Taking liberties with religion and politics

Religion, it would seem, has been playing a major role in the Grand Old Tea Party’s (GOTP) primary elections this year. For instance, a lot of the GOTP faithful, unhappy with the slate of candidates vying for the nomination of their party, have been praying daily for another candidate, any other candidate, for their consideration. Sadly, that prayer remains unanswered.

After being ambushed by former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum in caucuses in Colorado, Minnesota and in a non-binding primary in Missouri recently, former Mass. Governor Mitt Romney has been praying for a resurgence of his status as front-runner.

Mitt made the bad move of betting against the American auto workers when he wrote an op-ed piece on Nov. 18, 2008, that stated it would be better if GM, Ford and Chrysler went bankrupt. Because of this, he is in a tight battle in his home state of Michigan. After all, GM and Chrysler have rebounded nicely after getting a federal bailout crafted by President Obama, thereby saving a lot of American manufacturing jobs.

Mitt actually trailed his rival Santorum in Michigan for a bit, but thanks to some heavy spending, this race is now rated a tossup. But should Romney lose in Michigan, the race for the GOTP nomination would be put into turmoil, and that would be an answer to one of President Obama’s prayers.

The whole of the slate of GOTP candidates has taken up the cause of the Catholic Church, which runs some 12.7 percent of the nation’s hospitals. Because it is an employer, it was required by the Obama administration to provide access to contraceptives to its female employees through their health care coverage.

The Catholic Church, which looks on contraceptives unfavorably, immediately blasted the Obama administration for interfering in its religious liberty, despite the fact that 88% of Catholic women use contraceptives. It doesn’t mind providing Viagra for its male employees. It just doesn’t want to provide for any unintended consequences of these drugs.

Thankfully, the Obama administration answered the Church’s prayer by putting the onus of providing contraceptives to its female employees on the insurance companies, thereby allowing these women a solution to healthcare issues such as ovarian cysts that can be cured by the use of birth control pills.

One more religious conundrum has hit the Romney campaign, as if it didn’t have enough trouble. It turns out that the Mormon Church has been baptizing Jews posthumously by proxy and it doesn’t set well with one Elie Wiesel. And he has asked Mitt Romney to tell the Mormon Church to stop this practice.

It turns out that not only is the Mormon Church continuing to posthumously baptize those of the Jewish faith by proxy in violation of an agreement reached with Jewish leaders in 1995, but Elie Wiesel himself has been identified as being eligible for this practice after his death, even though he has made it clear he doesn’t want to be covered by this afterlife insurance offered by the Latter Day Saints. It would appear that Wiesel considers being baptized by proxy a violation of his religious liberty.

Mitt spoke in favor of the Catholic Church when it insisted its moral authority was being taken away by the Obama administration’s rule that required it to provide contraceptives as a part of its healthcare. Will he now speak up Wiesel as well?

To the Luddites among us

In 19^th century England, there arose a sort of social movement bent on reversing the gains of the industrial revolution. There were new ways of doing things in textiles and it was putting people out of work; people who’d been somebody under the old ways of doing things.

Of course, it was futile, because some things are inexorable. But that didn’t stop the disciples of one General Ned Ludd, a figure whose reputation was not unlike that of Robin Hood in his day. For this reason, those who sought to undo the advances in textiles bought about by mechanized looms became known as Luddites.

Luddites is a name now given to people who oppose new ideas or new ways of doing things that threaten either their livelihood or privileged positions they hold. We are seeing some latter day Luddites appear in Kentucky in response to the suggestion that the University of Pikeville be made a state-supported institution of higher learning.
They come from both governmental and educational backgrounds, but they have one thing in common: They are opposed to establishing a new, state supported school for southeastern Kentucky.

Those from government who oppose a state supported UPike include both members of the state assembly and various county fiscal courts. Let’s say they are well-represented by state Senator DamonThayor from Scott County. Senator Thayor, like the members of the various fiscal courts who are also opposed, is concerned about the funds that will be needed for the new-look UPike. There’s not enough now, he says, for those schools out there.

Senator Thayor might remember when then-Governor Martha Layne Collins proposed spending $125 million dollars to bring Toyota to Georgetown. This proposal also generated a lot of opposition, but he’d have to agree that the much smaller amount of money that would be needed for a state-supported school in this area could also hold the same promises for Eastern Kentucky that Toyota held for Scott County. And may I add that that $125 million was money well spent.

Senator Thayor also mentioned it was the strong Eastern Kentucky powerbase that was behind this proposed new state-supported school. Really? A strong Eastern Kentucky power base? Listen, if that was the case, Thayor and the rest of the Golden Triangle would be a lot poorer, because a strong Eastern Kentucky power base would have kept 100% of the coal severance tax in the counties that generated it.

From the educational opponents, none is perhaps more vocal than Morehead State University. Both the Board of Regents and the Rowan County Fiscal Court have passed resolutions opposing a state-supported UPike and for the same reasons. They see the new school taking students from Morehead, and they don’t like it.

But it isn’t that the University of Pikeville wants to rob them of any potential students from this area. Those who have the wherewithal can continue their two hour plus commute to that campus. It is those students who might not go to college at all because of the distance to schools like Morehead UPike is after.

And if the new state-supported school manages to increase the percentage of area residents with a college education to the level found elsewhere around the state, then the funds needed for a state-supported school, like the money spent for the Toyota plant in Georgetown, would also be money well-spent

Hemp to the rescue-almost

Coal isn’t the only iconic Kentucky industry that is troubled by the way the Obama administration does business. State Rep. Wilson Stone, D-Scottsville, acting on rumors that the Obama administration is seeking to exclude tobacco in trade talks has introduced a non-binding resolution in the state Senate asking that tobacco be included along with other agricultural commodities in any future foreign trade agreements. He is joined in this effort by State Sen. Paul Hornback, R-Shelbyville. Both of these gentlemen are concerned that the state's tobacco farmers and the state itself would take a hit if tobacco is excluded.

With all due respect to both lawmakers, I think Kentucky’s tobacco has killed enough people. We certainly don’t need to be exporting death to other countries. And it’s plain enough that the era of tobacco as an acceptable crop has long since passed. I would like to suggest to these solons that if they really want to do something to help the state’s farmers, they join with Kentucky Commissioner of Agriculture James Comer as he and several of these gentlemen’s colleagues in the state assembly attempt to persuade the federal government to end its prohibition against industrial hemp.

There is another commodity that Kentucky exports, in a manner of speaking; it’s cast-off plastic. It isn’t sent to any particular country, and Kentucky isn’t alone in exporting it. But all the scrap plastic that doesn’t make its way into our landfills eventually makes its way into the waterways and then to one of two great floating garbage patches in either the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans.

The first one of these was discovered in the Pacific by a yachtsman, Captain Charles Moore in 1997. His discovery has since been dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In 2010, its equivalent was found in the Atlantic, south of Bermuda. Not that you’d actually see much of either patch if you were right in them. They both consist of small bits of plastic debris that are suspended below the surface.

Not that all is lost, not by any means. As reported in the San Jose State University’s student newspaper, the SJSU Today, a junior business major, J.D. Leadam, may have come up with a solution to part of this problem. In the Silicon Valley Innovation Challenge held on December 12 of last year, Mr. Leadam won several awards, including the people’s choice award and an award for the most innovative idea for his suggestion to replace regular single use, non-biodegradable water bottles with biodegradable plastic water bottles made from hemp.

Well, you know, the sad part about this bright young man’s idea is, it isn’t workable in the U. S. Hemp, you know, is still illegal to produce here. After all, according to federal law, hemp is the same thing as marijuana, and marijuana is a schedule one drug, just like heroin. So you can only imagine that if farmers are allowed to grow industrial hemp, why, right away, you’d have young people everywhere shooting up hemp on the main streets.

Because of the ridiculousness of this reasoning, Mr. Leadam is going to have to look to the Chinese to make his idea work. China, you know, is one of several enlightened countries that still produces industrial hemp. We even import it from them.

Too bad, too; otherwise we might have profited from this idea here in Kentucky.

A tried but not so true strategy

The Grand Old Tea Party (GOTP) probably never had any idea that someone named Barack Hussein Obama could ever be elected President. President Obama explained it this way: “…my second name came from someone who obviously never thought I’d ever run for President.”

Once the unthinkable happened, though, the GOTP came up with an ambitious goal ably enunciated by Kentucky’s Senior Senator, Mitch McConnell, who said it should be the aim of the GOTP to limit President Obama to one term.

And the GOTP had some good ideas as to how that could be achieved. One way was to play on the fears of its base by playing up the scarier aspects of the new President and what better way to do that than to concentrate on that scary middle name that even the President didn’t seem too willing to embrace publicly; yes, Hussein, as in Saddam Hussein. Oh, there was a good guy named Hussein; the one-time King of Jordan-Hussein bin Talal-who was nothing if not a strong ally of the U. S. But let’s face it, the bad guy Saddam left a far stronger impression, even though he, too, was an ally of the U. S. in the early years of the Reagan presidency.

Then there was that similarity of the name, Barack Obama to that of Osama bin Laden, and anyone with such a name had to be a Muslim. And we all know Muslims is the bad guys, even though we buy a lot of our poison of choice from them; petroleum.

Included in the scare campaign, too, was the idea that the President wasn’t even an American citizen; that he’d forged his Hawaiian birth certificate because his real place of birth was Kenya.

Well, we all know how that turned out. Everything the GOTP used as an assumption to promote ill-will towards President Obama has been disproven. More importantly, even the assumptions that he couldn’t handle the affairs of his office have been shown to be wrong as well, as the survivors of many an Al Qaida official could tell you.

One joke told by Obama supporters goes something like this: How would life have been different if Obama had lost the last campaign? Osama bin Laden would still be here and General Motors and Chrysler wouldn’t.

With all that, you’d think this plan of attack would have been dropped by now. But that isn’t so. Here in Coal Country, where Obama was beaten badly every time his name appeared on the ballot, the various coal associations are going with their first plan; identify Obama with a war on coal purportedly being waged by the EPA.

Explicit in this attack is the idea that the war on coal has cost the area jobs. But according to a couple of stories in the Appalachian Express, the number of jobs in the coal industry is at its highest level since 1997.

Now that had to be explained somehow, so in the second story, some coal officials explained the extra jobs were necessitated by unnecessary federal regulations, forgetting that ignoring “unnecessary federal regulations” was what cost 29 miners their lives in Montcoal, WV.

Not that anything would actually get Obama any more votes here in Coal Country, though. We don’t want any outsiders telling us what to do, unless they are coal producers. Them we’re okay with.