The voters in the state of Oklahoma earlier this month approved a measure that prevents state courts from considering international law or Sharia (Islamic) law. The measure was mostly in reaction to the New Jersey case of a women that sought a restraining order against her abusive husband and lost (but later won on appeal) because her husband’s beliefs (supported by Sharia law) gave him the right to force himself on his wife.
The Oklahoma measure (State Question 755) was put on hold yesterday by a Federal judge who thinks the ballot issue may be unconstitutional. It seems to core question to the judge is whether the specific reference to Sharia (and defining it within the question as being tied to the Quran and the Prophet Mohammed) is improperly singling out a religion.
I can’t even begin to pretend that I understand why anyone would think that Sharia law should ever be a consideration in a United States court. I’m not saying that to diminish the position (although I oppose it), I’m simply saying I fail to understand it and I wish I did.
Clearly we have had a history of granting exceptions to those whose religious beliefs run counter to societal demands through law. Most notably is that those who can make a case that using restricted drugs for religious purposes (even during Prohibition, there were exceptions provided for “alter wine”). Religious exemptions to child abuse laws (typically related to medical treatment or corporal punishment) are another example. Some exceptions in tax law have also existed to support religious work.
Contrary to the exceptions mentioned are polygamy, virgin sacrifice, mutilation and other practices that are not accepted in the United States despite their religious support. Most of these practices are just too abhorrent to rationalize.
As should be any form of rape or unprovoked violence.
To think that our system of Justice; that any individual’s rights to life, liberty and property; may be thwarted by claims of religious freedom is just mind-numbing.
The Oklahoma ballot issue may be flawed because it so specifies Sharia. And in the minds of many (or perhaps most), it should be unnecessary to say that only the laws of the United States and the relevant geographic or military jurisdiction(s) of any case should be applied by a court. The problem, as we have discussed before, is that judges have been making their own rules in some cases and the people see the need to solve this problem.
Despite the fact that much of our system of law and the specifics of acceptable behavior derive from a largely Judeo-Christian cultural and Biblical worldview, we do not allow reprehensible behaviors or punishments that go contrary to our law to be treated as acceptable even though they may exist in the Mosaic Law in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. We do not execute adulterers or witches. We do not allow indentured servitude. We don’t allow a newly married service member to take a year off from their military obligation.
And we don’t cut of the hand of a woman that fights dirty. See Deuteronomy 25:11-12.
We wouldn’t want the courts to consider these very Biblical edicts, and the same goes for Sharia. Equally unthinkable is that the laws of another nation may have similar influence on our courts.
And this is what Oklahomans seek to protect themselves from.
We certainly need the courts, and we need courts that will make good sound decisions, sometimes looking outside the simple application of the law to make a fair ruling. But rulings like the one in New Jersey, that just don’t make sense, are making me scratch my head and think, as the folks in Oklahoma apparently do, that the courts need some kind of constraints to ensure they carry out their mission within the context of the will of the people and not the will of outsiders.
So what should we do about it? My thinking right now is that a slightly more generalized version of the Oklahoma initiative (perhaps without mentioning Sharia by name) might be more likely to pass muster.
Hopefully the situation in Oklahoma will provide us with some lessons to help us solve this issue effectively across the nation. Until then, we’re probably in for a bumpy ride. Let’s hope that the courts at least get the people’s message for now.
Our grandchildren were over last weekend–two boys ages 5 and 3. At one point the 3-year-old was telling me about being disobedient and how Daddy had to give him a big spanking. Now I know my son and I’m sure that he was providing gentle discipline, but the point wasn’t lost and can be applied to last week’s election.
Much has been made of the Republican’s gains in the House and Senate, and their effective control of Congress. This was clearly a repudiation of the Obama, Reid, and Pelosi policies of economic stagnation. Make no mistake about it, this was about the economy. The Democrats insistence on spending taxpayer’s money ineffectively, squandering it, actually, passing huge and unpopular bills, and their complete lack of caring about the taxpayer and the cumulative effect on the economy led to their downfall.
Part of this is due to their arrogance. Part is due to the Democrats’ lack of understanding of how our economy works. America is and always has been a capitalist society. Government control and planning is an anethema. Our economy works best when businesses and individuals are confident and can make plans to invest, spend, hire and borrow with a degree of certainty. America has not had any level of confidence in over two years, since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. The Democrats, and President Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi specifically, have done everything they could to ensure a lack of confidence by ramming through legislation designed to further their agenda and in the process, scaring the living crap out of people. Hence the rise of the Tea Party, and the big spanking.
Everything the Democrats have done has suggested higher taxes or significantly additional costs and fees. First, they’ve managed to pass a “stimulus” bill that has to be paid for somehow, and that has failed to stimulate much. Second, they passed Obamacare that will raise the cost of doing business for everyone, and I mean everyone, and must be paid for with additional taxes. Third, they passed a “financial reform” bill that will raise the costs of banking and lending, with the net result of limiting access to credit. Finally, their failure to extend the Bush tax cuts raises everyone’s taxes, regardless of income, by a minimum of $2,000 next year. All of this money has to come from somewhere. And so people are nervous and nervous people do not spend money. Nervous businesses do not hire and invest in infrastructure and equipment. And the cumulative effect of all of this is a lack of revenue flowing into the US Treasury. You cannot have 9.6% unemployment and expect treasury tax revenues to increase. And this is why the Democrats got spanked.
Republican leadership now has to lead or they’ll get spanked. They need to undo the uncertainty and instill confidence in the electorate and business. This means revising all of the poor legislation that was passed the last two years, if not repealing it altogether. This is what they were elected to do. If they pass legislation and President Obama vetoes it, then in two years, the voters will have another chance to spank. And despite all of his rhetoric, I don’t believe that the President truly gets it. There is still an incredible lack of humility emanating from the White House. Even this week in Seoul, the President got spanked by the Europeans and Chinese, and he refuses to acknowledge his policies aren’t working; rather, his policies are ”misunderstood”.
On a separate but related topic, The Federal Reserve and Chairman Ben Bernanke has decided to print another $600 billion and buy back US Treasury securities in a process known as Quantitative Easing (QE). Flooding another $600 billion into the economy over the next six months is like pushing on a string. Until the government gets its fiscal act together, it won’t do anything other than increase the money supply with no increase in aggregate demand for goods and services. This money has to go somewhere, and investors will search for a place where they can get a reasonable rate of return. So, after the election, there was a rally in the stock and bond markets, but this week, stocks and bonds sold off, but commodities rallied–specifically oil, cotton, soybeans and gold. On Friday, even commodities weakened. The stock markets have generally rallied since September 1 because corporate earnings have been solid. But earnings are a result of sales, and in order for sales to increase, people have to want to risk spending the money, which brings us back to fiscal policies.
So the next month will determine whether or not the resurgent Republicans and spanked Democrats can and will work together. The amazing thing about our economy is that it hasn’t collapsed despite collosal mismanagement in our nation’s capitol. Stay tuned. Things are about to get very interesting.
In a lot of ways you wouldn’t need much of a crystal ball to see this coming: A Country over 13 trillion dollars in debt with a government either completely ineffectual or damaging in nearly all spheres except military, enacting massive expenditures passed against the majority opinion of its citizens, which gives rise to a movement that wants to stop spending money it doesn’t have and return their government to its Constitutionally relegated space. These people have been branded with a name: the Tea Party, which is weird because I have never been to a party where everyone is this mad.
Much has been said about this newly minted surge and much is known. Though you may not have needed it to see it coming, that crystal ball sure could come in handy when trying to envision how the Tea Party will attempt to pivot from being a movement to achieving movement. Being that mine seems to be broken about half the time I’ll just tell you that if I could write the script it would look something like this.
Never minding how sad it is a movement is needed for this, the beauty of this uprising is the underlying confidence that is implied by the movement. The confidence of the people in saying we can take care of ourselves. We, as Americans, can make decisions on a personal level to better ourselves and our Country while weathering the results. Let us keep the vast majority of our own money and we will be the stewards of our own future.
The next step is to have the fortitude to extend this confidence into the political proposals that will be forthcoming after the mid-term elections, when at a minimum Republicans will control the House, if not the Senate as well. Here is what I mean by this– the process for passing legislation in Washington is to argue for it by making grand proclamations for how some bill’s passage will control costs, provide this or that, or stop this or that. Once passed the game turns into one of managing expectations. When a bill is written never is there included benchmarks that need to be met for it to be continued, no rip-cord provisions stating that if certain measurable effects that have been promised do not materialize in a certain amount of time the bill is nullified or re-opened for debate. The reasons for this are obvious. First, when you pass bills upwards of 1,500 pages for a country of over 350 million people nobody knows what will really happen. Second, it flies in the face of political self-preservation by opening the door to, god forbid, being proven wrong.
A perfect example of this is the Obama administrations hollow promise that the Stimulus Bill would keep unemployment below 8%. One that while politically damaging does nothing to stop the economic consequences that its failure has brought. The point here being that if you are confident in your claim-put it in the bill. Include language that if the unemployment rate goes above 8% the spending is stopped outright or a vote on its continuance is triggered in the legislature. Since no sane person from either party would, in hind-sight, trade spending a trillion dollars for 9.7% unemployment we could have had the bill discontinued at a cost of $200-$300 billion, instead of spending it all and having the president simply change his argument to “well unemployment could be at 16%.â€
This is where the Tea Party movement and the candidates that it produces have a real chance to differentiate themselves from the weak- kneed slop that has been served up in recent memory by both parties in the economic realm. If the ideas are right and the desired results are indeed forthcoming, have the confidence to put it in writing. If the policies deliver you go from a small movement that champions a huge shift in the direction of the Country to a proven entity with the ability to actually get it done. In other words; Step up, Throw down, Win big, or Flame out. If you don’t think that this is a strategy that the American electorate would fully embrace, you haven’t looked around much lately.
We as Americans are ingrained, if not obsessed, with competition resulting in either winning or losing. We don’t watch American Idol and Survivor in embarrassingly large numbers for 12 weeks to be told all the singers are equally as good and that everyone gets to stay on the island and split the money. Americans are not rabid about sports so we can watch our teams play and discuss amongst ourselves who we thought was the better team that day. We don’t watch soccer, not just because well…its soccer, but because we can’t accept the concept of a tie, nor should we. There is not a doubt in my mind that Americans, especially the massive number of politically apathetic ones, would be interested and invigorated by a movement that had the courage to offer an agenda that says not only will we do x, y, and z (akin to the Contract With America), but that this agenda will then deliver x, y and z, and if it doesn’t we were wrong and will go away.
The perfect place to start would be in the areas of taxes and health care as these both can be impacted in the short term and have solid, near real-time measurables. The proposal for health care would look like this: offer tax breaks to the lower and middle classes while opening up the health insurance industry to nation-wide Capitalistic competition. If after a period of somewhere between 1 to 3 years prices on average have not gone down a certain percentage the bill is ended and the debate is re-opened.
In terms of taxes- the party would settle on a tax strategy, be it a flat tax, a consumption tax or just lowering the current progressive rate. Then a proposal would be offered that states- we will lower/reconfigure the way you pay taxes and at the end of a set period of time it will result in some combination(to be specified in the bill’s language)of higher GDP, a lower National debt, and more employment. If it does not then we return to prior policy and the debate is restarted.
Not only would this approach let potentially ineffective legislation be discontinued and give the American people a chance to clearly judge the success of our ideology, the real benefit is what could be achieved afterward. If these bills delivered on their promises the trust needed to tackle larger and longer-term problems would begin to be established. This bold approach could create the political capital and trust that is required to move forward with things like removing Federal money from education and privatizing or vastly reducing Social Security.
Near is the time that these Tea Party candidates will be running in and winning a sizeable number of general elections. With this will come the reality of actual bills that contain actual legislative language. This phase in which the Tea Party goes from the philosophical to the literal is the critical moment that will determine its ability to deliver. Though most involved won’t want to hear it, this is the point where the Tea Party inevitably, at least to a degree, will lose its “leaderless†status as legislative proposals have to be authored, co-authored, and submitted by actual Congressmen and Congresswomen. This is not necessarily something to be feared if the right people take up the task. The preceding thoughts are in a way a plea to these legislators to be bold and embrace the spirit of confidence inherent in the movement that will have placed them there. Conservatives have long been fond of saying that we win in the arena of ideas – soon will come both the time and opportunity to prove it.
Though this level of political risk is highly unorthodox it is most certainly American in spirit. From our founding, quite fittingly, to the very nature of Capitalism that we have thrived on for centuries we have craved competition, embraced the possible glory of winning, and never feared the possibility of losing. When the time comes, and it is coming soon, for the men and women we elect to put the pen to paper and attempt to realize the potential of this political movement I only hope that that this is the spirit that guides them. To them I say simply – Step up, Throw down, Win big, or Flame out.
Running with scissors, bungy-jumping, lion-training don’t hold a candle to these two items…
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Republicans appear to be doing well, very well, scary well. So what’s to be done about it? Republicans need to work harder, get more engaged, get more yard signs up, knock on more doors!
Why, you may ask, would I think that?
Because early poll successes:
Are deceiving. In Politics, scientific polling lacks integrity because there are so many factors and inconsistencies, including the fact that they reflect a point in time, which is not election day
Are open to interpretation. The complexities and meaning behind poll answers can be interpreted multiple ways… sometimes the answers mean something different than what we think.
Can lead to complacency. Accepting that your candidate is going to win hands down can lead to voter apathy and before you know it, everyone that said they were going to vote decides to stay home election day or just forgets to vote.
It’s great to feel good about these polls… I’m very enthused about our prospects here in Iowa. But polling can cause us to take our eye off the ball… we need to stay focused on the message, on getting it delivered to the people that need to hear it most, and make sure we get everyone out to vote come election day.
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Did you think that maybe ObamaCare wouldn’t impact you directly for a while? Think again.
New rules from the IRS issued earlier this month, based on the Affordable Care Act now require that those who pay for over-the-counter (OTC) medications (such as Claritan, Robitussin, etc.) FSAs or HRAs, beginning January 1, 2011, to get a prescription for these medications to get the reimbursements. Flexible Spending Account (FSAs) Health Reimbursement Accounts (HRAs) setup for medical expenses not normally covered by insurance, using untaxed dollars. On top of this, patients will have to submit the prescription information along with the receipt to their account program adminstration instead of using the more convenient (and appropriate) debit cards most of these accounts now provide.
It may seem like a small thing, but doctors don’t typically hand out prescriptions of any kind without a visit, which will cost the patient and/or their insurance provider. Add to that the new paperwork burden, and you’ve impacted many Americans enough that they will (rightfully so) choose to abandon the use of the untaxed (or pretaxed) dollars and instead reduce their FSA/HRA use (or eliminate it) and just pay for these medications with taxed dollars.
Yes this is for real, and yes I think it’s stupid. This is the result of just a small piece of the gargantuan legislation passed by a Congress bent on making us miserable. I’m convinced of that now. Give them 2 more years and they will find a way to ensure that the Government will simply pay for these medications (with an appropriate prescription) instead of just going back to a system that worked fine, therefore making us even more dependent on the government.
And the best part is, you can still use these accounts like you always did for any other medical supplies that don’t require a prescription. You will have to get a prescription to get a, frankly small, tax advantage.
Government savings, none… I can pretty much guarantee that the new taxes recovered will barely pay for the paper used to print this stupid bill. More likely we will see substantive costs go up, either in government or for insurance companies, to support this idiotic requirement.
Sometimes it just seems dangerous to get up in the morning.
The voters in the state of Oklahoma earlier this month approved a measure that prevents state courts from considering international law or Sharia (Islamic) law. The measure was mostly in reaction to the New Jersey case of a women that sought a restraining order against her abusive husband and lost (but later won on appeal) because her husband’s beliefs (supported by Sharia law) gave him the right to force himself on his wife.
