A group of pastors has decided to get engaged with politics, in defiance of tax laws.
Defying a federal law that prohibits U.S. clergy from endorsing political candidates from the pulpit, an evangelical Christian minister told his congregation Sunday that voting for Sen. Barack Obama would be evidence of “severe moral schizophrenia.”
The Rev. Ron Johnson Jr. told worshipers that the Democratic presidential nominee’s positions on abortion and gay partnerships exist “in direct opposition to God’s truth as He has revealed it in the Scriptures.” Johnson showed slides contrasting the candidates’ views but stopped short of endorsing Obama’s Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain.
Johnson and 32 other pastors across the country set out Sunday to break the rules, hoping to generate a legal battle that will prompt federal courts to throw out a 54-year-old ban on political endorsements by tax-exempt houses of worship.
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Each campaign season brings allegations that a member of the clergy has crossed a line set out in a 1954 amendment to the tax code that says nonprofit, tax-exempt entities may not “participate in, or intervene in . . . any political campaign on behalf of any candidate for public office.”
This is just stupid. There’s a very simple rule in place, here. If you’re a non-profit, like a church, and you take a tax exemption, you can’t participate in politics. Why? Because we don’t want to give tax breaks for the expression of political opinion. So the solution for pastors who want to speak out about candidates is simple: start paying taxes.
Personally, I don’t see why churches are tax-exempt anyway, but as long as they are, they need to abide by the rules just like everyone else.
Peter Suderman links to this article, which indicates that Sarah Palin’s preparation for the debate is less about coaching and more about cramming:
Ms. Palin has traveled with a briefing team since Sept. 10. Two people close to the campaign, addressing her difficulties, said she had been stuffed with facts as if preparing for an oral exam and had become nervous and unnatural in the few interviews.
Advisers said she was a diligent worker and was frequently up until the small hours of the morning in her hotel room trying to cram as much information as possible before the debate.
“I think she has to be careful not to be overprogrammed for the debate,” said Robert T. Bennett, the Ohio Republican chairman. “I think she’s a lot brighter than people are giving her credit for.”
Like Suderman, I don’t think that Sarah Palin isn’t bright. I’m sure that she is. It’s just that nothing in her history to date has shown that she has a lot of interest in national issues. Which is fine for the governor of Alaska. It’s a bit more worrisome when you’re a potential president of the United States.
Put it this way, one thing I learned from college debate is that a reasonably bright person can generally manage to sound at least competent talking about issues they don’t really understand. I recall one case my partner and I debated where the other team argued against dollarizing the Ecuadorian sucre. We didn’t know a damn thing about the economic or political situation in Ecuador, or a whole lot about monetary policy. I doubt I could have told you the name of Ecuador’s president, let alone the finance minister. But we had some basic econ and game theory down, and I knew a bit about the Mexican peso crisis of the mid-90s, and so we were able to bluff our way through and win the round. The kind of mess we’ve seen in Palin’s interviews, then, can’t really be ascribed to an ignorance of details that could be remedied with a few more flash-card sessions. As Jeff Goldberg puts it, the problem isn’t so much that she doesn’t have the right answers, it’s that she doesn’t seem to have enough of a grasp on the questions to bluff her way through with something vague but halfway cogent sounding. This suggests that she’s either profoundly ignorant on economic and foreign policy questions, in a deep and architectonic way unlikely to be remedied by a few briefings geared toward filling in the lacunae, or that she’s just not terribly bright.
I don’t think that the latter is true. I just don’t think that her background has given her the skills to be able to discuss issues in this type of format. Really, I think Julian is more on point here:
The simplest inference from the available data points, it would seem, is exactly the opposite of the theory behind the calls to “Free Sarah”: At the end of the day, Palin is still basically a local TV news personality. Give her a prompter loaded with punchy zingers, and she’ll deliver it smoothly and with verve. It’s when she’s forced to get interactive that she runs into trouble.
This is, of course, more or less the line conservative have long been pushing about Obama: He’s great with a prepared text, much more uneven in debates. Obama’s problem in that context, though, seems to be a lingering professorial tendency to want to think through his answer in realtime, covering all the angles as though the exchange were some sort of Socratic inquiry, when a well-packaged talking point would better fit the bill. This, to put it as mildly and kindly as possible, would not appear to be Palin’s problem.
I’ve waffled on the bailout, but the more facts I’ve learned about the current state of the financial sector, the more I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that this is one of those projects so big and with so much at risk that government intervention is justifiable.
Too big to fail is bad public policy. But I’m persuaded that the very real prospect of too many to fail presents an entirely different question. We are faced with a situation in which a systemic credit freeze will take down not just one or two banks, but many, including not just Wall Street but also local and regional banks. In turn, as more banks fail, it will become increasingly difficult for non-financial businesses to borrow. The ripple effect could be disastrous:
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This is why the “freedom to fail” is a good thing when we’re talking about one firm or one industry and a nightmare when we’re talking about the entire economy.
Now, let’s get this straight. As proposed late last night, the bailout legislation isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty good and it will do what is needed: namely, prevent a credit freeze. Let’s also get another thing straight–once the present crisis is over, it’s time to look at how, exactly, this happened. My own reading of the situation suggests that there was a lot of fraud involved. Fraud by mortgage brokers, fraud by banks, fraud by the creator of particular instruments, and fraud by homeowners themselves (especially on “stated income” mortgages. We need to come up with ways to ensure that there’s enough transparency in the system that this type of industry-wide fraud can’t happen, while at the same time making sure the paperwork burdens don’t just completely slow down the markets.
That’s next month’s task. My bet is, though, that Congress won’t look much into it.
“The only good news for McCain-Palin is that the expectations are now absurdly low. Palin can ‘win’ tomorrow night’s debate with Joe Biden simply by coming across as something other than an absolute moron. I’m not at all confident at this juncture, however, that she can clear that hurdle.”
– James Joyner
Ezra Klein has a great rundown on John McCain’s completely irresponsible plan to eliminate the employer tax deduction for health care.
The first policy is the tax hike. Currently, employer health benefits are tax deductible, as they have been since the Second World War. This amounts to a huge subsidy for employer-based health insurance and is the reason why the workplace is at the center of our health insurance system. Eliminating that subsidy will make employer-based health insurance $3.6 trillion more expensive. The effects of that on the health insurance market will be felt in full: Huge numbers of employers will stop offering such insurance. Many more will sharply raise the worker contribution, or drastically cut benefits. In Health Affairs, Thomas Buchmueller, Sherry A. Glied, Anne Royalty, and Katherine Swartz estimate that a full 20 million Americans will lose their current coverage as a result of the tax hike. 20 million. And they say that’s a low estimate: “The effect could be much larger…these estimates account only for the price effect of eliminating the tax preference; they do not account for the number of low-wage workers who might lose employer-sponsored insurance when employers are no longer bound by the nondiscrimination rules, nor do they capture the impact of breaking up existing risk pools.”
While I am generally sympathetic to means to provide for a more market-oriented health care system, I really think there needs to be a smooth transition through such reforms. McCain’s policy is more like a trap door, one which could cause millions of people to lose easy access to health care and increase costs for everyone else. Not a good plan.
Tina Fey brought back her dead-on Sarah Palin to Saturday Night Live yesterday with this hilarious take on Palin’s interviews with Katie Couric earlier this week:
What is actually kind of disturbing about this is that Fey used gestures and whole phrases from Palin’s actual interview, and it just fits right in with the parody.
Quick question: has anyone actually seen Sarah Palin and Tina Fey in the same room together? Just curious…
Because I’m a big political dork, I’ve been spending the better part of an hour playing around with Google In Quotes, which provides excerpts and links to full-length articles about what Obama and McCain said about various topics. It also has a little “spin” button (ha ha) so that you can riffle through some quotes real quick. Fun stuff. Of course, at this rate, I imagine that it’ll be less than a year before we see Google Blogger, which will take headlines from Google News and parse together sentences from blog posts to generate instant commentary on the days events without human intervention…
“John McCain showed up without running mate Sarah Palin, which is a shame because she actually has a lot of experience with financial matters. You know, she lives right next to a bank.”
– Jimmy Kimmel
Personally, I saw the debate as being pretty sober and surprisingly substantive, given the limits of the format. From my perspective, I saw it as a tie, in the sense that neither candidate made any real major mistakes, and both of them gave (as much as a politician can) substantive answers to the questions. Naturally, given that I’m an Obama supporter, I thought that Obama “won”, in the sense that he has the better positions, but I really thought of it as a tie. Which is really a win for Obama, given that he came in with the lead.
As it turns out, though, this was a much bigger win for Obama. Most independents and undecided voters saw the debate as either an Obama win or a tie. Which is huge for Obama.
Having spent some time thinking about it, I think I’ve figured out why this might be. Obama’s the new guy. The guy that all the ads show as a “celebrity” and an “empty suit.” But at the debate tonight, Obama showed himself to have a great command of the issues, he was smooth, he was cool, and he was gracious. And, well, he could pronounce the names of foreign countries and leaders properly, while McCain stammered over some of them. In other words, Obama showed that he wasn’t just a celebrity. He’s a guy who knows what he’s talking about.
Having known that the whole time, that made it pretty much a tie performance for me. But for someone who doesn’t pay obsessively-compulsively pay attention to the campaign like I do, that must have been a pretty big difference, and I imagine that surprise must have registered itself in an Obama “win.”
So John McCain’s in a bind, isn’t he? Having said that he wouldn’t debate tonight without a bailout plan being agreed upon, he undoubtedly thought that Obama would follow suit. Instead, Obama called his bluff, and polls are overwhelmingly behind the idea that the debate should go on. So what to do, what to do?
Personally, if I were advising the Obama campaign, I would suggest that Senator Obama offer a magnanimous gesture that allows John McCain to save face. And that gesture is this:
Postpone tonight’s debate and hold it October 2, the date currently slotted for the Vice-Presidential Debate.
And hold the Vice-Presidential Debate tonight.
That should clear things up, right? Biden and Palin are running for vice-president, a job which might entail becoming President in the middle of a sudden crisis at very short notice. What better way to give them a dry run of the scenario than to have them fill in for Obama and McCain in the debate on short notice? This way, there’s still a debate tonight, McCain doesn’t have to lose face, and there’s no worries about rescheduling the VP debate.
This is a win-win scenario, right? I mean, what possible reason could McCain have to not let this scenario move forward?
