While other Christian groups and denominations may have doctrinal issues with the Latter-day Saints, they do line up on a number of political issues.

SALT LAKE CITY – The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is asking California members to join the effort to amend that state’s constitution to define marriage as being between a man and a woman.

A letter sent to Mormon bishops and signed by church president Thomas S. Monson and his two top counselors calls on Mormons to donate "means and time" to the ballot measure. A note on the letter dated June 20 says it should be read during church services on June 29, but the letter was published Saturday on several Web sites.

Church spokesman Scott Trotter said Monday that the letter was authentic. He declined further comment, saying the letter explains the church’s reasons for getting involved.

The LDS church will work with a coalition of churches and other conservative groups that put the California Marriage Protection Act on the Nov. 4 ballot to assure its passage, the letter states.

In May, California’s Supreme Court overturned a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage, saying gays could not be denied marriage licenses.

"The church’s teachings and position on this moral issue are unequivocal. Marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and the formation of families is central to the Creator’s plan for His children," the four-paragraph letter states.

Mormons say they have 750,000 member in California, who could have a big impact.

What’s not clear in all of this, regardless of the addition of the Mormons to the fray, is how California will deal with the genie they’ve already let out of the bottle; what to do with marriage licenses that the amendment would directly affect.  This quandary, brought to you by Judicial Activism(tm), is the result of liberals in government not letting the legislative process do its work and trying to usurp it.  Some complained here in Georgia that the constitutional amendment that passed here was unnecessary since we already had a law against same-sex marriage.  The California situation is a prime object lesson for why that argument was, at least, disingenuous. 

Technorati Tags: California, Latter-Day Saints, Mormons, same-sex marriage

Learned by Josh Marshall, lefty blogger at Talking Points Memo.  First, he starts out the post being inspired.

I happened yesterday on this article in The Atlantic by Jonathan Rauch about the Chevy Volt. GM is throwing tons of resources into a breakneck schedule to produce an electric powered car that is dramatically more advanced than the hybrids currently on the market. The question is whether they can have the technology developed in time for release date.

It’s sort of inspiring to see an American company try something so ambitious.

American companies try ambitious things all the time.  Energy companies might try this more often, if there wasn’t the ever-present concern that their return-on-investment might get sucked away by the government as "windfall profit".  The freedom to innovate while keeping the fruits of your labor, and responding to needs by the consumer, is a feature of what we call "the market".  Familiarizing oneself with the concept would be very helpful in the current economic climate. 

Josh then finds in himself a newfound concern about alternative energy sources.  Despite his upbringing, he says, he was never really focused on it much.

But that’s changed over the last several months: most of the key issues that face us today, from environmental issues proper, to our geostrategic position vs. other great powers and the future of our economy, all turn on our reliance on fossil fuels. Not just ‘foreign’ ones, all of them.

And what has likely contributed heavily to this rediscovered concern?  How about the gas prices that have been rising quickly over "the last several month"?  But that’s nothing to be ashamed of.  The price of an item is an amazing bit of information that gives suppliers knowledge of short-term future demand, gives consumers an incentive to buy more or less of a product, and, depending on the price itself, gives innovators an incentive to come up with new and better way to supply the need.  This is a feature of what we call "the market".  (Detect a pattern here?)

This is instead of nationalizing the particular industry or forcing the price to an artificially lower value which could easily bring about shortages (just ask Venezuelans) and stifle innovation.  I  mean, a new source of a product just may cost a bit more as it’s getting ramped up, and forcing existing prices lower make consumers less likely to make the transition, unless you force them to do so.  The keyword here, which must be used over and over again, is "force".  And when your government is forcing all of your economic decisions on you, this is a feature of what we call "socialism". 

Would Marshall know the free market it if jumped out and bit him?  I think it just did, but according to the title of his post, he’s "shocked, shocked".  Likely that’s an intentional pun on the Chevy Volt subject, but his surprise at seeing American innovation, and his lack of understanding of his changing attitudes tells me that he apparently doesn’t recognize the source of those teeth marks.

Technorati Tags: Josh Marshall, free market, economics, supply and demand, oil industry, socialism, communism

Paging Mr. Belafonte, Mr. Penn, Ms. Sheehan, et. al. Please call your office.

President Hugo Chávez has used his decree powers to carry out a major overhaul of this country’s intelligence agencies, provoking a fierce backlash here from human rights groups and legal scholars who say the measures will force citizens to inform on one another to avoid prison terms.

[…]

The new law requires people in the country to comply with requests to assist the agencies, secret police or community activist groups loyal to Mr. Chávez. Refusal can result in prison terms of two to four years for most people and four to six years for government employees.

“We are before a set of measures that are a threat to all of us,” said Blanca Rosa Mármol de León, a justice on Venezuela’s top court, in a rare public judicial dissent. “I have an obligation to say this, as a citizen and a judge. This is a step toward the creation of a society of informers.”

The sweeping intelligence changes reflect an effort by Mr. Chávez to assert greater control over public institutions in the face of political challenges following a stinging defeat in December of a package of constitutional changes that would have expanded his powers.

Looks like his powers are expanding in spite of the voters. Again, yet another predictable step towards totalitarianism from a government that the Hollywood Left finds common cause with. Ignorance of history is no excuse.

(Can we use the term “dictator” now?)

UPDATE:  Chavez has revoked the law, which is great to hear.  Thousands of protesters combined with an upcoming election probably changed his mind.  Not a good idea to get the people in an uproar so close to voting.  Is this a case of Chavez listening to the people?  I hope so.  History still suggests keeping a watchful eye, though.

Technorati Tags: Harry Belafonte, Sean Penn, Cindy Sheehan, Hugo Chavez, Venezuela, socialism, Blanca Rosa Mármol de León

Don Surber notes that the health care system run by the state of Oregon won’t pay for cancer drugs, but they’ll cover assisted suicide.  Socialized medicine is about the money just as much as "capitalized" medicine is.

One example cited is that of a woman who’s oncologist prescribed a drug to slow the cancer growth, but Oregon Heath Care wouldn’t cover it, though she could take the Permanant Exit Door(tm) with their blessing.  Instead, the drug company gave her the medicine for free.  Surber notes the moral of the story:

Socialists to cancer victims: Kill yourself.

Capitalists: Can’t pay? No problem.

Oh and the capitalists also pay the taxes that finance the socialist programs.

The New York Post has a column up on this topic as well, noting that the health care system that Ted Kennedy would like to see could actually have killed him (well, if he wasn’t a man of means).

Problem is, governments that promise to "cover everyone" always wind up cutting corners simply to save money. People with Kennedy’s condition are dying or dead as a result.

Consider Jennifer Bell of Norwich, England. In 2006, the 22-year-old complained of headaches for months – but Britain’s National Health Service made her wait a year to see a neurologist.

Then she had to wait more than three months before should could get what the NHS decided was only a "relatively urgent" MRI scan. Three days before the MRI appointment, she died.

Consider, too, the chemo drug Kennedy is receiving: Temodar, the first oral medicine for brain tumors in 25 years.

Temodar has been widely used in this country since the FDA approved it in 2000. But a British health-care rationing agency, the National Institute for Comparative Effectiveness, ruled that, while the drug helps people live longer, it wasn’t worth the money – and denied coverage for it.

Barack Obama – and other Democrats – have been pushing a Senate bill to set up a similar US "review board" for Medicare and any future government health-care plan.

After denying this treatment completely for seven years, the NICE (did whoever named it intend the irony?) relented – partly. Even today, only a handful of Brits with brain tumors can get Temodar.

And if you want to pay for Temodar out of your own pocket, the British system forces you to pay for all of your cancer care – about $30,000 a month.

So the lion’s share of the populace is stuck with sub-standard health care, and only the super-rich can get what they need.  I thought that’s what Michael Moore said our system was like.

And the column notes that it’s no better in Canada, where, if they live close enough to the border, they come here for the care they have to wait for over there. 

Socialized health care is simply not delivering for the countries that have it.  The fact is, the US system is delivering better medical care for more of its population in a timely manner than government-run ones are.  Why would we want to change that?

I looked at the “charitability” of conservatives and liberals when Arthur Brooks came out with his study in 2006. He noted that conservatives were more charitable with their time and money than liberals.

Today we have a piece about multiple polling groups finding a correlation between the political spectrum and the honesty spectrum. But before I get to the data, I want to address the issue I have when I say “I hate polls”, which I’ve said quite a lot.

I’ve covered this a bit before, but it bears repeating. When we poll people on topics that they have little to no experience in, the poll is meaningless; no more than, as SCO contributor Mark Olson calls them, a cricket race. “Consumer confidence” numbers are as much (or more) a measure of economic news reporting as they are about how a person feels (itself, an ephemeral measurement). “Who would you vote for”, on the other hand, is certainly something each person can know about themselves for sure. Now, that may change over time, but no one else knows you better than you at this moment. It’s not a good measure of who you’ll vote for 6 months from now, but it’s accurate enough for the here and now, much more so than deciding how the economy is going based on feelings.

With that out of the way, on to the results.

Is it OK to cheat on your taxes? A total of 57 percent of those who described themselves as “very liberal” said yes in response to the World Values Survey, compared with only 20 percent of those who are “very conservative.” When Pew Research asked whether it was “morally wrong” to cheat Uncle Sam, 86 percent of conservatives agreed, compared with only 68 percent of liberals.

(Maybe that’s why liberals are all for tax increases. They figure the conservatives will do most of the paying.)

Ponder this scenario, offered by the National Cultural Values Survey: “You lose your job. Your friend’s company is looking for someone to do temporary work. They are willing to pay the person in cash to avoid taxes and allow the person to still collect unemployment. What would you do?”

Almost half, or 49 percent, of self-described progressives would go along with the scheme, but only 21 percent of conservatives said they would.

When the World Values Survey asked a similar question, the results were largely the same: Those who were very liberal were much more likely to say it was all right to get welfare benefits you didn’t deserve.

The World Values Survey found that those on the left were also much more likely to say it is OK to buy goods that you know are stolen. Studies have also found that those on the left were more likely to say it was OK to drink a can of soda in a store without paying for it and to avoid the truth while negotiating the price of a car.

And on the article goes, with more and more examples in the same vein. Buy why is this? Well, this is an opinion piece (because the MSM would never touch this with a 10-kilometer pole), so the writer, Peter Schweizer, a Hoover Institution fellow and author of a new book on this subject, actually does some analysis and gives us his take, but based on data, not just out of thin air.

Now, I’m not suggesting that all conservatives are honest and all liberals are untrustworthy. But clearly a gap exists in the data. Why? The quick answer might be that liberals are simply being more honest about their dishonesty.

However attractive this explanation might be for some, there is simply no basis for accepting this explanation. Validation studies, which attempt to figure out who misreports on academic surveys and why, has found no evidence that conservatives are less honest. Indeed, validation research indicates that Democrats tend to be less forthcoming than other groups.

The honesty gap is also not a result of “bad people” becoming liberals and “good people” becoming conservatives. In my mind, a more likely explanation is bad ideas. Modern liberalism is infused with idea that truth is relative. Surveys consistently show this. And if truth is relative, it also must follow that honesty is subjective.

Ideas, indeed. Post-modern deconstruction of traditional values did not originate from conservatives. And this is even more important, considering what year it is.

Sixties organizer Saul Alinsky, who both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton say inspired and influenced them, once said the effective political advocate “doesn’t have a fixed truth; truth to him is relative and changing, everything to him is relative and changing. He is a political relativist.”

Technorati Tags: honest, conservatives, liberals, polls

Jim Lindgren at The Volokh Conspiracy notes a few studies showing that the carbon offset program set up by the United Nations is what amounts to a scam.

Leading academics and watchdog groups allege that the UN’s main offset fund is being routinely abused by chemical, wind, gas and hydro companies who are claiming emission reduction credits for projects that should not qualify. The result is that no genuine pollution cuts are being made, undermining assurances by the UK government and others that carbon markets are dramatically reducing greenhouse gases, the researchers say.

[…]

A working paper from two senior Stanford University academics examined more than 3,000 projects applying for or already granted up to $10bn of credits from the UN’s CDM[clean development mechanism] funds over the next four years, and concluded that the majority should not be considered for assistance. "They would be built anyway," says David Victor, law professor at the Californian university. "It looks like between one and two thirds of all the total CDM offsets do not represent actual emission cuts." . . .

Should we really be shocked that a left-wing scheme to "do something" turns into a Make Money Fa$t scam?  (Hint: No.)  It’s just become another tax, which, one wonders, if that wasn’t the plan all along.

Technorati Tags: environment, United Nations, global warming, climate change, carbon offsets, Stanford University, David Victor, clean development mechanism

Erik Erickson, a contributor to Redstate.com, also has a personal blog in which he talks about local politics (he lives in Macon, GA). Yesterday, he talked about a good local government program the finds summer jobs for high school students. It does its job well, he says, but it’s having a new problem.

Erik is on the Macon City Council’s Community Resources and Development Committee, and the lady who represents the program briefed the committee on it.

During the course of the lady’s presentation she lamented the increase in the minimum wage — this from a government bureaucrat who’d already blamed Bush for cutting other social program funding.

Because of the minimum wage increase, it is now more expensive to employ each student. Because it is more expensive per student, less students can be employed. The less students that can be employed through the program, the more students there will be on the street during the summer without jobs.

And that could very probably increase the rates of petty crime during the summer.

Way to go Democrats!

He titles the post “The minimum wage and unintended consequences“, but those consequences are certainly not unforeseen, as any honest economist would have to admit to it. Democrats, when arguing for an increase, however, never seem to mention that a minimum wage increase does not, cannot, happen in a vacuum. There are consequences to tampering with the free market, but the loss of jobs is minimized or ignored by a party that claims common cause with the poor.

Technorati Tags: minimum wage, free market, Democrats, living wage, unintended consequences

Should a painter be allowed to decide what he or she paints?  Should a musician be allowed to decide what music to play or write?  Should a photographer be allowed to decide what pictures to take? 

In New Mexico, the answer to that last question is a resounding, "No."

The New Mexico Human Rights Commission ruled on Wednesday that an evangelical Christian photographer discriminated against a lesbian couple by refusing a job to photograph the couple’s same-sex commitment ceremony. Religious rights attorneys plan to appeal.

The commission ordered Elaine and Jon Huenins, owners of Elane Photography in Albuquerque, N.M., to pay the lesbian couple $6,600 in attorney fees.

"It is just a stunning disregard for the First Amendment," said Jordan Lorence, a senior legal counsel for the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Alliance Defense Fund, which is representing the photographer couple in court.

Canada’s Human Right Commission has been, at the same time, busy accusing Ezra Levant, Mark Steyn and others of thought crimes (covered by the Shire Network News podcast here and here with many more details at FreeMarkSteyn.com), with the idea of "free speech" being considered foreign.

In fact, for an organization that is supposed to promote "human rights," the HRC’s agents seem curiously oblivious to basic aspects of constitutional law. In one famous exchange during the [Marc] Lemire case, [Dean] Steacy [HRC investigator] was asked "What value do you give freedom of speech when you investigate?" — to which he replied "Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don’t give it any value." (I guess Section 2 has been excised from his copy of the Canadian Charter of Rights.)

If a photographer doesn’t want to take pictures at a same-sex commitment ceremony, but will get fined if she doesn’t, how soon before the First Amendment become a value-less concept within our own borders?

And this is not just a general free speech issue.  From the original article:

"[Vanessa] (Willock) had requested via e-mail for Elane Photography to conduct photography for her commitment ceremony, and the owner of Elane Photography responded that she would not perform that photography session because it was a same-sex commitment ceremony," [Carrie] Moritomo [public information officer for the New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions] told Cybercast News Service .

No punitive monetary damages were awarded because Willock did not seek damages, Moritomo added.

Lorence said the Huenins, who are fervent evangelicals, politely declined the request because they did not want to use their art to disparage traditional heterosexual marriage. That should have been the end of the matter, he said.

"The Constitution prohibits the state from forcing unwilling people to promote a message they disagree with and thereby violate their conscience," Lorence said. "Christians should not be penalized for abiding by their beliefs.""

Eugene Volokh, UCLA Law School professor, constitutional scholar and contributor to the Volokh Conspiracy blog (where he’s blogged about this issue separately from the new story) is quoted, noting parallels to hypothetically requiring a freelance writer being forced to write for a pro-Scientology web site words that he does not believe in.  He also points out a bit of inconsistency.

"The law says that only when there is a ‘compelling government interest’ and applying the law is essential, only then can the government compel someone to violate their religious beliefs," Volokh said.

The fact that New Mexico does not recognize same-sex marriage makes it hard to argue that government has a compelling interest in protecting same-sex commitment, he added.

Human Rights Commissions are becoming less and less aptly named, and are instead becoming mere tools in the hands of liberal interest groups to silence dissent.  Where the legislative avenue doesn’t work, these commissions and activist judges are the Left’s next front to get their way in social law when the people are clearly against them.

Technorati Tags: New Mexico Human Rights Commission, free speech, Christianity, religion, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, Elaine Huenins, Jon Huenins, "Vanessa Willock, Alliance Defense Fund, Ezra Levant, Mark Steyn, Eugene Volokh

But is the Left noticing?  While I was gone on Spring Break, a number of news stories came through showing both Hugo Chavez’s desperation for power and popularity in Venezuela, while the standard of living is predictably spiraling downward.

First, in response to a housing shortage, he declared that he’d nationalize the cement industry.  The first thing that happened as a result was that Cemex, the largest domestic supplier of cement in Venezuela, dropped almost 4% in Mexico’s stock market.  Apparently investors know a losing proposition when they see it.

Then, he renationalized the largest steelmaker in the country.  Their stock dropped 9% in New York.

And during all of this, the people are suffering.

Grimacing from contractions, expectant mother Castuca Marino had more on her mind than birth pangs. She was nervous about whether she and her newborn child would make it out of the hospital alive.

Interviewed as she stood in the emergency room of Concepcion Palacios Maternity Hospital here last week, Marino had heard news reports of six infant deaths there over a 24-hour period late last month. She knew that since the beginning of February, six mothers had died in the hospital during or after childbirth.

"What are poor people going to do?" said Marino, 20, as she was being admitted to this sprawling complex where, on average, 60 babies are born a day. "I’m just hoping that there are no complications and that everything goes well."
Palacios, Venezuela’s largest public maternity hospital and once the nation’s beacon of neonatal care, has fallen on hard times. Half of the anesthesiologists and pediatricians on staff two years ago have quit. Basic equipment such as respirators, ultrasound monitors and incubators are either broken or scarce. Six of 12 birth rooms have been shut.

On one day last month, five newborns were crowded into one incubator, said Dr. Jesus Mendez Quijada, a psychiatrist and Palacios staff member who is a past president of the Venezuelan Medical Federation.

The deaths of the six infants "were not a case of bad luck, but the consequence of an accumulation of circumstances that have created this alarming situation," Mendez said.

He and others say the problems at Concepcion Palacios are symptoms of a variety of ills that have beset the public healthcare system under leftist firebrand President Hugo Chavez. Cases of malaria nearly doubled between 1998, the year before Chavez took office, and 2007. Incidents of dengue fever more than doubled over the same period.

Chavez is trying to counter this with his own, parallel, socialized medicine program, but he’s keeping prying eyes away from the innards.  "Please ignore the man behind the curtain."

Inaugurated nationwide in 2003, Barrio Adentro initially was so popular with the poor that it helped Chavez win a crucial 2004 referendum and hold on to power. It has brought basic healthcare to the barrios, providing free exams and medicine as well as eye operations that have saved the sight of thousands.

But the system siphons resources and equipment away from the public hospitals, which have four-fifths of the nation’s 45,000 hospital beds and where the public still goes for emergency and maternity care, as well as for most major and elective surgeries.

The finances and organization of Barrio Adentro are "a black box and not transparent, so it’s impossible to analyze it for efficiency," said Dr. Marino Gonzalez, professor of public policy at Simon Bolivar University in Caracas, the capital.
A lack of openness has affected other facets of public health too. After the medical establishment blamed him for an outbreak of dengue fever last summer, Chavez halted weekly publication of an epidemiology report that for 50 years had tallied occurrences of infectious diseases nationwide.

Former Health Minister Rafael Orihuela says the loss of the weekly report has deprived the government of information needed for a quick response to outbreaks of disease.
"I am not talking about a failure of the government to adopt innovations in healthcare," said Orihuela, a Chavez critic. "I am talking about a failure to maintain basic healthcare standards."

And in the meantime, Chavez’s poll numbers are approaching George W. Bush lows…

Public support for President Hugo Chavez’s government has significantly declined, according to two polls published on Tuesday.

Some 34% of Venezuelans surveyed said they support Chavez’s government, down from a high of 67% in early 2005, to the lowest level in five years, a quarterly survey of 2,000 Venezuelans by Caracas pollster Datos found.

…and the economy is tanking.

Polls have consistently shown that rampant crime is a major concern to Venezuelans. Double-digit inflation has also accelerated, and sporadic shortages of milk and other food products persist.

While these polls are not as open as those in the US, they do show a general malaise among Venezuelans.  Bruce McQuain at Q&O believes that the power grabs are specifically because of the poll numbers.  Whether or not that’s true, the narrative of The Socialist Utopia(tm) and the bill of goods it sells continues on course, to the detriment of the Venezuelan people, and to the ignorance of Chavez’s buddies in the US.

Technorati Tags: Hugo Chavez, Venezuela, Cemex, socialism, socialized medicine

The Columbia Journalism Review, no member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy ™ they, is calling out the press corps on their (lack of) coverage of a pretty blatant lie.  First they repeat the context in which John McCain said we may stay in Iraq for 100 years, picking a number out of the air while noting our lengthy, continuing presence in S. Korea (~50 years) and Japan (~60).  But then came the lie about it.

It’s clear from this that McCain isn’t saying he’d support continuing the war for one hundred years, only that it might be necessary to keep troops there that long. That’s a very different thing. As he says, we’ve had troops in South Korea for over fifty years, but few people think that means we’re still fighting the Korean War.

Nevertheless, back in February, Obama said: “We are bogged down in a war that John McCain now suggests might go on for another hundred years.”

And, on a separate occasion: “(McCain) says that he is willing to send our troops into another hundred years of war in Iraq.”

But the big deal for the CJR is that journalists aren’t journaling.  If their job is to report the facts, they’re derelict.  Instead, they’re burying the lead or completely ignoring it, becoming co-dependents.

Still, some outlets continue to portray the issue as a he-said, she-said spat. A long takeout on the controversy by ABC News, opining that McCain’s comment “handed his Democratic opponents and war critics a weapon with which to bludgeon him,” is headlined: “McCain’s 100 Year Remark Hands Ammo to War Critics: McCain Haunted by January Remarks Suggesting 100 More Years in Iraq.” And today’s L.A. Times story, headlined “Obama, McCain Bicker Over Iraq,” is similarly neutral.

To be fair, the ABC News piece does provide the quote in its full context, giving enough information to allow conscientious readers to figure out the truth. That’s better than the L.A. Times piece, which says only that “McCain has stressed since then that he meant that U.S. troops might need to remain to support Iraqi forces, not to wage full-scale warfare”—instead of simply telling readers that it’s clear from the context that McCain did indeed mean that. Still, neither piece stated high up and unequivocally that Obama is distorting McCain’s words.

(Emphasis mine.)  When those who lean left can’t keep quiet about leftward bias in the press (and when they make their case in a journalism magazine), the game is up

Technorati Tags: media, Columbia Journalism Review, John McCain, Barack Obama, Iraq, media bias