Tax Day: Tea Party

FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) - Protesters began gathering at state Capitols and in neighborhoods and town squares across the country Wednesday to kick off a series of tax-day protests designed to echo the rebellion of the Boston Tea Party. Demonstrators said they're steamed about government spending since President Barack Obama took office.

The rallies were being held everywhere from Kentucky, which just passed tax increases on cigarettes and alcohol, to South Carolina, where the governor has repeatedly criticized the $787 billion economic stimulus package Congress passed earlier this year. Large protests also were expected in California and New York.

In Atlanta, thousands of people were expected to gather on the steps of the Georgia Capitol, where Fox News Channel conservative pundit Sean Hannity was set to broadcast his show Wednesday night. He's been promoting the show on Fox.

The tea parties have also been promoted by FreedomWorks, a conservative nonprofit advocacy group based in Washington and led by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas.

In Hartford, Conn., police estimated 3,000 people showed up at the state Capitol, where nearly two decades earlier an estimated 40,000 had converged in protest after the state enacted its personal income tax.

This time, many carried makeshift pitchforks and signs with messages aimed at the Democrats who control Congress and the White House.

"There needs to be some common sense restored to government at every level, Washington, in our state and in our towns," said Faith Burns of East Granby, who rang a school bell and wore a sandwich board with a picture of a pig in a circle crossed out. "And besides it's so much gosh-darned fun to ring this bell."

In Des Moines, Iowa, more than 1,000 people gathered on the steps of the state Capitol wearing red shirts proclaiming "revolution is brewing."

"The system is severely broken and we the people let it get that way," said Des Moines businessman Doug Burnett. "What can we do? My answer is revolution."

Organizers say the movement has developed organically through online social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter and through exposure on Fox News.

And while they insist it's a nonpartisan effort, it has been seized on by many prominent Republicans who view it as a promising way for the party to reclaim its momentum.

"It is a nonpartisan mass organizing effort comprised of people unhappy with size of government. All you have to be is a mildly awake Republican candidate for office to get in front of that parade," said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform.

The movement has attracted prominent Republicans, some considering a 2012 presidential bid.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich planned to address a tea party in a New York City park Wednesday night. His advocacy group, americansolutions.com, has partnered with tea party organizers to get word to the group's members.

"It's the Reagan coalition reorganizing itself," Gingrich spokesman Rick Sawyer said.

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, another likely 2012 GOP presidential hopeful, planned to attend tea parties in Columbia and Charleston. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal sent an e-mail to his supporters, letting them know about tea parties taking place throughout the state.

At a rally in Madison, Wis., Jean Snyder of Milwaukee held a sign showing the U.S. Capitol as a pirate ship, with taxpayers walking the plank into a sea of debt.

In Boston, a few hundred protesters gathered on the Boston Common—a short distance from the original Tea Party—with some dressed in Revolutionary War garb and carrying signs that said "Barney Frank, Bernie Madoff: And the Difference Is?" and "D.C.: District of Communism."

Event coordinator Christen Varley, a conservative Catholic Republican, said she was thrilled with the turnout.

"Personally, I envisioned me and 100 friends on the steps of the Statehouse," she said. "I never saw this coming."

And at a midday rally in downtown Louisville, Laura Watkins pushed her 2-year-old daughter Zoe in a stroller with a sign strapped to the front reading "My Piggy Bank is not Your ATM." Watkins said she joined the protest after reading about it online and hearing about it on Fox News.

"I don't want my daughter to inherit all this debt," she said.- AP

Here in Louisville (Below)

Colbert Report!

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Bart Ehrman
colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

Jesus Betrayed and Arrested.

Matthew 26:36-56

Jesus Prays in Gethsemane

36 Then Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to his disciples, “Sit here, while I go over there and pray.” 37 And taking with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, he began to be sorrowful and troubled. 38 Then he said to them,“My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here, and watch with me.” 39 And going a little farther he fell on his face and prayed, saying, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.” 40 And he came to the disciples and found them sleeping. And he said to Peter, “So, could you not watch with me one hour? 41 Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” 42 Again, for the second time, he went away and prayed, “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done.” 43 And again he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were heavy. 44 So, leaving them again, he went away and prayed for the third time, saying the same words again. 45 Then he came to the disciples and said to them, “Sleep and take your rest later on. See, the hour is at hand, and the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. 46 Rise, let us be going; see, my betrayer is at hand.”

Betrayal and Arrest of Jesus

47 While he was still speaking, Judas came, one of the twelve, and with him a great crowd with swords and clubs, from the chief priests and the elders of the people. 48 Now the betrayer had given them a sign, saying, “The one I will kiss is the man; seize him.” 49 And he came up to Jesus at once and said, “Greetings, Rabbi!” And he kissed him. 50 Jesus said to him, “Friend, do what you came to do.” Then they came up and laid hands on Jesus and seized him. 51 And behold, one of those who were with Jesus stretched out his hand and drew his sword and struck the servant of the high priest and cut off his ear. 52 Then Jesus said to him, “Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword. 53 Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? 54 But how then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so?” 55 At that hour Jesus said to the crowds, “Have you come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs to capture me? Day after day I sat in the temple teaching, and you did not seize me. 56 But all this has taken place that the Scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled.” Then all the disciples left him and fled.

Here we see Christ falling on his face in Matthew 26:39. In this typical posture of abject humility in prayer, Jesus lays his life before his Father in complete honesty and surrender. Jesus is facing the most severe temptation of his life, at the moment when he is ready to accomplish the culmination of his life's mission - to bear the sins of the world which is what the cup signifies.

Nightline Debate: Does Satan Exist? Part 1-10

Just in case you missed it the debate is up on Youtube so I posted the 10 part debate below. Its really good Mark Driscoll did amazing.

Iraqis Snap Up Hummers as Icons of Power

BAGHDAD — Ali al-Hilli is a happy man. He has a wife and three kids, a prosperous business and — this is the important part — a Hummer in his driveway.

In a country with at least 20,000 Humvees and a war-weary population, who would think there would be a market for the civilian version?

Mr. Hilli did. “I just knew there’d be a huge demand for this in Baghdad,” he said. Now Mr. Hilli and his brother Dhafir run a car dealership specializing in Hummers. It is called, in English, “Al Sultan for Trading Cars.”

An American diplomat declared that it was the biggest Hummer dealership outside of the United States, a fact that seemed too good to check. Unfortunately, Mr. Hilli has checked. “It’s the biggest one in Baghdad, though, that’s for sure,” he said.

Never mind that General Motors, Hummer’s struggling parent company, may scrap the brand or sell it to someone else.

“Iraqis love them because they’re really a symbol of power,” said Mr. Hilli, a chubby 37-year-old who could not stop chuckling. Nonetheless, he spoke with authority, since he was his own first customer.

Hummers in Baghdad are symbols of much more besides: increasing security, returning normality and a yearning for the trappings of sovereignty. Mr. Hilli allowed that there was something else, too, a little more indefinable, which in Arabic is “hasad thukuri,” and which in English will be translated later.

The Hilli brothers first got their coals-to-Newcastle brainstorm a couple of years ago, during the height of the sectarian violence. “Even if we imported these back then, no one would have dared to drive around in them,” Ali al-Hilli said.

Insurgents were taking aim at anything that looked foreign, let alone an analogue of an American military vehicle.

Then the war started quieting down and, about a year ago, they found an online auction for repossessed nearly new cars in the United States. They put in the winning bid on a Humvee H3, which they air-freighted in through Dubai, followed by a second one. “Everyone thought we were crazy,” Mr. Hilli said. “Or they thought we were Iraqi government officials,” who can most easily afford such cars.

At first the Hummers sat on the lot and attracted little interest. “We took such a risk, it’s such an expensive car, and all our money was in it,” said Dhafir al-Hilli, 38. So the brothers got in the cars and began driving around their Kadhimiya neighborhood, a largely Shiite area that had so often been a target of terrorists that it was walled off and relatively safe.

“It helped that in Kadhimiya we didn’t have such a bad opinion of the Americans,” Ali al-Hilli said. “People often asked the soldiers to stop their Humvees so they could get their pictures in front of them.”

Idling through the city’s relentless traffic jams, the Hummers were their own advertising campaign. “We couldn’t go a block without people stopping us to ask, ‘What is it?’ ” Mr. Hilli said. “We looked like astronauts from outer space.”

Soon conditions improved enough to drive all over the city. Hummer H3s began rumbling off the lot, at 50 to 60 grand apiece, in dollars and all the money down, fully loaded. (No one wanted them any other way.)

Canary yellow and fire engine red proved the favorite colors.

“No one complains that they remind them of the American military,” Mr. Hilli said. “It’s much more trouble driving around in a Samand.” Made in Iran, the car is the surrogate object of many Iraqis’ scorn for Iran itself.

The Hillis said they had sold more than 20 H3s, about one every 10 days, even in the midst of plummeting oil prices and economic turmoil. Their biggest customers tend to be government officials. That is not necessarily a sign of corruption, since the new government has voted itself enormous pay raises.

Iraqis are paying historically high prices for gasoline. At $1.40 a gallon, that would not break any American hearts, but not long ago it was 19 cents. The increase had no effect on sales of these notorious gas-guzzlers, though. “If you can afford this car, you don’t care how much gasoline costs,” Mr. Hilli said.

Iraqis love their cars. “In Iraq, people judge you by your car, and you’re not a man without one,” he said. When it comes to Hummers, he added, they will nearly always be bigger than anyone else’s vehicle. That is where “hasad thukuri” comes in; roughly translated, it means “penis envy.”

In prewar years, red-blooded Iraqis lusted after the Mercedes, especially the costly Ghost sedan, which only the best-heeled Baathists could afford. During the early war years, it was the nimble little BMW 3 Series, until that car got a bad rap as the insurgents’ favorite getaway car. (At one time, black BMWs were actually banned from the roads.) “Now Iraqis are obsessed with the Hummer,” Dhafir al-Hilli said.

It beats being obsessed with, say, car bombs. Who knows, the Hillis may yet see the day when there are even more Hummers on the streets than Humvees. - New York Times.

I was reading the New York Times and I thought this article was very interesting. Sense we live in a world that tells us that SUV's are unpopular and that everyone wants and needs a earth friendly car.

Why I Hate Twitter!

Twitter is overrated! Therefore I will never get it!

TIME lists Calvinism as one of the Top 10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now.

If you really want to follow the development of conservative Christianity, track its musical hits. In the early 1900s you might have heard "The Old Rugged Cross," a celebration of the atonement. By the 1980s you could have shared the Jesus-is-my-buddy intimacy of "Shine, Jesus, Shine." And today, more and more top songs feature a God who is very big, while we are...well, hark the David Crowder Band: "I am full of earth/ You are heaven's worth/ I am stained with dirt/ Prone to depravity."

Calvinism is back, and not just musically. John Calvin's 16th century reply to medieval Catholicism's buy-your-way-out-of-purgatory excesses is Evangelicalism's latest success story, complete with an utterly sovereign and micromanaging deity, sinful and puny humanity, and the combination's logical consequence, predestination: the belief that before time's dawn, God decided whom he would save (or not), unaffected by any subsequent human action or decision.

Calvinism, cousin to the Reformation's other pillar, Lutheranism, is a bit less dour than its critics claim: it offers a rock-steady deity who orchestrates absolutely everything, including illness (or home foreclosure!), by a logic we may not understand but don't have to second-guess. Our satisfaction — and our purpose — is fulfilled simply by "glorifying" him. In the 1700s, Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards invested Calvinism with a rapturous near mysticism. Yet it was soon overtaken in the U.S. by movements like Methodism that were more impressed with human will. Calvinist-descended liberal bodies like the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) discovered other emphases, while Evangelicalism's loss of appetite for rigid doctrine — and the triumph of that friendly, fuzzy Jesus — seemed to relegate hard-core Reformed preaching (Reformed operates as a loose synonym for Calvinist) to a few crotchety Southern churches.

No more. Neo-Calvinist ministers and authors don't operate quite on a Rick Warren scale. But, notes Ted Olsen, a managing editor at Christianity Today, "everyone knows where the energy and the passion are in the Evangelical world" — with the pioneering new-Calvinist John Piper of Minneapolis, Seattle's pugnacious Mark Driscoll and Albert Mohler, head of the Southern Seminary of the huge Southern Baptist Convention. The Calvinist-flavored ESV Study Bible sold out its first printing, and Reformed blogs like Between Two Worlds are among cyber-Christendom's hottest links.

Like the Calvinists, more moderate Evangelicals are exploring cures for the movement's doctrinal drift, but can't offer the same blanket assurance. "A lot of young people grew up in a culture of brokenness, divorce, drugs or sexual temptation," says Collin Hansen, author of Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist's Journey with the New Calvinists. "They have plenty of friends: what they need is a God." Mohler says, "The moment someone begins to define God's [being or actions] biblically, that person is drawn to conclusions that are traditionally classified as Calvinist." Of course, that presumption of inevitability has drawn accusations of arrogance and divisiveness since Calvin's time. Indeed, some of today's enthusiasts imply that non-Calvinists may actually not be Christians. Skirmishes among the Southern Baptists (who have a competing non-Calvinist camp) and online "flame wars" bode badly.

Calvin's 500th birthday will be this July. It will be interesting to see whether Calvin's latest legacy will be classic Protestant backbiting or whether, during these hard times, more Christians searching for security will submit their wills to the austerely demanding God of their country's infancy.- TIME

Ephesians 1:5-7

He predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace.

Galatians 4: 16

I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, though he is the owner of everything, but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by his father. In the same way we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of women, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because your are sons, God has sent the Spirit of the Son into our hearts, crying, "Abba! Father!" So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.