RealCurrents

I’ve been intending to write something here about the upcoming presidential election. I can’t help but notice how many folks over 35 are really frustrated with their choices this time. The United States is desperately in need of strong, conservative leadership, yet the Republican Party seems about as bankrupt of ideas as the mortgage lenders are of money.

It’s pointless to try to record all my thoughts here, it would go far too long. Let me just state the obvious, the Republican Party has gone terribly astray, to the point that it’s hardly recognizable as a party for true conservatives, and nowhere is this most apparent than in the recent campaign strategy of the McCain-Palin camp. True leadership brings creativity to bear on difficult problems, getting people to work together in innovative ways to solve them. I’ve written a little about the need for such creativity in the pro-life movement, for example.

Sadly, the Republican Party, at least at the national level, instead keeps retreating to worn-out slogans that stifle real discussion of the serious problems we face. This isn’t any news to liberal Democrats or even independents. Rather, the point I’m trying to make is that it’s not working with Republican voters either, yet the Republican leadership remains so frustratingly out of touch, unable to grasp that THEY are going to have to hold themselves to a higher standard, or else the Party itself is in danger of collapsing. Let me just repeat the comment I left earlier today on Carmen Van Kerckhove’s blog Racialicious, in response to “An Open Letter to White Voters“:

Hi Carmen, perhaps you will find my perspective interesting. Whites are such a huge voting block that it’s difficult to generalize, but I will say that as far as Republican demographics go, I should be right in the middle of their voter bloc. I’m a WASP from Texas who has voted a straight Republican ticket several times, & a Christian conservative.

Nevertheless, I’m very unhappy with the Republican congress, in particular, and was never very enthusiastic about voting for McCain, either. The Palin choice is kind of a wash, in my view, she has a lot of qualities I admire, but at the same time doesn’t seem ready to fill McCain’s shoes if something happened to him.

I had just about convinced myself to go ahead and vote for McCain-Palin before they started what’s been about a month of the most bone-headed campaigning I can remember. First they kept Palin off-limits from interviews for the most part (hardly a vote of confidence), then they started the ridiculous attacks on Obama that just seem to keep getting worse.

It’s disturbing to think that Palin may end up destroying her reputation and a promising political future. McCain should have never hired the campaign “experts” that have ruined a campaign that was really starting to connect with voters. We’ve all seen the worst of Republican rhetoric over and over in recent years, and I’m as tired of it as anyone. BTW, it really turns me off when they say “Barack *Hussein* Obama”, as if that’s supposed to imply something. THAT seems pretty racist to me, anyway.

Yes, it’s an insult to all voters to think this sort of campaigning will sway opinion. Barack Obama’s voting record is far too liberal for me to support him, but now I’m really having second thoughts about voting for McCain as well.

It’s sad to see the Republican Party basically falling apart from a lack of leadership. A true leader would never allow that kind of stuff to happen. The only slight hope Republicans have in capturing the White House is if Palin finally says enough, gives the McCain folks an earful, and strikes out on a different course. America is starving for leadership. Can’t any of these “experts” see it obviously isn’t working?!!

As long as the Republican Party sends folks to Washington who then start acting more or less like everyone else in D.C. politics-as-usual, Republicans will continue to fail at being a conservative influence. We need a Republican Party - or some replacement for it - that has an activist bent throughout the ranks and understands it’s fighting a battle and that sacrifices must be made. This is what all true leaders embody, and this is the only solution to America’s many problems: true leadership.

Congressman John Culberson, from Bill Archer’s (and George H.W. Bush’s) old District 7 in Houston, is getting a bit of a backlash for daring to say something critical of NASA. Here’s the comments page from yesterday’s Houston Chronicle article, Culberson weighing legislation for NASA overhaul.

Now Culberson has gotten a reputation as one of the most tech-savvy Congressmen, which seems well-deserved. In May, he did a live video, using his cell phone and the Qik service, of the Mars Phoenix landing from JPL. Culberson’s enthusiasm for space, science and discovery is obvious there. He’s also very active on the fast-growing Twitter social network (@johnculberson), to the point that last week he became embroiled in a flap with Democrat congressional leaders over proposed rule changes that would severely restrict congressional internet video and blog posts.

Asking a question like “What’s wrong with NASA?” is so complex that a long answer is probably of little practical usefulness. I will say that it was a little disturbing how quickly folks who obviously knew far less about NASA than Culberson, including some politicians, turned on him as if he’d blasphemed or something. It’s also frustrating how many immediately viewed this as some sort of attack on the personal integrity of NASA employees.

As someone who once worked, long ago, both for NASA and a contractor, these sorts of arguments seem pretty much pointless. Let me just repeat what I wrote at the Chronicle page:

This has nothing to do with whether NASA has good employees or not. Of course there are many very motivated and dedicated folks at NASA and among the contractors. The real question is whether they’re being used effectively.

Rep. Culberson is right in certain respects. NASA has made great strides in many areas, but two areas, manned spaceflight and propulsion technology, are greatly lagging. We need a concerted effort in advanced propulsion because this drives everything else, and we desperately need strong leadership for a sustained manned spaceflight program.

As far as NASA taking credit for a “growing commercial space industry”, that’s ridiculous. Maybe the agency is finally seeing the light about commercial space, but it’s visionary entrepreneurs and private investors who have long been the driving force.

As to how we should invest funds to best create a vigorous manned space program, I wrote about the basic technical strategy here on my blog AeroGo. Congressmen, responsible for determining NASA’s budget and priorities, at least need to understand the root problem behind our frustrating lack of progress in manned spaceflight, which I noted in this discussion of SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan’s criticisms of NASA:

Because its R&D isn’t properly divided between technology development and operations, NASA remains prone to starving technology development whenever funds are tight (i.e. nearly always), which is much of the root problem. I suspect this is a lot of what is upsetting to Rutan about the program, “that you are not going to learn anything new here that is useful for you to go on to the other moons.”

The reality of NASA budgeting over the last 30 years or more has been that of operational manned space projects - Shuttle and ISS - crowding out most everything else, which leads to a very risk-averse R&D environment where breakthroughs are unlikely to occur

NASA will never be a perfectly efficient organization, but it still could accomplish a lot more if its budgeting were realigned to reflect the strategy needed to make steady progress. Manned flight operations cannot be allowed to crowd out space technology research, especially propulsion, anymore than they can be allowed to displace space probes, space science, or aeronautics research.

Because manned spaceflight is so expensive, however, the reality is that it will end up crowding out the others unless Congress imposes budgetary guidelines to protect these other areas that provide so much technological return on investment. Rep. Culberson is right in calling for an overhaul of NASA, but the budgeting process is key. Even without multi-year appropriations, a lot can be accomplished just by making sure NASA isn’t eating its own seed corn, particularly in the area of space technology R&D.

I was reading Jessica Mah’s post on how a lot of her high-school and college-age friends are really scared about global warming. Here in the U.S., it’s often reported that folks in other countries are more concerned than the average American, but little attention has been given to how the issue is impacting younger Americans.

It occurred to me that they need a little perspective on this. I grew up in the 1970s, and for those of us Americans who went through this period when the U.S. was in a severe technophobic angst, and there were constant pronouncements about all the terrible things that were going to happen, I suppose we’re just not so quick to be convinced the world is coming to an end every time scientists start preaching doom and gloom.

This was a very long list of crises that 1960s-70s experts insisted were soon to befall us, most of which I’ve probably (thankfully) forgotten, but which included such calamities as pollution, endangered species, population, overcrowded skies, the San Andreas and yes, even a looming ice age. I guess being terrified of nuclear armageddon just wasn’t enough anymore. The funny thing was, very few of these scientists were talking about an energy crisis.

Of course, even the “energy crisis” didn’t last long, once investors started pouring hundreds of billions into oil, which was $35 when I got out of high school but less than $10 when I got out of college. Jessica titled her post “Scared of Global Warming? Bring in the entrepreneurs!” and so yes, I think she’s right that entrepreneurs and the free market are a lot of the answer to global warming.

In general, though, I think we ought to stop and notice something. It sure seems to me that scientists can get into a negative funk about stuff, and end up focussing too much on the problems rather than the solutions. In fact, I can’t help wondering if it’s sort of the same dynamic as with investment newsletters - negativity and fear apparently sell a lot more newsletters, and a crisis may, sadly, be the only thing that will finally garner a research project any funding.

Now, this is certainly not all the scientists’ fault, nor is the business world off the hook. Just look at the American car industry, one of the most pitiful examples of research budgeting in modern history. Perhaps GM, Ford and Chrysler may be excused for being caught unprepared on fuel economy in the early 70s, since they were already struggling with new emissions restrictions. On the other hand, here we are again thirty years later and, sadly, it seems that only the recent combination of high oil prices, a dropping dollar, and concerns over carbon emissions was finally enough to get them serious again about improving fuel economy.

Amidst all the prognostications, it’s still not clear how global warming is going to play out. Besides the many questions of specific effects in specific places, there’s at least three basic questions involved. First is the question of how fast temperatures will go up. Second, how much will they rise long-term (or is it a runaway increase with no end in sight)? Third, if temperatures can be stabilized, will (can?) they then head back down?

We hear virtually nothing of potentially beneficial effects, but clearly there’s going to be some winners among the many losers from effects of global warming. Interestingly, so far the Russians seem to be the only ones thinking ahead about any positive outcomes from it. As Jessica suggests, entrepreneurs ought to be also. Again, though, we must keep a proper perspective - a long-term perspective.

While there’s a lot we don’t know, we can say that at least for practical purposes, whatever we can do will take place over decades. Realistically, it’s far too late to do anything about changes that may take place within the next decade or so. In other words, whatever research and changes - technological or political - that are to be made must be done consistently over a decades-long time frame.

This is, for example, why I strongly disagree with the basic Kyoto (Treaty) framework. Already China is producing as much carbon emissions as the U.S., and will likely continue to increase. Kyoto might be effective in reducing the emissions of Western industrialized nations, but given these reductions and the continued growth of China, India and other large industrializing countries, within a few years this extremely costly plan will prove ineffective in reducing the bulk of emissions.

We’ve heard from the scientists on global warming, but have yet to hear from the engineers, who are going to be the folks who have to make reductions in carbon emissions actually happen. We need to think about cost/benefit ratios. We also need to think about sustaining research investments over decades, which as the history of NASA indicates, is awfully difficult to do when you start out with crash-program type overbudgeting.

I think it’s a good bet that a lot of these new technologies are going to come from both big American businesses (such as Boeing with its new 787) and American entrepreneurs. This realization may not play well overseas, but any approach such as Kyoto that hobbles the American economy is going to be counterproductive.

Like it or not, the U.S. is still a (if not the) major innovation engine in the world. Companies in Silicon Valley (1, 2, 3) and elsewhere in the U.S. are working on hundreds of different technologies, everything from emission controls to cheap solar to electric cars to wind power and so on. Here in Texas, it’s become common to see the giant parts of wind turbines rolling down the highway on their way west, where hundreds are being put up.

We must remember that innovation, not political decrees, is the only way to solve the problems from global warming, and while we’re at it, let’s not forget to also think about taking advantage of the benefits.

With all the criticism of George W. Bush and Republicans in general, I think we need to sort out a few basic aspects of our current mess so we can then, hopefully, make intelligent changes.

In my view, Republicans (in which I include myself, since I generally vote that way) have two basic problems:

1. Bush’s administration has been hijacked by war-hawk NeoCons, the first evidence of which appeared to be his picking Dick Cheney (seemingly out of nowhere, considering Wyoming isn’t a big state) to be his running mate.

As a result, early philosophical drivers of Bush policy, such as Marvin Olasky’s notion of “compassionate conservatism“, a foreign policy that refrained from “nation building”, and in general a more limited federal government, gradually gave in to the NeoCon urge to use power whenever possible, wherever possible.

Of course, the dam broke after 9/11, an event which may well have been given too much import in re-shaping U.S. foreign and domestic policy. In any case, the war-hawk NeoCons were firmly behind the wheel after that, and within a year were openly maneuvering to invade Iraq.

2. The near-complete failure of the rest of Republicans to make a serious effort to reclaim their party from the war-hawk NeoCons.

As I wrote before, despite Bush’s obvious failings, I put more blame on the Congress, for largely abdicating its responsibilities: “the Republican Congress … has failed to fulfill two of its primary duties: providing a check on the Executive Branch and controlling spending.”

So, two basic problems: the NeoCon takeover of the Bush administration, and the failure of the rest of us Republicans to counter it. With these in mind, it’s time for someone to finally state what’s plainly obvious, at least to any non-NeoCon in the Republican camp:

War-hawk NeoConservatives do NOT represent the views of all or anywhere near a majority of Republicans, nor are they legitimate heirs of Ronald Reagan’s legacy.

Through most of my teen years, I would hear Ronald Reagan in the morning, giving his radio address outlining his views, and no one’s going to convince me that his vision of personal responsibility and freedom, with limited government, has anything in common with the imperialist, police-state policies promoted by the war-hawk NeoCons.

The Republicans lost control of Congress for the simple reason that they failed to do their job. They completely failed to control spending, they failed to rein in government, and one by one those opposed to the invasion of Iraq knuckled under, I guess swayed by the argument, “We’re in a ‘war on terror‘, you just have to trust us.” Well, it’s amazing that the Bush administration still seems to be trying to use that argument. It shows how out of touch they really are.

As far as Bush’s failings go, I think Lee Iacocca hits the nail on the head in his new book, Where Have All the Leaders Gone?. Iacocca gives 9 “C’s” of leadership, and notes that Bush dismally fails on the very first one: Curiosity.

George W. Bush has a lot of good, even great, qualities, and I’m sure most Republicans, including myself, want to continue supporting him, but he has GOT to develop both a much greater interest in what is going on, and multiple alternative channels of information. As someone once said, a leader must use the chain of command to issue orders, but can NEVER depend on the chain of command for information.

As for other Republican politicians and candidates, I hope they will not abandon Bush, but will finally begin to demand accountability (and fiscal responsibility) from his administration.

Obviously, the folks Republicans DO need to be abandoning, and driving from the party, are the war-hawk NeoCons, who haven’t got a clue what terms like “limited government”, “Constitution”, “separation of powers”, and “conservative” really mean.

Sadly, if this mess continues much longer, us conservatives will have to come up with a new name for ourselves, lest people think we’re in favor of torture, abolishing the Geneva Convention, pre-emptive war, and all the other nonsense (evil) that’s been foisted upon us by these “Neo-Conservatives”, who seem to think the solution to every problem is the exercise of more government power.

Raymond’s lament about how CNN has degenerated into the “Celebrity News Network” got me thinking about media and journalism again. I realize how important the media folks are, how much they influence the conversation, and I know it’s essential to keep pushing for improvements in that industry. I, for one, am certainly a fairly dissatisfied customer.

Raymond’s complaint brought up at least two things that particularly annoy me about the media:

1. Journalists seem to be really BAD at ever covering stuff that would actually be useful to know about. We hear about disasters all over the world and, of course, whatever mess (or island resort) Paris Hilton may be in at the moment. Nevertheless, there’s all kinds of practical stuff that we hardly ever hear about. I wrote about one such example, changes in credit card minimum payment rules, back in 2005.

I encountered another example this afternoon, when I was picking up one of my kids from work, and the subject of the minimum wage hike came up. He was wondering when the first increase would go into effect and how much it would be (i.e. whether he’d get a raise). I really don’t know. I think it’s sometime next winter, but I guess information like that is just too practical for the media to bother with.

There’s a lot of examples like that, of missed opportunities to be helpful, across most all the media, and I’ll try to point out more in the future (see the Journalism category).

2. It used to be there were 3 TV networks, only AM radio, etc., but now that we’ve got a zillion channels, they STILL can’t seem to focus on a specific topic. In other words, an awful lot of media channels are all chasing the entire market, rather than specializing.

CNN isn’t the only channel that’s lost its focus, but what’s more frustrating is that with so many more channels available (and so many owned by major media players), they still won’t specialize.

Radio provides perhaps the best test case, at least here in the Houston area, where we still don’t seem to have a dedicated news station, even though ClearChannel has bought several of the top AM stations. In fact, it’s gotten worse, as long-dominant KTRH 740AM lost a lot of its news coverage (and apparently its staff) after the 2004 election, and is just a shell of its former self.

Why can’t a huge media company like ClearChannel have at least one 24 hour news station in a big market like Houston? The obvious answer is they think they can make more money by changing formats all day long, from morning news to Rush Limbaugh to local talk to sports to UFOs, etc. That may work for them, but the longer this goes on, the more I just lose interest.

I wrote recently on All Things about how most of society STILL isn’t taking information overload seriously, and the major media are prime culprits. It’s not just broadcast media, either. It never ceases to amaze me, for example, how many ads I get for print magazines. Don’t they realize I’ve already got a pile of magazines I can never find time to read?

For years Americans have seemed to be relentless consumers of more and more media output, whether TV shows or sporting events or newspapers, books, etc., but I can’t help but think we’re nearing a limit, and that the winners in the media are going to be the ones who help us to find the right information, and package it for us in easy-to-swallow bites.

Google is perhaps the best example of this currently, of a business that helps us to overcome information overload, to cut a swath through the jungle to just what we’re looking for. In other words, Google is actually helpful, and they’ve been richly rewarded for it.

What I’d like to see are broadcast channels that are actually oriented toward my needs, to where my needs are placed first, and advertising comes second. This will seem ridiculous to traditional media types, but in my view, there’s an incredible amount of media out there, and I’ll just go somewhere else. Who knows, maybe I’ll get my weather updates from Twitter before long. After all, I can’t hardly find them on KTRH anymore.

First of all, in case anyone’s looking for it, here’s the official details on the IRS’ reasons for making April 17th the national deadline for filing your personal income taxes this year. It’s certainly also a good time to be thinking about how we could improve the system, something we all agree needs to be done, but can’t seem to agree how.

Of course, when you really get down to details, I’m not sure any of us quite knows quite what kind of tax system we’d prefer, but there are some basic qualities we could probably agree on. We need a system that no longer penalizes American business competitiveness, we need a simpler system (need I say more?), and we need a system that encourages - or at least doesn’t penalize - savings and various forms of investment and capital formation.

While a lot of conservatives might not agree on this last point, I think we also need a system that is modestly progressive, i.e. that gives a break to the poorest members of society. Even if you don’t agree with this philosophically, there is certainly a public interest in seeing these folks succeed financially, rather than linger on welfare rolls.

I don’t know all the specifics of the FairTax Plan, but this morning Houston City Councilman Michael Berry had Americans for Fair Taxation’s David C. Polyansky on, discussing this proposal. Here’s a summary taken from their website:

“The FairTax plan is a comprehensive proposal that replaces all federal income and payroll based taxes with an integrated approach including a progressive national retail sales tax, a prebate to ensure no American pays federal taxes on spending up to the poverty level, dollar-for-dollar federal revenue neutrality, and, through companion legislation, the repeal of the 16th Amendment.

The FairTax Act (HR 25, S 1025) is nonpartisan legislation. It abolishes all federal personal and corporate income taxes, gift, estate, capital gains, alternative minimum, Social Security, Medicare, and self-employment taxes and replaces them with one simple, visible, federal retail sales tax administered primarily by existing state sales tax authorities.

The FairTax taxes us only on what we choose to spend on new goods or services, not on what we earn. …”

In other words, the FairTax plan would be based on consumption, not income or savings, so if you made a lot of money but lived frugally, saving and investing what you made - and so creating jobs and wealth - then you wouldn’t get taxed that badly. On the other hand, if you wanted to live like the robber barons, then you’d pay considerable tax - 23% (plus state sales tax, I presume) - but you wouldn’t have to hire an army of accountants and lawyers, nor would you need to worry about estate taxes. That last part alone would probably save wealthy folks enough to where many would gladly pay the 23% on consumption in order to have more financial flexibility.

Of course, I don’t know how they come up with these numbers, but that 23% would apparently include all Social Security and Medicare taxes, and since it’s a straight number, it would be easy to predict the tax impact of any transaction and, like sales taxes, the amount would apparently only be levied on the final purchase, so there wouldn’t be a bunch of “built-in” taxes that add to the cost of goods. While the combined federal and state tax would be about 30%, twice the European VAT, if it had a downward impact on inflation - and interest rates - it might prove a bargain for these reasons as well, without having the regressive characteristics for which value-added taxes have been criticized.

The FairTax Plan, which currently has about 60 mostly Republican co-sponsors in Congress, including Texas Sen. John Cornyn, is reportedly most strongly opposed by Washington lobbyists and some Congressmen in powerful committees, who would lose a lot of influence were it to pass. Perhaps this is the best reason of all for supporting it.

The FairTax would basically be a 23% federal sales tax on everything, that would be balanced by a “prebate” that would rebate the tax burden that would be paid by a family living at the poverty level. So as I understand it, you’d only be paying this consumption tax on purchases above the poverty level.

Moving to a consumption tax is key, because this would put our industries on a much more competitive basis with those of other countries. Right now, in Texas at least (I know some states are different), if you buy a $100,000 home, you have to pay property tax, on the order of 2.5%, every year on that home, which is made in America, of course. On the other hand, if you buy a $100,000 car imported from Germany, England, or wherever, you generally don’t have to pay this tax every year. But if you you buy a $100,000 aircraft made in Wichita, Kansas, you do!

Of course, this is property, not income tax, but it’s just one glaring example of how our system in some many subtle ways (double taxation of overseas earnings is another) rewards importers over domestic industries. A consumption tax would lower the effective cost of our goods overseas and make our manufacturing, agricultural, and other industries more competitive, while at the same time likely doing more to improve conservation of resources and protection of the environment than a lot of other measures would.

While folks are busy fretting about all the terrible things that might happen in Washington this year with a new Democrat-led Congress, Americans might need to keep a lot closer eye on their state and local politics as well. Is it just me, or does it seem that politicians are busier than usual proposing all kinds of odd-ball laws? I saw a report today that someone in New York was proposing a law banning listening to iPods while crossing the street! If legislators have this much time on their hands, they ought not meet so often.

Here in Texas, where the biennial legislative session is a notoriously short 140 days, this shouldn’t be a problem, yet I’m more concerned than usual this year. I must admit I don’t keep very close tabs on Texas state politics in Austin; the general news coverage is far from adequate and usually focusses on just a few bills. Back before the internet really caught on, there used to be an organization, the Texas Grassroots Coalition, run by Austin attorney/CPA Adrian van Zelfden, that did a great job of putting out information, especially during legislative sessions and before primaries. Perhaps nowadays with the many blogs there is something equivalent, but I have yet to discover it.

Despite the information gap, the maneuverings of the past few weeks have been enough to get the attention of even casual observers, whereas, I guess, even the astute were caught off guard by Governor Rick Perry’s draconian power grab last Friday, when he issued Executive Order RP65 mandating the HPV vaccination of all 11-12 year-old girls in the state.

There are so many things wrong with both the scientific/medical and political aspects of Perry’s action that I will leave this to others, or at least to another post. David Watts, Jr. has started a helpful blog, Overturn RP65, to track developments regarding this issue.

Besides that mess and its threats to our civil liberties, not to mention our constitutional form of government, there’s the general budget situation in Austin, and the huge surplus, which Perry, among others, hopes to spend, but ought to by and large be handed back to the citizens of Texas through tax cuts. This will be a huge fight, I’m sure, because all these billions of taxpayer dollars floating around are just asking for trouble.

In light of the very favorable budget situation, it seems awfully curious to me that Republicans are so busy trying to raise extra cash. Perry’s idea of selling the lottery, unsettling at best even for those of us who oppose state-sponsored gambling, is indefensible with so much surplus already floating around. As ususal there’s various efforts, that I haven’t managed to keep track of, to legalize additional gambling and “use the money for education”, a phrase which some political hack might as well convert to newspeak since we hear it so constantly.

Besides these, there’s the Republicans’ push to privatize new state highway construction. This is one of those ideas that sounds “conservative”, but really is just a different can of worms. Texas has had one of the best highway systems for a long time, especially considering the size of this state, and more public toll roads may well be worthwhile. Private toll roads, on the other hand, would turn the economics of highway construction and repair - and property taxation - on its head. Foreign-owned private toll roads, which have limited exits and which don’t convert to free roads once paid off, are a very bad idea.

In general, it seems state Republicans are increasingly looking for assets to sell, or otherwise mesmerized by big projects to fund, which is making a mockery of the term “conservative”. Since just about every candidate running in Texas these days boasts about how they are a conservative, a little fiscal discipline would sure be refreshing.

With their unbridled willingness to spend money and start new projects, the rush to start war in Iraq, and potentially elsewhere, even while threatening the rest of the world, I can’t help but wonder if many Republican office-holders who call themselves such even understand the meaning of the term “conservative”.

Considering how upset a lot of folks are over RP65, and the disappointments with the free-spending Republican Congress of recent years, I don’t know how much more of this Texas conservatives can take. If our legislators in Austin don’t think real hard before spending Texans’ money, they may well ensure that the 2008 primary gets very interesting.

I recently quoted, in AeroGo of all places, from Eugene Peterson’s Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. Peterson’s willingness to take (as scientists, engineers and environmentalists do) a serious interest in creation is one reason this is an important book. It’s unfortunately rare to find a book that seriously grapples with basic elements of our world such as time, place, animals, etc., from a Trinitarian theological perspective (though James Jordan’s Through New Eyes and Gary North’s Is the World Running Down? are worthy examples).

In doing so, Peterson considers a lot of issues fundamental to the Christian life. His 350pp book is especially strong in addressing the need for a proper balance between theology/scripture and practical living, and I bet a lot of folks will be surprised to read his treatment of some things.

We’ve been reading it in my Sunday school class, and I’ve really liked it, yet still have a long way to go to finish it. Consequently, I can’t definitely recommend it in total yet (I’ve been disappointed quite a few times by books that started out strong diagnosing a problem, and then fell off a cliff trying to prescribe a solution). Nevertheless, the book deals with a lot of the same issues I’ve looked at for years in parts of my research. In essence, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places is taking direct aim at many of the key subjects the Church has either studiously avoided or never seriously considered, but really needs to be grappling with in an age increasingly fascinated with both technology and spirituality.

Let me just give a couple of quick examples of this. The first is escapist premillennial/pre-trib/rapture eschatology (whatever you want to call it). Rather than get into an endless debate about the books of Daniel and Revelation, Peterson simply shows (pp. 65-71), from Genesis 1, how the trite “waiting for Jesus to come back” is really a failure to respond in gratefulness to God’s gift of time to us.

Second, regarding creation, one of the most common questions I hear folks ask about spiritual things is “What happens to animals when they die?” It’s disturbing then, considering that God started the Bible talking about His creation, how little the Church has seemed interested in so much of it (and so, at times, of science). Peterson doesn’t address, specifically, this question, but does consider (pp. 77-82) some of the basic differences between people and animals, disctinctions which, if understood, would cast the human evolution debate in a whole different light.

To sum up, regardless of potential faults, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places may well prove to be one of the books that sets the “paradigm” for Christian thinking in the 21st century. And, yes, we certainly need a paradigm shift - a la Thomas Kuhn - to clear out a lot of the accumulated debris that’s impeded the Church’s thinking, and positive impact on our world, for well over a century.

Today is Election Day in the U.S., and as good a time as any I guess to comment on the odd state of politics in this country. This morning I found myself trying to motivate my 18 year old daughter to vote. Obviously I’d like her to listen to my advice on how to vote, but I’m really more concerned that she learns both to value the right to vote and to take her duty to participate in the process seriously.

She says that she really isn’t interested in politics and so doesn’t know who to vote for. I can’t really blame her; the fact is, politics attracts a lot of goofball or even downright nasty people.

And that’s really the point that began crystallizing in my thoughts this morning as we talked. As voters, our main goal must be to play defense, not offense, to keep the really bad folks from gaining the reins of power.

Every generation seems to produce a new crop of political idealists who think they can solve a bunch of the world’s problems through politics. Of course, in my generation this was the “Christian right”, which swept Ronald Reagan into the White House in 1980. A lot of these folks got disillusioned early on, when Reagan appointed moderates or liberals to many posts (such as the Dept. of Education, which he had vowed to abolish) and kept a hands-off management style that let them work against his stated agenda.

My church seems to have a fair assortment of folks like this, some of whom apparently don’t even vote any more. I guess anyone could understand their disillusionment with politics, but I think we need to grasp that it’s much more important to vote against a bad candidate than to find a good one to vote for. Nearly all candidates will disappoint, but then we shouldn’t be expecting so much out of government to begin with.

When I was a child, it seemed that whenever someone was asked who they were voting for, the standard answer was “for the lesser of two evils”. I never much liked that answer, but everyone understood that was pretty much the way it was with politics.

As David Kuo’s recent book Tempting Faith (of which I’ve read only a little) warns, I think we need to move away from the idealism and get back to that more realist sort of mindset about politics.

Actually, if you look at the way the recent national elections have turned out, the Republicans’ closing the gap in the weeks leading up to the vote can probably be explained by this way of thinking. Before the election, people are dissatisfied and generally unhappy a lot of times with the folks in power, because they usually are disappointed in various ways. However, as Election Day nears, they start thinking more in terms of whether the alternative would be any better, and if the other party’s candidate(s) look worse, will move back toward the incumbents.

In 2004, I think the courts were the issue that really drove a lot of conservatives and moderates to end up voting Republican, as concerns have continued to grow that the judiciary is getting out of control. Osama’s message just weeks before the election also likely encouraged a lot of folks to vote for Bush. This year, while Osama has, notably, remained very quiet, the driving issue for a lot of folks, the perceived “greater of two evils”, is keeping very liberal Democrats from gaining control of Congress and its committees.

John Kerry’s recent remarks have added fuel to the fire by rekindling concerns of Democrats being weak on defense and unsupportive of the military.

It’s clear that a lot of folks are upset with the Republicans’ leadership of recent years. I guess most liberals and moderates are mainly upset with Bush, who certainly hasn’t listened enough, but I think most conservative Republicans are almost as upset with the Republican Congress, which has failed to fulfill two of its primary duties: providing a check on the Executive Branch and controlling spending.

In my view, the bigger failure has been with Congress, not Bush, because Congress has largely abdicated its responsibilities. This is why we haven’t, as I’ve noted before, had a real debate about our strategy and long-term goals with Iraq and the war on terror. The Republicans in Congress have pretty much given in to Bush on foreign policy, when it’s clearly not his area of strength. At the same time, spending has been out of control.

Nevertheless, while it’s clear a lot of conservative Republicans are fed up, the Democrats have clung so far to the left that the thought of their running things is genuinely scary to a lot of folks.

The problem seems to be that the Democrats remain beholden to the most liberal part of their base, so that they refuse to consider, for example, even quite modest restrictions on abortion. They seem unwilling to sincerely acknowledge even the most general, widely-held concerns about the erosion of moral values.

In what is an amazing revelation if true, Kuo asserts in his book that Tipper Gore, after championing one of the few family values efforts the Democrats have mustered, had to go to Hollywood, when her husband was nominated for President, and repent for her (bi-partisan) campaign to put warning labels on music whose lyrics advocate killing cops and other nasty stuff.

If this is the real Democratic Party, one that must kow-tow to the most extreme members of NARAL or the Hollywood elite, then they really don’t deserve to run this country. Maybe this isn’t the case, but the Democrats certainly could do a lot better job of making themselves a mainstream party, because there’s a lot of us, no matter how frustrated we are with the Republicans, who really don’t have anyone else to vote for, but certainly have a clear notion of who we’re voting against.

I recently ran across a popular discussion of Rick Warren’s concept of a “purpose-driven church” on Tim Challies’ blog, which has prompted me to finally get around to posting some basic background information on this subject that most folks may not have.

I don’t by any means intend for this to be a detailed examination of the subject, but before Christians get to beating each other up over it, which is unfortunately what often happens, we need to know that this whole issue of the tension between “purpose” and “comfort” is very basic to management of any organization, not just churches.

Way back in 1973, Ralph Winter (who co-founded the U.S. Center for World Mission) wrote an article, “The Two Structures of God’s Redemptive Mission” that describes this basic dilemma. For those who have taken the Center’s Perspectives course, the article is also in Perspectives on the World Christian Movement (Ch. 19 in the earlier edition).

The basic tension is between two distinct purposes for the local church, what Winter calls “sodalities” and “modalities”. Sodalities are mission/purpose-driven to accomplish ministry to the outside world. Modalities serve/minister to the members of the organization itself.

This is really a very basic tension that exists in all organizations, not just churches. Andy Grove, co-founder of Intel, discusses this at length in his book High Output Management (Ch. 8). He calls the two types “mission-oriented” and “functional”, and links them to the well-known organizational tension between decentralization (independent project-oriented groups on a mission) and centralization (bureaucratic controls set up to serve the organization itself).

Regarding the basic, inevitable nature of this tension, Grove asserts, “Alfred Sloan summed up decades of experience at General Motors by saying, ‘Good management rests on a reconciliation of centralization and decentralization.’” Grove calls this desired result “a balancing act”.

And indeed it is. Before churches go about splitting over “purpose”, Christians need to understand that both points of view are legitimate. The local church is to minister to congregants, as with the widows in Acts 6, and it is also to minister to the outside community, even to the point of sending missionaries as the church at Antioch did (Acts 13).

Nevertheless, we also need to heed the warnings of many with management experience, that left to their own devices, organizations naturally tend to degenerate into bureaucracy and thus an excessive focus on internal ministry, which is more comfortable than external ministry. Legendary GE Chairman Jack Welch has argued forcefully against bureaucracy, saying it is something that must be constantly battled in order for a company to grow and remain profitable.

Of course, unlike a business, a local church doesn’t exist merely to achieve an external goal such as making a profit. It must care for and disciple its members. Indeed, a failure to emphasize discipleship has been one of the problems with many evangelical growth strategies.

Yet it seems clear that, outside times of major persecution, growth should be a normal outcome of a healthy local church (Acts 2:47). As someone has asserted, perhaps the best measure of any successful entity is that it reproduces capable “offspring” after itself. If this is the case, then the proper measure of a successful church is not the size of the congregation, but whether it is producing other local churches, whether across town, perhaps in a depressed area needing help, or in another country (what is traditionally considered to be a “missions” activity).

The Wall Street Journal article cited in Challies’ post (”Veneration Gap: A Popular Strategy For Church Growth Splits Congregants” by Suzanne Sataline), quotes a “purpose-driven” minister as saying that occasionally leaders have to “play hardball” when certain congregants don’t catch their vision for growth or ministry. Perhaps this is the case, but I certainly hope it is the exception.

Leaders must realize that developing a vision for external ministry, whether evangelization of the immediate community, ministry to local needy, or world missions, is going to be a major paradigm shift for most American Christians.

In other words, this is a necessary change in outlook for most churches, but it’s going to take a long time. In moving back along the continuum from modality/internal ministry toward sodality/external ministry, church leaders should bear in mind that it would probably be easier just to move to the other extreme (even though it might well split a church) than to actually move gradually toward a proper balance, educating members and communicating a vision over time.

Yet this must be the goal for a healthy church - a proper balancing of attention toward both internal needs and discipleship and external needs and evangelization.