This week’s feature group is The Chuck Wagon Gang.  As you recall, this group began in the 30’s and traveled all over the country and recorded for over 40 years with Columbia Records. They sold more than 37 million records, which many of the secular artists have not attained. They appeared in Carnegie Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, Grand Ole Opry and the Grand Ole Gospel Reunion. They are Gospel Music Hall of Fame members and are included in the Smithsonian Institution’s classic American recordings. The group left the road after the death of Roy Carter in 1997.

“Johnny, give your toy to your sister. You need to learn to share.”

“No, Annie, I don’t feel like taking you to the party tonight. It’s time you learn to give up your own desires once in a while.”

“We shouldn’t complain when our high taxes go to support the homeless. The Bible says we should sacrifice to help others.”

All three of these statements have something in common. Do you know what it is?

All three have a faulty understanding of the meaning of sacrifice. The first sentence sounds pretty innocuous and I’ve often heard it said to toddlers. The second statement is a little more problematic and you may have heard parents of teenagers say this. The third statement shows the full picture of misunderstanding biblical sacrifice.

As candidates come forward and election fever grips the people there are many questions about the Tea Party activities and how they might serve to shift the party powers in the Washington arena.  Allegations run rampant about problems within the Tea Party movement.  Are Republicans trying to take it over?  Is it being infiltrated by so-called Progressives?  Is it too representative of the fringe elements of our political system?  Is it in danger of becoming a third party spoiler that could split the conservative votes and allow the Democrats to continue their power monopoly? 

Can It Happen Here?

The $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act stimulus package passed last year pushed the annual fiscal deficit to $1.89 trillion, almost doubling the last Bush deficit of $1.02 trillion. Not that Bush has anything to brag about, the largest deficit in the Clinton years was $347 billion, and way back in the Nixon years the highest annual deficit was only $31 billion. More ominously, it looks like President Obama will chalk up another $1.8 trillion deficit this year. Our national debt is already $12.5 trillion. Yet the President is proposing healthcare, immigration, environmental, and education legislation that could send federal, state, and local government spending out of sight. 

Sacrificing National Security to Insane Political Correctness

With little more than a year in office, President Obama and his overwhelming Democratic majority in Congress have managed to seriously undermine the economy by implementing inflationary government spending programs that actually strangle long-term job creation, threaten devaluation of the dollar, and risk the enormous wealth-destroying pain of hyperinflation. Because his policies are based on economic theories that do not pass the common sense test and have proved failures in Europe, Japan, and past American administrations, we can expect things to get worse unless the people’s outrage puts out the lights of the Obama administration in November 2010 and 2012.

There are many people who say that our only serious immigration problem is that there are 12 million immigrants in the country who are technically illegal.  These people tend to believe that the only problem with 500,000 illegal immigrants per year is that they are, in liberal-speak,  “undocumented.” They believe that everything would be fine if legal immigration were made easier and employers could have more legal guest-workers. The problem with this is that our legal immigration levels are also unprecedented. Legal immigration is now averaging about 1.0 million per year. Previous to 1987, it averaged only 300,000 per year, and the rate of illegal immigration was much lower. According to Harvard labor economist, George Borjas, himself a Cuban immigrant, a total immigration level of about 500,000 per year is the maximum that will not hurt native-born Americans and their families.