“Jesus Christ may have lived as a poor man and consistently been on the side of those with little material wealth, but a poll shows almost half of the Christians in the United States believe people who live in poverty do so because they’re lazy. Indeed, Christians, particularly white evangelicals, are much more likely than non-Christians to associate a lack of wealth with a lack of effort, according to a poll from The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation published Thursday.
The survey, conducted between April 13 and May 1 with a sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points, indicated that 46 percent of Christians believed that a lack of effort is generally to blame for a person’s poverty, compared with 29 percent of non-Christians.
For white evangelical Protestants, that number rose to 53 percent, with just 41 percent attributing other circumstances to an individual’s poverty. Fifty percent of Catholics blamed a lack of effort for poverty.”
“… a plurality of voters in the POLITICO/Morning Consult poll said Congress should not seek to impeach Trump. An earlier Harvard-Harris Poll found nearly two-thirds of American voters say investigations into Trump and Russia are hurting the country.”
Ricky, after talking with people from Austin yesterday, I have concluded that folks in the panhandle are much more helpful and polite. I always have a pleasant experience when dealing with facilities in Lubbock and Amarillo.
AJ, there has been a big shift in attitude toward the poor. I think that Phos has articulated the other side well. There is no reason to assume that someone is lazy or uneducated because they lack lots of money. IMO, there is far too much focus on material possessions.
RKessler, I agree that West Texans are nice. They are also conservative. After much searching, I have determined that the nicest, most conservative place in America is the early morning (traditional) service at South Cliff Baptist Church in Lubbock.
Speaking of Lubbock and Amarillo, they are here in this cool 3D display of the 2016 election that Charles Murray tweeted. HRW, You may not like Murray’s books, but this display confirms everything you have said about demographics and the election results.
If I publish a new edition of Coming Apart, this would make a great cover. Tells most of the story in one graphic. https://t.co/L3P5KKbBY3
“When former President Bill Clinton met with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch at an Arizona airport, the gross impropriety of the “tarmac summit” was immediately evident. Clinton’s wife and 2016 Democrat presidential hopeful was then under FBI investigation for her server and email scandals. The impropriety was pooh-poohed away by a defensive AG, a disinterested media, a complicit FBI, and the corrupt Clinton clan.
The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) has released 413 pages of memos obtained from the DOJ that show the “tarmac summit” was planned and that the media was working with the Obama-Lynch DOJ to downplay and bury the entire incident.
The ACLJ in their article entitled, “DOJ Document Dump to ACLJ on Clinton Lynch Meeting: Comey FBI Lied, Media Collusion, Spin, and Illegality,” reports:
We have just obtained hundreds of pages in our ongoing investigation and federal lawsuit on former Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s tarmac meeting with former President Bill Clinton while the Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI had an ongoing criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. The results are shocking.
First, the Comey FBI lied to us. Last July, we sent FOIA requests to both the Comey FBI and the Lynch DOJ asking for any documents related to the Clinton Lynch plane meeting. The FBI, under the then directorship of James Comey, replied that “No records responsive to your request were located.”
The documents we received today from the Department of Justice include several emails from the FBI to DOJ officials concerning the meeting. One with the subject line “FLAG” was correspondence between FBI officials (Richard Quinn, FBI Media/Investigative Publicity, and Michael Kortan) and DOJ officials concerning “flag[ing] a story . . . about a casual, unscheduled meeting between former president Bill Clinton and the AG.” The DOJ official instructs the FBI to “let me know if you get any questions about this” and provides “[o]ur talkers [DOJ talking points] on this”. The talking points, however are redacted.
Not only was Comey’s FBI less than forthcoming, but the emails reveal that Clinton’s and Lynch’s security details coordinated prior to the tarmac summit.”
—————————-
And I’ll say it again. Comey deserved to be fired.
From a business standpoint, Roger Ailes was a genius. However, Fox has been an intellectual and moral sewer for a long time. I am not sure it is possible to “clean up” Fox. Many of its viewers expect to be fed garbage. I don’t think they want to hear the truth.
The leaks aren’t from some deep state conspiracy rather its from the competing interests of the admin itself. You have the generals vs the Brietbart group vs the Trumps vs the “real” Republicans. The last group is already thinking 2020 including Pence who’s already fundraising.
AJ — Hilary lost and left the building.
Ricky — the graphics right; urban vs rural is the real division (except the black belt, native reservations, and along the southern border). The problem for the Democrats is getting the city to vote and the over-weighed vote in rural states.
So we should ignore her crimes, the fact that the FBI director lied, and that the Washington Post and other media outlets colluded with the Obama White House, DOJ, and FBI to kill the story?
I would suggest investigating those in power first then catch up with those no longer in positions of power.
It took us about a decade but Canada caught up with Mulroney and his friends after he left politics.
rkesslar — for example in California there’s one electoral vote per 715 000 persons whereas in Wyoming one electoral vote equals 195 500 persons. In this way Republicans lose the popular vote and win the presidency. Since electoral votes are based on Senate and House seats the discrepancy continues into Congress. Now rural votes have always been given more weight just out of geographical necessity but at a certain point it gets ridiculous. Hence some urban political parties favor proportional representation.
If we are going to change the allocation of electoral votes, it should be done in a way that gives an equal voice to plants, animals, rocks and dirt, not just humans. Why should Rhode Island which has only 1500 square miles of plants and animals or Delaware which has only 2500 square miles get as many electoral votes as Wyoming which has 97,000 square miles?
Texans would not mind having fewer having fewer electoral votes than the bears and moose in Alaska, but are completely irrirated that we have fewer votes than the transgender people in California.
Me: This is good news. Several intelligent, conservative, sane Republicans are preparing to run for President in 2020.
My wife: What if Mini-Trump Scaramucci runs and gets the votes of all the Trumpkins?
He is right that the Trumpkins and the Democrats have both taken extreme positions.
We need just enough immigrants to perform those jobs that Trumpkins and Democrats are incapable of performing or unwilling to perform. The new Cotton/Perdue bill does two things:
1. It adjusts the ratio of Mexicans to Asians by shifting us from a family based system to a skills based system.
2. It reduces the number of legal immigrants.
As Douthat points out, it is possible to do #1 without doing #2. That would give us more Asians who would pay more taxes and create more new businesses and would keep the Ponzi schemes of Social Security and Medicare solvent for a longer period of time.
The best and saddest part of this article is reading about how the bright young conservatives reacted to seeing the videos of Ronald Reagan and Robert George. Today they are generally only exposed to lobotomized versions of such leaders.
Constitution or not, as the US becomes more urbanized, something will have to give. An amendment is always possible, urban states will endorsed the states rights philosophy, or ….
Canada has had an immigration point system for year but also has a family reunification track and refugee track along with the point system. A point system is an excellent idea but shouldn’t come at the expense of family reunification.
This is a thought-provoking piece in the American Conservative that I missed a couple of weeks ago. Although Christians will never go ‘on strike’ like a soulless Rand character, still, our country does not at all appreciate the many benefits directly provided by unselfish Christian service.
We’ve all heard of the idea of a general worker’s strike. In her tome Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand posed a provocative question. What if, in response to an increasingly overbearing regulatory state, the entrepreneurs of America decided to go on strike?
The resulting 1000 pages, if you can get through them, constitute one of the most creative, if overwrought, dystopias ever envisioned. Society’s producers quietly disappear, enclosed in their own hidden capitalist utopia, while innovation grinds to a halt, intellectual property languishes, and overconfident, arrogant bureaucrats run world-class factories into the ground. When all’s said and done, all that was required to liberate America’s unappreciated geniuses and creators was for them to walk away and leave society to pick up the pieces.
American Christians may find themselves in a position closer to John Galt than to Saint Benedict, with apologies to Rod Dreher. Many of the services Americans take for granted are provided by churches and Christian organizations. It is not hyperbolic to say that core areas of American life would languish or collapse without the contributions of Christian people and organizations. These enormous social contributions are frequently underappreciated, but would certainly be missed.
Perhaps the most important is health care. John Stonestreet, president of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview, wrote in an article titled “No Christianity, No Hospitals: Don’t Take Christian Contributions for Granted”:
One in six hospital beds in our country is located in a Catholic hospital. In at least thirty communities, the Catholic hospital is the only hospital in a 35-mile radius. This doesn’t even take into account hospitals run by other Christian bodies such as Baptists, Methodists, and especially Seventh-Day Adventists…..
Debra, I am very familiar with Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian and Catholic hospitals in our area. None are subsidized to any significant extent by their respective churches. All make their income primarily from insurance payments, Medicare and Medicaid. A very few patients pay for their own care. It is not the churches that are paying for the care of Democrats, Trumpkins and the elderly. It is that ever shrinking group of taxpayers.
Wandering Views 
First
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Good news!
https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/us/politics/trump-mcmaster-national-security-conservatives.amp.html
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The political views of millennials.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/08/05/think-all-millennials-hate-trump-actually-itscomplicated/?utm_term=.064c386f9223
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Interesting.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-people-poor-because-apos-173238019.html
“Jesus Christ may have lived as a poor man and consistently been on the side of those with little material wealth, but a poll shows almost half of the Christians in the United States believe people who live in poverty do so because they’re lazy. Indeed, Christians, particularly white evangelicals, are much more likely than non-Christians to associate a lack of wealth with a lack of effort, according to a poll from The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation published Thursday.
The survey, conducted between April 13 and May 1 with a sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points, indicated that 46 percent of Christians believed that a lack of effort is generally to blame for a person’s poverty, compared with 29 percent of non-Christians.
For white evangelical Protestants, that number rose to 53 percent, with just 41 percent attributing other circumstances to an individual’s poverty. Fifty percent of Catholics blamed a lack of effort for poverty.”
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http://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/05/democrats-trump-russia-blowback-241346
“… a plurality of voters in the POLITICO/Morning Consult poll said Congress should not seek to impeach Trump. An earlier Harvard-Harris Poll found nearly two-thirds of American voters say investigations into Trump and Russia are hurting the country.”
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A warning to deep state conspiracy theorists;
https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/dont-fear-the-deep-state-it-may-be-americas-only-hope/article35881419/?ref=https://www.theglobeandmail.com&cmpid=rss1&click=sf_globefb&service=mobile
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Like French I have seen a generational political divide among evangelicals.
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A little West Texas humor from Kevin D. Williamson.
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Tychicus, Krauthammer agrees with your point.
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/345272-krauthammer-impeachment-would-be-a-catastrophic-mistake
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Ricky, after talking with people from Austin yesterday, I have concluded that folks in the panhandle are much more helpful and polite. I always have a pleasant experience when dealing with facilities in Lubbock and Amarillo.
LikeLiked by 1 person
AJ, there has been a big shift in attitude toward the poor. I think that Phos has articulated the other side well. There is no reason to assume that someone is lazy or uneducated because they lack lots of money. IMO, there is far too much focus on material possessions.
LikeLiked by 2 people
RKessler, I agree that West Texans are nice. They are also conservative. After much searching, I have determined that the nicest, most conservative place in America is the early morning (traditional) service at South Cliff Baptist Church in Lubbock.
https://www.crowdpac.com/blog/the-most-liberal-and-conservative-cities-in-america
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Speaking of Lubbock and Amarillo, they are here in this cool 3D display of the 2016 election that Charles Murray tweeted. HRW, You may not like Murray’s books, but this display confirms everything you have said about demographics and the election results.
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Chance meeting my keister.
http://legalinsurrection.com/2017/08/aclj-doj-document-dump-shows-lynch-clinton-tarmac-summit-planned-media-coverup/
“When former President Bill Clinton met with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch at an Arizona airport, the gross impropriety of the “tarmac summit” was immediately evident. Clinton’s wife and 2016 Democrat presidential hopeful was then under FBI investigation for her server and email scandals. The impropriety was pooh-poohed away by a defensive AG, a disinterested media, a complicit FBI, and the corrupt Clinton clan.
The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) has released 413 pages of memos obtained from the DOJ that show the “tarmac summit” was planned and that the media was working with the Obama-Lynch DOJ to downplay and bury the entire incident.
The ACLJ in their article entitled, “DOJ Document Dump to ACLJ on Clinton Lynch Meeting: Comey FBI Lied, Media Collusion, Spin, and Illegality,” reports:
We have just obtained hundreds of pages in our ongoing investigation and federal lawsuit on former Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s tarmac meeting with former President Bill Clinton while the Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI had an ongoing criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. The results are shocking.
First, the Comey FBI lied to us. Last July, we sent FOIA requests to both the Comey FBI and the Lynch DOJ asking for any documents related to the Clinton Lynch plane meeting. The FBI, under the then directorship of James Comey, replied that “No records responsive to your request were located.”
The documents we received today from the Department of Justice include several emails from the FBI to DOJ officials concerning the meeting. One with the subject line “FLAG” was correspondence between FBI officials (Richard Quinn, FBI Media/Investigative Publicity, and Michael Kortan) and DOJ officials concerning “flag[ing] a story . . . about a casual, unscheduled meeting between former president Bill Clinton and the AG.” The DOJ official instructs the FBI to “let me know if you get any questions about this” and provides “[o]ur talkers [DOJ talking points] on this”. The talking points, however are redacted.
Not only was Comey’s FBI less than forthcoming, but the emails reveal that Clinton’s and Lynch’s security details coordinated prior to the tarmac summit.”
—————————-
And I’ll say it again. Comey deserved to be fired.
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Kirsten Powers and Matt Lewis react to the Eric Bolling suspension at Fox.
https://twitter.com/kirstenpowers/status/893936319415566336
From a business standpoint, Roger Ailes was a genius. However, Fox has been an intellectual and moral sewer for a long time. I am not sure it is possible to “clean up” Fox. Many of its viewers expect to be fed garbage. I don’t think they want to hear the truth.
LikeLike
Good editorial on the White House leaks;
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/globe-editorial-leaks-are-symptom-of-white-houses-dysfunction-under-trump/article35882627/
The leaks aren’t from some deep state conspiracy rather its from the competing interests of the admin itself. You have the generals vs the Brietbart group vs the Trumps vs the “real” Republicans. The last group is already thinking 2020 including Pence who’s already fundraising.
AJ — Hilary lost and left the building.
Ricky — the graphics right; urban vs rural is the real division (except the black belt, native reservations, and along the southern border). The problem for the Democrats is getting the city to vote and the over-weighed vote in rural states.
LikeLiked by 1 person
HRW,what do you mean by “overweighted vote in rural states”?
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“AJ — Hilary lost and left the building.”
So we should ignore her crimes, the fact that the FBI director lied, and that the Washington Post and other media outlets colluded with the Obama White House, DOJ, and FBI to kill the story?
That stuff might fly in Canada, but not here.
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I would suggest investigating those in power first then catch up with those no longer in positions of power.
It took us about a decade but Canada caught up with Mulroney and his friends after he left politics.
rkesslar — for example in California there’s one electoral vote per 715 000 persons whereas in Wyoming one electoral vote equals 195 500 persons. In this way Republicans lose the popular vote and win the presidency. Since electoral votes are based on Senate and House seats the discrepancy continues into Congress. Now rural votes have always been given more weight just out of geographical necessity but at a certain point it gets ridiculous. Hence some urban political parties favor proportional representation.
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Those are basic tenets of our Constitution. They certainly do not need to be changed.
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If we are going to change the allocation of electoral votes, it should be done in a way that gives an equal voice to plants, animals, rocks and dirt, not just humans. Why should Rhode Island which has only 1500 square miles of plants and animals or Delaware which has only 2500 square miles get as many electoral votes as Wyoming which has 97,000 square miles?
http://www.ipl.org/div/stateknow/popchart.html
Texans would not mind having fewer having fewer electoral votes than the bears and moose in Alaska, but are completely irrirated that we have fewer votes than the transgender people in California.
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Me: This is good news. Several intelligent, conservative, sane Republicans are preparing to run for President in 2020.
My wife: What if Mini-Trump Scaramucci runs and gets the votes of all the Trumpkins?
LikeLike
Douthat on immigration:
He is right that the Trumpkins and the Democrats have both taken extreme positions.
We need just enough immigrants to perform those jobs that Trumpkins and Democrats are incapable of performing or unwilling to perform. The new Cotton/Perdue bill does two things:
1. It adjusts the ratio of Mexicans to Asians by shifting us from a family based system to a skills based system.
2. It reduces the number of legal immigrants.
As Douthat points out, it is possible to do #1 without doing #2. That would give us more Asians who would pay more taxes and create more new businesses and would keep the Ponzi schemes of Social Security and Medicare solvent for a longer period of time.
LikeLike
The best and saddest part of this article is reading about how the bright young conservatives reacted to seeing the videos of Ronald Reagan and Robert George. Today they are generally only exposed to lobotomized versions of such leaders.
LikeLike
Constitution or not, as the US becomes more urbanized, something will have to give. An amendment is always possible, urban states will endorsed the states rights philosophy, or ….
Canada has had an immigration point system for year but also has a family reunification track and refugee track along with the point system. A point system is an excellent idea but shouldn’t come at the expense of family reunification.
LikeLike
This is a thought-provoking piece in the American Conservative that I missed a couple of weeks ago. Although Christians will never go ‘on strike’ like a soulless Rand character, still, our country does not at all appreciate the many benefits directly provided by unselfish Christian service.
LikeLike
Debra, I am very familiar with Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian and Catholic hospitals in our area. None are subsidized to any significant extent by their respective churches. All make their income primarily from insurance payments, Medicare and Medicaid. A very few patients pay for their own care. It is not the churches that are paying for the care of Democrats, Trumpkins and the elderly. It is that ever shrinking group of taxpayers.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The economics of those “non-profit” religious hospitals:
http://www.arbiternews.com/2014/04/08/why-nonprofits-are-the-most-profitable-hospitals-in-the-us/
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The Cult Leader was not happy with the inclusion of Pence in the NYT article posted @6:40.
Pence is forced to recite fifty “Hail Trumps” as penance.
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