached conversions in prisons, not those linked to hopes of release.  Given the depravity of the human soul, you are more likely to send people to hell by pardoning them, because they may believe they have a genuine conversion when it’s really just motivated to save their skin.

Huckabee is basically self-righteous white trash.  This little anecdote conveys the essence of the man:

Saline County Circuit Judge Robert Herzfeld, who as a prosecutor successfully sued Huckabee over clemency practices, said Huckabee’s decision to give Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards a pardon for a 1975 traffic offense after meeting him at a concert showed how lightly the ex-governor approached the practice.

“That just said volumes about how he considered this serious ultimate power over freedom as a joke,” Herzfeld said.

Click here to see my full past coverage of Huckabee.

I think we can all agree that killing abortion doctors is always a tragedy.  I personally wish there were fewer abortion doctor killings and that every abortion doctor was a planned, wanted abortion doctor.  However, we should not judge those who have a different conviction, so that’s why I support the right to choose…it’s a choice no abortion doctor killer wants to make, but feels driven to out of desperation.  When will we take abortion doctor killings out of the back alley and ensure a safe, orderly environment in those cases where such a tragic choice may be felt to be necessary?

Perhaps if people were less judgmental about killing abortion doctors, and stopped demonizing abortion doctor killers, they would feel less marginalized and seek the help they need in the community.  We’re all human beings here, and no one has the right to judge…

Murdered Ukrainian Christians: 20,000,000

Hollywood Movies Depicting Their Struggle: 0

Number of States Requiring Mandatory Ukrainian Christian Holocaust Curriculum: 0

http://www.ynetnews.com/Ext/Comp/Articl … 99,00.html

Among some of my friends I have apparently earned a reputation of a tax protester of sorts, so I thought I should clarify my position.  My theological position on this, like so many things, is flexible in the specifics but clings to a absolute kernel of truth, ableit filtered through human error.  I am a weak theonomist I suppose, in that I see the tithe, at 10%, to be a reasonably realistic appraisal of a just rate of tax.  After all, it can’t be unjust, since God imposes it, and it is probably very nearly close to ideal since God is perfect.  This is the weak case, that taxes should be no more than around 10%.  The strong case is that God demands 10%, and so the state should demand much, much less, being much less than God.

It becomes clear at some point, I believe, that tax rates are fundamentally unjust when they get out of the neighborhood of 10%, that any takings beyond that are in violation of the higher law of self-preservation and providing for one’s family, and that men may band together and righteously resist such takings.  For the American colonists, who were of the strong anti-tax variety, this level was somewhere around 3%.

Now maybe one can argue that our economic excess production is so much higher due to the higher productivity of our economy that the government can take more without substantial harm to ourselves or our families.  But such a position also implies that the government owns us and our labor, that we are literally slaves whose production can be taken at will at our master’s pleasure.  But I will grant this as well: perhaps our mode of life is necessarily more complicated and more money is needed.  And I will reduce my claim of my right to resist to a doubling of God’s rate: the state may take 20% and no more, and perhaps I have no cause to complain, for blessed are the peacemakers who do not quarrel over small wrongs.

But whether you are as flexible as I am in allowing 20%, or share the fire-eating spirit of our ancestors who fought and bled over 3%, nearly all should agree that our current system is extremely unjust.  My effective tax rate on marginal earnings is 35%, which Obama seeks to raise to 39.6%.  In addition, though my marginal dollars are not subject to the self-employment tax, they are subject to the Medicare tax of 2.9%, for benefits that are mathematically impossible for the government to ever deliver to me as someone (for a precious few weeks) still in my 20’s.

So every dollar I earn is subject to a marginal rate of 42.5%.

Now if I am really doing what I am supposed to do as a Christian father and head of household, I do not really work for myself, but for my family, as a mere trustee of wealth for future generations.  In preparing a will recently, it dawned on me that my family business is an asset the government will value for estate tax purposes, and that it will likely be subject to the estate tax, due to the valuations presently at play in my industry.  This means every dollar I earn is first subject to a 42.5% income tax and, after I pay those taxes, on top of that is also effectively subject to a 45% estate tax, if I intend to use the dollar, as I should, for the benefit of my progeny and not my own selfish pleasure.  Oh, and if I try to leave the money to my grandchildren instead, they double-estate-tax that (not technically the estate tax, but a little thing the IRS calls the “generation skipping transfer tax”), ensuring they eat 45% of my family’s savings every 30 or so years when a generation dies off.

So the effective rate my family pays on an earned dollar is equal to 1 – (1-0.425)(1-0.45) or 68.375%.  Every dollar I earn is subject to a government levy of 69 cents.  And we call ourselves a free country?  And this is not even counting state taxes, sales tax, property tax, or even the net cost of unnecessary government regulation, or the fact that each subsequent generation who inherits will also lose 45% of the principal.  And even then, as I prepare my tax return, I am informed that I owe AMT, the Alternative Minimum Tax, you see, because I’m getting too much of a deduction for property tax and they take away the first 3% or so of my charitable deductions.  Then TaxCut tells me that they’re taking away my child tax credits, which makes me question why I ever got social security numbers for my kids (hey, if they’re not giving me a tax credit, why not just have my kids “off the grid” where they never get sucked into this system? Under Obama’s plan, they could not pay taxes for 20 years and then apply for amnesty as an illegal alien, paying a $500 fine with no back taxes.).  The red number at the top of the screen gets bigger and bigger and I suddenly start to entertain Arlington Road-style revenge fantasies.

But it gets even worse.  Unless I am a successful speculator and know when to exit the dollar (and I pray for the divine revelation to do so!), I will eventually also pay an inflation tax equal to the current federal deficit as a percentage of GDP.  Right now that’s approaching 90%, so my wealth will be diluted again by almost 50% by inflation unless I time correctly my exit from the sinking ship of the US dollar.  Exit too soon and I’m in illiquid investments like gold with substandard returns and also subject to theft; exit too late and I’m left with Dead Presidents Wallpaper.

So those of you who tell us it is our moral duty to pay taxes, I show you the reality of the Beast that is the federal government.  Unless we admit that all men are forever slaves to their governments, without any rights whatsoever, there is no moral imperative to pay taxes to this government.  For now they nearly take all there is to get.

Wisdom, however, dictates that I do pay my taxes.  Just as it would be wise to pay protection money to Tony Soprano if he ran your neighborhood and owned the police, it is sometimes necessary to pay tribute to thieves and robbers for a season to protect one’s family.   But it is not one’s moral imperative to do so, and if good men can band together to reestablish justice and run the Mafia out of town, then they should.  And if individuals of more tender conscience, who cannot abide compromising with evil, refuse to pay the tribute, they must suffer the consequences but their resistance is not sinful.

This federal government that protects the murderers of unborn children is every bit and more the moral equivalent of a criminal gang.  May God give us the courage to stand up to them one day.  Until that time, I advise you to pay your taxes and keep your nose clean.

Maybe now it is easier to understand why my best strategy this time of year is to write the check to the US Treasury, take a vacation and try not to be angry.  But please don’t tell me it’s my Christian duty to pay off these criminals.