Author: Julia

vote your deepest values

From the Washington Post:

The Internal Revenue Service has warned a prominent liberal church that it could lose its tax-exempt status because of an anti-war sermon a guest preacher gave on the eve of the 2004 presidential election, according to church officials.

So…enlisting churches to help with the re-election of the president is okay.

Giving a sermon about the fundamental tenets of Christianity — “Thou shalt not kill” and all that — is not?

I’m not sure about The Middle America Chronicle’s assertion that as long as a church “doesn’t specifically say “Vote Republican” or “Elect Democrats,” it shouldn’t be intimidated by the IRS,” but certainly a church’s tax-exempt status shouldn’t be called into question simply for preaching a sermon that extrapolates values to real world issues.

The sermon is archived on the church’s website. It is certainly critical of Bush, and does say things like, “When you go into the voting booth on Tuesday, take with you all that you know about Jesus, the peacemaker. Take all that Jesus means to you. Then vote your deepest values.” At no point, though, does it actually endorse Kerry or any part of his “plan”.

Clearly I’m not an expert on tax-exempt rules, and I am probably a bit biased in this particular case, but I think this is okay. It’s certainly a far cry from paying for an advertisement, which the Post cites as an example of activity conducted by a church that previously lost its status. And I’m sure there were much more blatant endorsements coming from less prominent pulpits that Sunday.

cell phone meltdown

The display on my cell phone died a few weeks ago. If you’ve sent me a text message in the last few weeks and I didn’t reply, well, that’s why.

Anyway, I now have a new phone, which I thought was going to fix everything, but it turns out that the vast majority of the numbers I had were stored to the phone itself, rather than to my SIM card. So I now have about five phone numbers.

I’m going through old emails to retrieve as many numbers as I can, but in the meantime, if you want me to have your phone number, please email it to me.

meager little great paradigm shift

I’m posting from Gathering Grounds, a coffeehouse here in Westminster. It’s a cute little place, consisting of four tables, four couches, and more high school outcasts than I’ve seen since the Wire. It’s nothing like the Wire, except that it does seem to be a “gathering ground” for the aforementioned teenagers. It’s pretty low key and relatively quiet, and no one seems to be doing anything remotely close to crazy. But anyway, I should be working on my novel.

I just wanted to draw your attention to this article about the close of the Dover Intelligent Design trial. The Washington Post also pointed out a few days ago that the Dover school board is up for re-election on Tuesday. I’ll be interested to see how that turns out.

stuck in the middle with you, babe

Here’s an interesting take on the current landscape. While I haven’t read anything else by this guy, and have the feeling our perspectives diverge, he (and, perhaps, more relevantly, Bull Moose) raises an important issue. Does the Democratic party really want to cast itself as being gullible and easily manipulated?

Clearly there was misinformation in the months leading up to the war, and it certainly appears that the Bush administration was gathering and presenting information with a clear objective of going into Iraq. But can the Democrats really claim that they weren’t at all responsible for what happened? And how would we be feeling about this if things in Iraq had gone more smoothly?

pa pay raise repealed

Apparently the PA state legislature is listening to its constituents. Kind of.

After months of angry talk show hosts and voters expressing their, well, anger with the pay raise the PA legislature gave themselves over the summer, both houses have passed bills to repeal it. It ain’t over yet, but it’s a step.

Here are the relevant stats (in my opinion):

Pre-raise, the base pay for a legislator was $69,647; top leaders made $108,722.

Post-raise base pay was $81,050; top leaders made $145,533.

According to the Patriot, the raises made PA legislators the second best paid in the nation.

But wait, you might be thinking, how can they give themselves immediate raises mid-term?

The raises weren’t in the form of actual raises because, you’re right, that would be illegal. Instead, they authorized monthly “unvouchered expenses.” That is, every month a legislator can say, “I spent a bunch of money, you need to reimburse me,” but doesn’t have to provide any kind of proof of that. It’s understood that they don’t actually have to spend any money.

So whether or not the PA legislators deserve raises, this was not a cool way to go about giving them to themselves.

closed senate

Okay, so the Democrats forced the Senate into a closed session to discuss pre-war intelligence failures. I can’t really not comment. But while it is exciting to see the Dems do something, I’m not sure that they, well, did anything — other than piss off Bill Frist. Not that there’s no satisfaction there.

On the other hand, it is understandable that he would be upset, since he didn’t realize that anyone had been concerned until yesterday.

“Really, I think it was not a good thing to do. … I think we’d have been a lot better off if Democratic Leader Reid had just walked down the hall to Senator Frist’s office and said he had a concern instead of going through that shenanigan yesterday,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions , R-Ala.

Here’s my favorite article about it.