Something worth thinking about:
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"As governors of the four most populous states, we represent over one-third of the nation's gross domestic product," the July 15 letter said pointedly. "Our states employ over 43 million people and represent the largest agricultural, manufacturing, technology, tourism and service-based economies in the country."
We spend little time watching for those downticket stars and less time recruiting stars for those downticket spots. Thus, when a name brand rolls around, we have no forceful candidate with which to counter it. This is the result.
Impeachment probe into Republican Connecticut Governor John Rowland begins.
I'm not sure if this is the first true Schwarzenegger fee increase, but it is a trickle in the inevitable flood to come.
When you add up the total tax burden (local, state and federal), and compare it to the same tax burden from five years ago, is anyone actually paying less real taxes?
If people remember the corruption scandal involving Connecticut Governor John Rowland (he had some state contractors do some home improvements, lied about it, and then said there was no problem when he told the truth), he's now invoked the Jimmy Swaggart defense: God has talked to him and said it's okay.
Quoting the "Christian author C. S. Lewis," he said that "in our adversity, God shouts to us."
"Needless to say, I am hearing him loud and clear," he said.
I've always been fascinated with the invocation of divine conversation as a symbol of authority. Among a certain brand of Christian, particularly the powerful kind who needs public support in times of scandal, God's a positively chatty fellow. God'll come down and tell you that you're doing alright, that you'll get through your strife, that you have friends that support you, that the people attacking you are wrong and misguided, and, also, a recipe for his banana bread. Sometimes you get his pineapple turnovers, depending on what your local grocer has in stock.
God is good.
There's a theological difference between talking to God and Talking To God. The first is almost the idea of opening your mind/heart and sort of soaking up the ambient Godly goodness - there's a certain bit of theological knowledge that we've been given, and God "speaking" to you in this manner is actually the amplification your own receptiveness towards the message that's already circulating. The second is the idea that you're privy to some new, directly related bit of Godly information - see Joseph Smith for an example.
The invocation of the former type of religious conversation is fairly common, but what I wonder is why it's actually supposed to hold weight. Even beyond the simple fact that I can claim I heard God last night and he told me to tell you that everyone should donate to us and USO Cares using our PayPal and Amazon buttons, it's a call to religious authority whose language (particularly in this case) doesn't just invoke the type A conversation with God (absorbing) but the spirit of type B conversation with God (direct receipt).
Rowland is not just saying that he has discerned from Christian tradition a method of dealing with his corruption scandal, which is how I read the C.S. Lewis quote he invokes: what God has said shouts to us. How Rowland reads it (not unlike a televangelist), is that God is in dialogue with him about this issue. Among certain branches of fundamentalists, direct conversation with God may not be so wild an occurence. But among the larger mainstream Christian community, a governor (or, for that matter, anybody) claiming to be in a form of dialogue with God would seem to be pretty big and potentially very offensive news, and therefore a really dumb thing to say.
This message sponsored by Jesus.
Arnold Schwarzenegger is promoting Terminator 4: Fiscal Insolvency with his current plan to save California from debt.
It seems to boil down to cutting a tax that brings in massive revenues, declaring a state of financial emergency that allows you to make cuts in other spending to cover some of the shortfall without legislative approval, and then placing the onus of covering the leftover $2.6 billion shortfall on the selfsame legislature whose heads you just went over. At the same time, completely negate any goodwill you had built up through the cutting of the car tax by making it readily obvious that you had no plan whatsoever to cover the revenue shortfall or to tighten up the state budget without taking extraordinary steps.
Why do I get the feeling that Arnold is putting California out of play for Bush as we speak?