…Not the story itself, but the silence of the media.

I can no longer embed video here (i don’t know why, but it is what it is), so check this out at YouTube. It is a hearing probing the issue of voting machines being hacked and changing the results of elections.

Understand, for the last two years now, i’ve been working at our local election precinct as a poll worker. I saw what went on with the counting. It’s a group effort with accountability to everyone standing around, and it is something you all have to sign your name to under penalty of law (i.e., if you sign your name to the results and they are incorrect, it is voter fraud). So, in the human aspect of it, i know that changing the results of an election done on computerized voting machines is something that would be difficult to do without some larger conspriacy. All you do is print out the results, tabulate all the machines’ printouts, and then record the results and report them to the county election officials, who in turn report them to the Secretary of the Commonwealth (Virginia isn’t a state).

This hearing and the expert who is testifying, however, shows me that the election can be thrown already, long before we turn the voting machines on, simply by a programmer changing a few dozen lines of programming code. That means that the programmer can make the election results end up being whatever he wants them to be, regardless of who casts a vote for what candidate. The results will be fixed.

Understand, i don’t think this happens often. Each county election board purchases and maintains their own machines, so any attempt to throw an election would necessarily involve a programmer for each county rigging the machines to give such a result. However, i am not so naive as to believe that this never happens and never has happened since the implementation of the computerized voting following the Flordia fiasco in 2000. There are, no doubt, only a handful of programmers for each state or commonwealth who go around to each county and program their machines for voting in each election. It would not be difficult for just a few programmers throughout the US to throw an entire election if they were dirty and crooked enough to do so, and it would not surprise me in the least if the elected officials were the ones secretly behind such actions, inciting certain people to do just that with the programming.

My grandfather used to say, “If a man is honest, keep him honest.” In other words, honest people don’t mind being made accountable and showing just how honest they are. And, hence, we should be willing to require that accountability from people who loudly proclaim their honesty. The civil authorities should, of all people, be kept honest. Our governments shouldn’t be shrouded in secrecy—certainly not with something so vital and momentous as an election in the balance—but should be free, open, and transparent in their actions, always being willing to prove to the people that what they have done is proper, decent, and comporting with law. Unfortunately, that isn’t happening in our federal government, and that is also increasingly the case in the state/commonwealth and local governments. That’s becasue political corruption is like biological corruption: it spreads with ferocious speed when left unchecked. The only answer, just as in the medical world, is to open the body, excise the corruption, and allow the wound to heal.

People die when they refuse to allow a surgeon to operate on them and remove cancer or gangrene, but there are some people who so because they are afraid of surgery or the pain that will result from it. They are fools, though, because the pain of death and the rotting of one’s body is much worse and more prolonged than the pain of removing a cancer or gangrenous tissue. Just as only a fool would prevent a surgeon from saving his life by performing surgery because it is painful, so only a fool would prevent the removal of political corruption from the government because he thinks it will cause us confusion, or the government won’t work as well, or simply because they’re so used to the status quo that they can’t conceive of it being any different. Those are childish answers from childish people. They deserve the leaders that they get.

But how do we get rid of government corruption? In a dictatorship, you can’t do it. However, where the people still have the power to change the leadership of their government through elections, removing government corruption is as easy as people getting off the cushion God gave them and going to vote for a candidate who will begin that change. But it’s impossible to do if the people, like mindless sheep, simply follow the crowd and believe what they are told when the media says this man is not electable, but this one is. If all the people would vote their consciences and not worry about trying to play political games, our elections would be much more trustworthy and a much better representation of the people.

It will be painful to try and get used to a different way that government operates. However, we can take heart that the future we will have gained for ourselves and for our children after us will be brighter and healthier than if we had been content with the sops of a corrupt government. We have to decide whether we prefer having our freedom or whether we prefer having what little bones and scraps that the government will throw our way in hopes that they have bought us off with them. We must not be like Esau, who sold his very birthright for a pot of stew. We must be willing to stand, fight, and die for the freedom and gifts that God in his great mercy and love gave to us for our benefit. We must do it for ourselves, and we must do it for our children. Anything less and we become conspirators ourselves. It is one thing to be deceived. It is quite another to cover your eyes to what can be plainly seen and allow ourselves to be deceived. People who do that become conspirators in their demise as a people. The judgment that will befall the corrupt politicians will also fall upon those who knowingly aid them simply to gain some temporary and inconsequential goal.

Under the previous post, one fellow asked the following question:

Question for you Ronites: OK, I get it. You love everything about his stands on every important issue facing our nation. But looking at Mr. Paul as a person - his record in Congress, executive experience if any, ability to work profitably and honorably in the great compromise that is Washington politics, and so forth - what makes you think he can govern?

If by some crazy chance he wins his first primary at some point, and then another, and another, resulting in both hell freezing over and the GOP nomination, and then goes on to best Billary or B. Hussein … after all the I-told-you-so’s from his true believers, I still see an ineffective President. A guy with Perfect Points of View on Every Problem, but who in the face of congressional opposition doesn’t get a thing done toward any of his laudable goals.

The following response, along with another response from a fellow Ron Paul supporter, is in the comments section, but i figured it would make sense to make it its own post. Here is in a nutshell my reason for supporting Ron Paul’s candidacy for presidency.

The point is that you can’t do anything about the poor state of our government if all you want to do is tweak the government as it is (which is seriously screwed up, and tweaking ain’t gonna cut it). The problem with the government is that people are treating it like an absolute government instead of the limited government that it is supposed to be. What’s the difference? The Constitution of the US was written in such a way that the federal government is limited to doing *ONLY* that which is explicitly stated in the Constitution and its amendments (cf., Tenth Amendment). However, our federal government thinks it can do anything that it takes a notion to do so long as it gets a majority in both houses of Congress and gets the president to sign it. Yet, there is still no constitutional warrant for the federal government doing lots of things, including, but not limited to, funding art (i.e., the National Endowment of the Arts), regulating education withinin the several states (i.e., the Department of Education and everything the Congress attempts to do about regulating education, especially “No Child Left Behind”), putting forward government insurance (i.e., Social Security and the property insurance for property owners in places that experience natural disasters), establishing a federal bank (i.e., the Federal Reserve), establishing federal police (i.e., the FBI), funding and subsidizing domestic businesses and foreign governments, and any other number of programs and activities the federal government engages in as a matter of course without any qualm. (Please note: i don’t have a problem with some of these things *IF* there were constitutional warrant, which is to say, 3/4 of the several states ratifying an amendment to the Constitution in order to authorize the federal government to engage in these things, but without constitutional warrant, they are illegal, even if they are almost universally accepted).

It takes someone who really understands and abides by the Constitution in order to bring us back to the point where our government really is “for the people and by the people.” And that just underscores the need for someone who isn’t a career politician to do the jobs in the Congress. It was through Parliamentary reform in England that there even *WAS* such a thing as a paid elected office. What that did was to give everyday, common men the ability to be elected to those offices, when they would have no means to support their families if they gave up their normal jobs to serve in Parliament. That same idea was carried over to our Congress and executive office. The point is that the people who make up the government *SHOULD* be ordinary citizens. Your assumption, though, is, for whatever reason, that the people who fill these offices should be career politicians? Why? Where does that assumption come from?

The truth is, you can’t do *ANYTHING* ultimately productive if you don’t have a proper foundation from which to operate. That’s true as much for our government as it is for the Church of our Lord Christ. People can have all kinds of ideas for lots of things to do, but if they do not comport with the standards in place (i.e., the Constitution), then they are useless ideas, illegal ideas, or, worse still, destructive ideas. So, Ron Paul’s candidacy may seem like a long-shot, but he’s the only person running in this race with the kind of principled leadership (and longstanding record) that can indeed lead us back to having a government based on the Constitution in truth, and not just in name.

At the same time, though, an “ineffective” president is a good thing–if you mean by “ineffective,” one who doesn’t get much done in terms of implementing new government programs and government spending. And, too, the reason many of us support Ron Paul is because he would have a very anxious veto pen (something our current president has no idea about). That veto pen would mean a curb on Congress’ spending and attempts to expand government–which is one of the reasons why Ron Paul is such an appealing candidate. Is he going to be able to return government to its proper limits in two or four years? Probably not. After all, it got the way it is over the course of 148 years now. You can’t undo in 4 what took 150 years to do. But, he will be a good start on the way back to our government being what it was originally intended to be if he is elected.

The final point is an important one. Ron Paul may not have, as my father said, a “Chinaman’s chance in Tokyo,” but my supporting him, giving money to his campaign and telling everyone i know about him is not so short-sighted as to end in February with no primary wins or even in September at the Republican Convention (because, even if Ron Paul only gets the handful of delegates he already has for his runner-up finishes, it is still possible for him to be the ultimate nominee; read about the 1880 Republican Convention and the way Garfield came to be the nominee); no, this is the beginning of a movement to see the government turned around. Ron Paul isn’t some sort of “Messiah”; he’s a servant of the people and a comrade to every other American who loves his country but is afraid of his government and wants to keep it in check. Ron Paul may not be the candidate to get elected, but he’s a pivotal figure in the overall, long-term fight to recapture what the federal government should be (not what it became after the War of Northern [i.e., “Federal”] Aggression, when the federal government actually believed its own propaganda to think it could do anything it wishes as long as they have the power to back it up).

I support Ron Paul *BECAUSE* i support the movement and the long-term goals we have as Paleo-Conservatives, not the other way around.

Here are some of my favorite Ron Paul “facts” and some i added myself…

• Ron Paul doesn’t go to the gym; he stays fit by exercising his civil rights.
• When Ron Paul delivers babies, he doesn’t use his hands; he just reads them the Bill of Rights, and they crawl out in anticipation of freedom.
• Ron Paul doesn’t cut taxes; he kills them with his bare hands.
• Jesus wears a wrist-band that says “What Would Ron Paul Do?”
• Ron Paul is the leading proponent of gun control—both hands firmly on your weapon of choice.
• Ron Paul can fly, but he doesn’t, because it isn’t in the Constitution.
• King Midas once shook Ron Paul’s hand. Nothing happened.
• It turns out that Ron Paul let the dogs out; they were being held without due process.
• Before Rudy Giuliani goes to bed at night, he checks his closet and under his bed for Ron Paul.
• Ron Paul didn’t invent the internet; he invented electricity and showed it to Ben Franklin.
• Ron Paul can recite pi to 1776 decimal places.
• Ron Paul doesn’t drink tea; just water from Boston Harbor.  
• Why did the chicken cross the road? To vote for Ron Paul.
• Ron Paul can read minds, but he doesn’t, because that’s an invasion of privacy.
• The man in the moon taught his kids to look up at the earth to gaze at Ron Paul.
• Ron Paul can kill two birds with one stone, but he doesn’t, because he’s so in favor of non-violence.
• Ron Paul’s hemoglobin contains no iron; it’s on the gold standard.
• Ron Paul doesn’t pee; he liberates urine.
• Ron Paul gave up bowel movements when he was first elected to Congress; he’s that committed to getting rid of government waste.

You don’t beat a dead dog. You don’t take aim at people who aren’t a threat. And you don’t make political attacks against people who are on the fringe and offer no threat to the status quo.

The trouble with people who talk straight about just about everything is that they are easy targets for people who like to use pull-quotes. The sad thing is that these attacks are coming not from the political right (i.e., Neo-Conservatives) but from the left (i.e., Neo-Liberals). The truth is that the left knows they can’t beat Ron Paul on the issues, so they must attack his character—and they must, at all costs, beat Ron Paul, because he stands for a complete and absolute end to their demagoguery, race-baiting, and victim-mongering. In other words, when people start to think for themselves, take care of themselves, and fight for themselves with the liberty God gave us, they’ll be out of a job. That’s the last thing they are going to let happen, and they’re willing to maitain their exalted place by any means necessary.

According to a prominent political and religious biographer, who recently completed a new book, God and Hillary Clinton, the New York Senator is “in lock step with the UMC.”

I went to seminary with a good many Methodists—many of them went there because the seminary was conservative, while others did so for convenience and just looked over the conservative elements (or derided them). In fact, since i have left, the General Conference of the UMC has withdrawn its approval of Erskine Seminary for its students to train there. It really doesn’t surprise me that Hillary is in perfect alignment with UMs, what surprises me is that Methodists don’t see it as a wake-up call that someone so vile and deceitful could be the poster-child for their denomination. It’s one thing to have a liberal faction in a denomination laregly marked by faithfulness. It’s another thing altogether to have a denomination wholly committed to liberal religion and politics, such that conservatives are beat down and disciplined for wanting to be true to Scripture and traditional limited government.

What a sad state of affairs.

Of course, while i don’t agree with using tax-payer funding to teach some supposedly “neutral” morality to children of the state, and while it is constitutionally illegal for the Federal government to engange in something it does not have specific constitutional warrant to do (which hasn’t stopped it from exponentially piling up such illegal activities over the last century), it is still within the perview of the several States to choose to make use of such funding for those programs.

Well, my current residence is in the Commonwealth of Viriginia, and there is new evidence that the abstinence education that has been at work here for the last several years is paying off in preventing pre-marital pregnancies and increasing the number of young men and women who wait until they are married in order to engage in God’s gift of sex. And this right on the heels of our illustrious governor cutting funding for abstinence education.

Talk about an idiot politician. For purely political and idealogical reasons, he cuts funding for the thing that is proven to work, and he pledges to fund what is prove not to work.

If you saw the Fox News Republican Debate Sunday night, you saw just how crazy Sean Hannity can be. When Giulliani didn’t come in first in their text message poll following the debate, and especially since Ron Paul (AGAIN!) came in first, Hannity reasserted crazy conspiracy theories about how Ron Paul supporters are spammers or hackers or whatever would give them the ability to inflate the polling results. (Of course, he didn’t say that Huckabee’s supporters were spammers, even though he came in second place in the polling, with all of the “first-tier” candidates coming in a good bit behind those two.) Worse than the text message polling results was the “voter panel” that What’s-his-head (with the weird mannerisms) interviewed, who all (with only a couple of exceptions) touted Giulliani as the winner of the debate. What annoyed me most was that the “fair and balanced” interviewer kept making statments like, “Clearly, Giulliani came out the big winner tonight.” “Clearly”? To whom? I normally like Fox News in alot of things, but “clearly,” their political bias is toward Giulliani, who always gets first crack at the post-debate audience, and whom Hannity always drools over.

Well, for those of you who were frustrated with Hannity’s attitude toward Dr. Paul (the way my wife and i were), here’s a little parody of the debate you might enjoy.

In my time in the Southern Baptist Convention, i remember folks who held to the view that the words of Jesus (in the older Bibles, these words are printed in red to set them off from the other words) were more important, represented a higher teaching, and were more fundamental to Christianity than the words elsewhere. They usually represented a more liberal strain of Christianity. In the fight over Scripture’s inspiration among Southern Baptists, those who stood against the folks who advocated verbal plenary inspiration always had a kind of interpretive grid. In fact, in the Baptist Faith and Message, the closest thing to a creed/confession that Southern Baptists officially have, in the 1963 version, there was one particular line in Article I, speaking of the Scriptures, which said: “The criterion by which the Bible is
to be interpreted is Jesus Christ.” Well, the self-proclaimed “moderates” (really, those who wanted to dismiss the whole idea of inerrancy and infallibility) always would take hold of that phrase (as anti-creedal as they always claimed to be) and would drive it home that we must interpret the Bible through Jesus and his words.

Well, apparently, Tony Campollo is one of those guys. I guess i shouldn’t be all that surprised at the fact. He’s not Southern Baptist (he’s American Baptist), but he still fits that same bill. These folks are called, not surprisingly, “Red Letter Christians,” and Campollo really puts this whole way of looking at the Bible forward in his book Letters to a Young Evangelical.

The way this came up was by reading a kind of “rebuttal” of sorts that Stan Guthrie wrote about the whole concept and the political ideas that come across from that kind of thinking (invariably left-leaning, politically), and he takes Campollo to task personally about it. It’s actually a very balanced and gentle critique that makes excellent points not only about that hermeneutic, but it’s own blindness to see that those ideas are politically ideological, and really politically motivated before they are religiously informed, even if they claim otherwise. Campollo gives an answer to Guthrie’s critique (and gives away the farm, if you ask me). It’s a really interesting read.

Really the point of contention between politically left-leaning Christians and politically right-leaning Christians is not whether you’re for protecting the environment, seeing equality and social justice, stopping the slaughter of infant children in the protection of the womb, or even wanting to feed and clothe the destitute. The real point is whether it is the job of the government to accomplish those things. This is where even a good healthy dose of political separation of Church and State is proper, and it is also the place where a healthy view of the truth of all Scripture equally would help people realize that Scripture itself has a bunch to say about the limitation of the powers of the government to enforcing the most basic moral principles to keep society in proper order. That’s their delegated task from God—not to control the Church, not to co-opt the Church, and not to leave off doing its own job by trying to tell the Church what to do and how.  Apparently, though, politically liberal Christians seem to think that it is the job of the government to do that. And that means that, ironically enough, all the Christians who talk about the government enforcing equal rights, government feeding the poor and providing them with healthcare, government doing anything other than enforcing common morality and maintaining order in society, they are the ones who advocate a defacto combining of Church and State.

The real clincher for me in this discussion, especially where RLCs are concerned, is the marked lack of anything from the mouth of Jesus that tells us that it is the job of government to enforce his teaching or that the Christian purpose should be so to influence the government as to do the job of the Church. It’s just funny to me that people who put so much stock in the words of Jesus (to be clear, Jesus’ words are absolutely important, but just as important as all other words of Scripture) above all else would ignore the silence of Jesus in directing that the government be as closely involved in what they seek to see done. It simply strikes me as a kind of laziness: wanting something done, but wanting someone to do it for you—that’s really an indemic problem in the Church today, anyway.

Tonight, on Dish Network and Sky Angel channel 262, and streaming from Values Voter Debate, the next Republican debate will be broadcast. It promises to be an interesting debate, especially for those of us who are interested in issues in addition to what we hear about on CNN and Fox News.

The most disappointing thing about it, though, is that the so-called “top tier” candidates are not appearing. Giuliani, McCain, Romney, and Thompson are all sufficiently convinced that the event will do nothing to help them, so they will not be attending. It really doesn’t surprise me, but in such a venue, one can hardly wonder why men who speak only in platitudes would be intimidated by the prospect. It just shows me that none of them are up to the task of being President of the United States. It’s certainly no job for a coward.

I’ve had some discussion of late about the War for Southern Independence, AKA the War of Northern Aggression, and its true causes. As i have said, i completely sympathize with those who wished to abolish slavery in the United States for moral reasons. However, as i have also repeatedly stated, that’s not the issue that was of primary importance in the so-called “Civil War.” Of course, the issues were always political, not moral; they were economic, with the economics of taxes and labor in general (and with slavery as only one small aspect of those) being the main driving force.

In Thomas DiLorenzo’s book, Lincoln Unmasked, the veil is pulled back on Lincoln as the driving force behind the push for war back in the 1860s. The book shows that his push for war could never have been a principled opposition to the Southern people who just wouldn’t give up their slaves, but rather his threat to invade and attack states in the Union (and their citizens) was in order to retain control over revenues from Southern states who protested exorbitant import and export duties that Washington was trying to foist upon them. Here’s a review and summary of the book that gives some tid-bits.

Truth is, when you lay it all out, from the suspension of habeas corpus to the warmongering for deceitful motives, George Bush is, as many Neo-Cons have claimed, indeed following in Lincoln’s footsteps.