• the top 0.1% of earners pay 17% of all federal income taxes
• the top 1% of earners pay 37% of all federal income taxes
• the top 5% of earners pay 57% of all federal income taxes...and that starts with a floor of just $137,000 adjusted gross income

As I sit back and listen to more and more evangelical Christians join the AGW bandwagon, I am moved to speak to them about their decision. On the scientific side there is still much to be learned about whether AGW even exists, as many climatologists are not convinced that any undue warming is even happening today, but the theological underpinnings of this for evangelicals is shaky at best.

While I understand that we are to be good stewards of the earth and all of creation, I flatly reject the notion that we should be joining forces with the environmental left in trying to stem the tide of AGW. There is no scriptural basis for the belief that man is powerful enough to destroy this creation of God, and in my view is borderline blasphemy. We are not, I repeat NOT, able to destroy this earth no matter what we do.

Many have searched the Scriptures and have hung their claims on the words of Revelation 7:3 which reads, “…Do not harm the earth, the sea, or the trees…” but that is totally divorced from the Scriptural context. This entire passage is actually the words of the angel that is about to seal the foreheads of the 144,000 from the tribes of Israel; it has absolutely nothing to do with man not harming the environment. In fact the Bible in several places makes clear that this earth is going to last until Jesus returns. Jesus is going to return to Israel, to the very place that he ascended to Heaven and no amount of alleged global warming is going to change that fact. Psalm 24:1-2 tells us that the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness it holds is His. How can we destroy the thing that belongs to God Himself? Further, Ecclesiastes 1:1-11 tells us that the earth abides forever, the sun will rise and set, and there is nothing new found under the sun; in the face of that, the belief by Christians that we can destroy what God has said will abide forever is blasphemy. It is saying that we do not believe what God has told us through his Holy Word, and that we are more powerful than God Himself in that we are convinced that we can destroy His creation.

Correct me if I am wrong, but wasn’t the last election held in this country over on November 4, 2008? After that election the next national elections are not slated until 2010, correct? So could someone please, please tell me why there is such a furor over the losing vice presidential candidate from the last election!?! The way many on both sides of the political spectrum act, you would think that Sarah Palin was responsible for Global Warming, bitter beer face, and I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!

Somewhere along the campaign trail, people decided that Sarah Palin was the bane of the McCain campaign, the scourge if the Republican Party, and the least qualified vice presidential candidate ever…as if that mattered when she was on a ticket opposing the most radical, leftist, inexperienced presidential candidate EVER!!! Somehow the inexperience of Palin as veep overshadowed the inexperience of Obama, although one was running to remake the Republic in his image, while the other was trying to help a flawed warhorse ascend to the White House.

What was amazing was to hear the same attacks that the left launched, as was their place as the opposition, coming from people who ostensibly stood on the same side of the issues as Palin. The leadership of the GOP looked down on her with their studied patrician arrogance for many of the same reasons she was savaged from the left; she only went to a state school for college; she was from Alaska, for goodness sakes!; she had a veritable tribe of children; she was not polished enough for the national stage, and by God she could not best Katie Couric in an interview on CBS News! Take her to the guillotine and take off her political head, because she is finished as a political player in national politics for all time!

That was to be expected from the Republican leadership, which has always seen itself as an exclusive country club an only tolerates those not to the manor born out of the necessity of garnering their votes come election time. The country-clubbers have never had any real use for those conservatives not located along the Boston-DC-Manhattan corridor; they hated Nixon, they hated Reagan, and they only liked George Bush because he had the right bloodline to be a member in good standing. But what I never expected was to see the “rank and file” conservatives turn on Governor Palin the way she did, especially after she decided to resign as governor of Alaska.

When Palin stepped down, many in the rank and file exploded in anger. To them the move just seemed to confirm the bad things being said about the governor in the media; she was ‘erratic’, unpredictable, and just plain strange. Why, oh why, would she just quit on the people of Alaska? No reason that the governor cited was good enough to assuage their anger, even if they were not actually her constituents. Neither the frivolous ethics complaints, nor the massive FOIA requests, nor the vicious attacks on her family were reason enough for the governor to step down. No, it was somehow felt that she owed it to the state of Alaska, the people of America, the Republican Party, and the conservative movement to bear those slings and arrows, no matter how much they impeded her ability to govern, or how personally hurtful the attacks on her family were. And when Governor Palin decided that she had a responsibility to do right by her family first and foremost, and that meant stepping down as governor, she became persona non grata to many people who had supported her in the presidential campaign.

Then came the insistence that resigning as governor meant that Sarah Palin was doomed as a political entity for all time; why the anti-Palin commercials calling her a quitter were already being written. Yet for someone that is a political non-entity, there is certainly a great deal of attention paid to her. If she were so politically radioactive, why do there continue to be hit pieces written about her**cough**Kathleen Parker and Peggy Noonan**cough**? If she’s so over, why does anyone care what she has to say about the current healthcare debate? I mean, she is finished…right?

People constantly come back to one theme with Sarah Palin that I would like to take a little time to address. One of the things people both left and right ask about Governor Palin is, “Why do you like her?” According to many she is just…well…simple. She isn’t polished like most people in politics; she doesn’t come off like she knows everything, and she doesn’t seem like the usual professional office seeker. And those are just the qualities that draw so many people to her. She is a genuine person, not a prepackaged product that is sold to us at election time. She has faults that she doesn’t spend her whole life attempting to cover up; she makes mistakes; she gets knocked around and pulls herself together, and she stands by what she believes in no matter the political costs. People like that about her; heck, I like that about her. In a world where politicians are commodities to be sold to potential voters, Sarah Palin stands out as different type of politician; namely the kind that doesn’t need to be in the political spotlight to be happy. Nowadays that is truly a rarity, and many people appreciate that about her.

None of knows what the future holds for Sarah Palin as a political player, and I’m not going to speculate about it. But I wouldn’t write her political epitaph quite yet; you never know what Sarah from Wasilla has in store for the future!

“Waving the bloody shirt” is a timeworn political ploy first used by the venerable Republican Party in the aftermath of the Civil War. After the war, in order to get controversial legislation passed through the Congress the Republican Party would not so subtly remind the public in general, and the Democratic Party in particular, just who had fought first to preserve, and later to reunite the Union…and whom had worked to tear it asunder. By using such rhetoric, and by sometimes literally waving a shirt allegedly stained with the blood of Union soldiers spilled in the War Between the States, the Republicans were able to silence Democratic opposition to all manner of policies. “Waving the bloody shirt” was used in part to give us the so-called Reconstruction Amendments that outlawed slavery, made the former slaves citizens of the United States, and granted them the right to vote. The tactic was also used to help in the passage of the first civil rights legislation in the history of the Republic in the years of 1866, 1872, and 1875.

In the decade of the 1960s the Democratic Party brought the tactic back with a vengeance after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Nearly every major piece of legislation that Lyndon Johnson wanted passed was foisted onto a mourning public as one of Kennedy’s major legislative priorities, which allowed Johnson to get just about anything through the Congress and onto his desk. It seemed that everything from the Job Corps, to Operation Head Start, to Medicare were packaged by the wheeling-dealing Johnson as one of Jack Kennedy’s most cherished ideas, and in the shocking aftermath of Kennedy’s murder no one wanted to be seen as thwarting the last wishes of King John of Camelot, so several trillion dollars later we are still stuck with LBJ’s Great Society schemes.

Since then, politicians have used some variation of the bloody shirt in nearly every decade, especially when there is a war being fought. John Kerry and his band of lying miscreants used it in the fraudulent Winter Soldier hearings; George H. W. Bush did it when he campaigned in 1988 with the badge of a slain New York City police officer as a symbol of why we needed to fight the War on Drugs; and various politicians use the tactic when they stage photo ops with wounded servicemen to show their support for the troops. The bloody shirt will occasionally recede into the political closet, but it never truly gets retired.

With the death of Edward “Teddy” Kennedy, the Democrats have decided to dust off the bloody shirt again and wave it wildly in a last desperate attempt to resurrect a healthcare bill that seems to be dead on arrival. Senator Robert Byrd (Klan-WV) has proposed that the bill (or bills) winding through the Senate be named in honor of Senator Kennedy, whom everyone recognizes as a staunch supporter of a nationalized healthcare bill in a last ditch attempt at getting the sympathy vote for a bill that the majority of the people of America simply do not want. The line of thinking seems to be that Kennedy’s death should be used as a catalyzing agent to bring any recalcitrant Democrats around on the issue, and to stir up some much needed public support for the failing plan. What this line of thinking ignores is the most obvious point in the whole debate: The people do not support this idea! No matter whom the bill is named for, or said to be in memoriam of, the American people have spoken in poll after poll and the conclusion is always the same: We don’t want government run healthcare or government issued health insurance.

What is really appalling about this idea is the base motives involved in even making the proposal. The vast majority of the members of the United States Senate publicly claim to have been friends and admirers of Senator Kennedy, but before his body could get cold or his family could properly mourn his passing, his “friends” in the Democratic Party began plotting to use his passing as a political tool to pass their beloved healthcare legislation. They had barely begun rewriting the history of his life to make him into some type of tragic/heroic figure before they struck upon the idea to use his death as the bloody shirt they hoped would get them  power over one-sixth of the American economy. Alas, I should not have been surprised with this after the way the memorial for Senator Paul Wellstone was hijacked and turned into an impromptu anti-Bush political rally; yet it is just as unseemly now as it was then, and I had hoped they would avoid exploiting the death of their treasured “friend” for naked political gain.

However, no matter how enthusiastically they wave this bloody shirt, it will probably not have its intended effect. Even if the American people were united in their love and admiration of Teddy Kennedy, it probably would still not be enough to shake them from their fears of the federal government doing to American healthcare and health insurance what they have done with the postal service and Social Security. The American people will not fall for such a shameless ploy, and the Democrats should be embarrassed by their attempts at exploiting the death of one of their own in the pursuit of political power. Alas, we know that they won’t because liberal Democrats may feel your pain, but they feel no shame.

Liberals come in all shapes and sizes, from the anti-nuclear power protestors to the Code Pink crowd. They have many individual concerns that fire their political passions, but there is always an underlying philosophy that unites them, no matter their personal political projects. Because at heart, liberals all believe in the same thing; government should strive to meet al of the needs of the people from cradle to grave, no matter whether or not there is any actual authority for the government to do so. And when push comes to shove liberals recognize that they all need one another in order to achieve the big government goals they have set for the nation. It is rare to see liberals divided over matters of ideology and even rarer to see even the most contrarian liberals culled from the left wing flock.

Conservatives like to look on liberals and say that they are disjointed, or just a loose amalgam of different pressure groups seeking political power in order to serve their specific ends. That is very true of the Democratic Party in general, as well as the GOP, but what we often miss is the fact that liberals almost always unite when the need arises. Look at the current healthcare debate as a prime example; nearly any plan that is passed will eventually have negative impacts on union members and their healthcare plans. Yet the unions have set aside, for the most part, their individual concerns to push for President Obama’s plan in a show of liberal unity. And it is this type of unity that allows the liberals to carry the day on so many important political and policy fights in the country; they will stick together through thick and thin.

On the conservative side, however, that unity does not seem to exist. When people look at the conservative side of the aisle, they do not see a movement made up of people pulling together to reach a single destination. What they see instead is a much fractured group that can hardly stop bickering long enough to even make a show of opposing the left wing agenda being promulgated by the current presidential administration. “National defense conservatives” are at odds with “paleoconservatives” over national defense strategy, while “border security conservatives” clash with “free market conservatives” over whether we need secure borders or a steady stream of sla…uh…cheap labor. And it seems that every other conservative faction seems to have a bone to pick with the “religious conservatives”, who by the way, seem to always bear the blame for the electoral failures of the GOP. The ultimate unity of purpose that is found on the liberal side of the spectrum just seems to be missing from the conservative side.

What I have noticed among conservatives is that whenever conservatives start adding qualifiers to their ideological leanings, there is going to be some internecine battles about to be fought. It seems that many people that want to identify as conservatives also want to claim the mantle of “true conservatives” and wrap themselves in it, while diminishing their fellow conservatives. Case in point: After the 2006 midterm elections when the GOP lost control of the Congress, what was the loudest complaint from many conservatives? The complaint, which as echoed in some quarters after McCain was beaten by Obama, was that the “religious conservatives” or “social conservatives” had cost the GOP the elections, and that they should be jettisoned from the movement. Little time was spent on figuring out what conservatives could do to win back public trust, while finger pointing inside the conservative movement ran rampant. Many conservatives were more concerned with attacking other conservatives that they did not agree with than opposing the massive government intrusions into the financial life of the country.

What conservatives of every stripe should be doing is what the liberals always do when it counts: Focus on the unifying characteristics of their ideology instead of picking fights within the group. There are certain characteristics that should be part of the political DNA of every conservative: smaller government, fiscal restraint, strong defense, secure borders, judges who actually respect the Constitution, and a fair chance for everyone to succeed or fail on his own merits. Whether your particular passion is national defense or fiscal policy, all of the other conservative characteristics are there in you as well. If we can learn to put aside our petty fights and differences when big issues are on the table, we can stall the list to port of our ship of state, and maybe even bring her back to starboard. But we have to be unified to do it, because we are facing an adversary that is relentless, aggressive, and above all else, unified. Only with a similar unity from conservatives can the slide towards socialism be arrested; to continue on a fractured path is to condemn the country to the continued ravages of the left and its ideas.

So to borrow a phrase from the left: Conservatives of the world unite! Because as one of the Founders so succinctly phrased it, “Either we all hang together, or we will all hang separately.”