DUTCH TREAT- Cal Fox's Blog

Now President Obama appears to have "lost" New York Times liberal economic columnist Paul Krugman. Krugman, who enthusiastically supported the president's redistributionist and stimulus plans, has bowed to the reality that they are not working

Writing in U.S. News & World Report, publisher Mort Zuckerman takes the Krugman view a step further by calling the administration he once supported "The Most Fiscally Irresponsible Government in U.S. History."

An economy burdened down with debt because of too much government spending, a health care law that will add new and unknown burdens, expiring tax cuts that will take more money from the private sector for government to waste and abuse, and a stock market unsure and thus unable to fuel the economic engine to propel us out of this recession, is not a "summer of recovery," but a winter of discontent.

Banner Headline in our local paper this morning: "Home foreclosure woes persist", echoing a similiar headline in the Boston Globe.  The local article  continues with, "...despite the federal Making Home Affordable program designed to keep them in their homes."  

Mona Charen's column in the same paper is titled "Federal mortgage rescue ends up subsidizing failure."

"President Obama has a weakness for thinking in categories. For someone who provokes swoons among liberals for his great intellect, he has repeatedly evidenced an unsophisticated, one might even say simple-minded, view of the world: Workers good; bosses exploitative. Borrowers good; lenders bad. Patients good; insurance companies bad. Again and again, the president and his spokesmen have justified their expansions of government power as efforts to help those who "through no fault of their own" find themselves in difficulties.

Many politicians traffic in this kind rhetoric during campaigns, but Obama has institutionalized it in policy.  One of those reifications -- the Home Affordable Modification Program -- now stands revealed as a failure."  

Charen's on target analysis can be read here 

/MonaCharen/2010/08/27/obamas_manichean_world

I have written in other places about a cultural trend that is getting, I believe, far too little attention. It’s been termed the “celebrification” of culture – an awkward term, perhaps, but like “industrialization” and “bureaucratization,” it speaks to a broad and historical trend: the increasing centrality of celebrities to the culture.

Movie and television stars, professional athletes and musicians, business moguls and journalists, have captured our attention as never before. Joseph Epstein writes that “a received opinion about America in the early twenty-first century is that our culture values only two things: money and celebrity.” From this, celebrities have become our cultural commentators, charity spokespersons, role models, and political candidates. They have become the arbiters of taste, morality and public opinion. Richard Schickel, who has written for Time magazine since 1972, reflects, “No issue or idea in our culture can gain any traction with the general population unless it has celebrity names attached to it.”

Comments by James White on his blog today at  http://www.churchandculture.org

Could all this be said of today's Church Culture?

The Springfield School District (in which I live) has recently been awarded 19 million dollars from our Federal taxes to improve education here.  Most of the students of our City do not graduate from High School.  Most live below the poverty line.  Most of these children are Black or Hispanic.  Most of them live in single parent families. Most of them are illegitimate (70% of all Black children) and the males who helped produce them do not live in their homes. 

The new grant money, which follows millions more that have been given in recent years,  will keep Teachers employed a little longer and new programs will be developed to aide "Learning" and buildings will be upgraded.  All that, of course, is good.  I do not expect it will really change the education of most of the students having problems with "school".  Why?  The money is not going to deal with the five factors that are crucial-

"Two decades, five factors. Two decades have passed since Barton wrote "America's Smallest School: The Family." He has estimated that about 90 percent of the difference in schools' proficiencies can be explained by five factors: the number of days students are absent from school, the number of hours students spend watching television, the number of pages read for homework, the quantity and quality of reading material in the students' homes -- and, much the most important, the presence of two parents in the home. Public policies can have little purchase on these five, and least of all on the fifth."  

Please read the entire article by George Will- content/article/

"But outside the Evangelical world, “proselytizing” is indeed a bad word. Other Protestants and the secular media regard it as an expression of “fundamentalism”—an elastic term, which can mean anything religious one does not like, in this case a faith that is intolerant and aggressive. The politically correct of all or no religious persuasion associate it with ethnocentrism, cultural imperialism and colonialism.  Roman Catholics tend to be more cautious in condemning “proselytism”—after all, they practice it themselves, asserting as they do that theirs is the only true church—but the more progressive ones also shy away from outright conversion activities, preferring terms like “enculturation” (adapting Christianity to non-Western indigenous cultures rather than going at them head-on) and “Christian presence” (bearing witness not by overt preaching, but rather by quietly practicing the Christian virtues of compassion and charity). The most favored alternative to “proselytism” is “dialogue,” the non-confrontational, open-minded conversation with “the Other.”

Read the entire article by Peter Berger on my website  http://www.reformedliving.org/