Let's Celebrate the World Congress of Families

With Google in trouble for skipping observance of Memorial Day—we only do light-hearted observances, they say—here’s a light-hearted event for them to celebrate.

It’s the World Congress of Families, being held in Warsaw on May 11-13, 2007.

I know. In your dreams. Especially given the attitude of Ms Magazine.

But lefty outfits like Google should do some thinking about population. After all, the result of lefty politics and consciousness raising on population has been calamitous. As Don Feder writes, everything the left celebrates leads to an empty cradle.

Selfishness was celebrated. Marriage and children were downgraded to lifestyle options. Women who stayed at home to raise and nurture a family were derided. The importance of fathers was downplayed. Abortion was enshrined as a "human right." And contraception was ubiquitous.

Just think. If lefties continue, as in Europe, to embrace diverse family forms that don’t usually have children, pretty soon there won’t be any lefties.

The World Congress of Families is different. Held provocatively in the center of depopulating Europe, it

will address such timely issues as: the importance of marriage, fecundity as a natural expression of family love and hope for the future, how to counter assaults on the family (including pornography, drugs, a hostile media, cohabitation, divorce and marriage-substitutes), rejecting the contraceptive mentality, promoting pro-family policies, building a new culture of marriage and strengthening the vital bond of faith and family.

Sounds like a light-hearted affirmation of life. Just the sort of light-hearted event that Google likes to celebrate with a goofy version of their logo.

Mixed Reviews on the Paulson Nomination

On Monday, May 30, President Bush nominated Henry M. Paulson Jr., CEO of Goldman Sachs, as Secretary of the Treasury to replace John Snow.

So what does it mean, for the dollar, for economic policy, and for the administration?

In the London Times Gerard Baker sees his role as essentially defensive. Given that income tax reform and Social Security reform look to be dead, the only place where he can make a mark is on the dollar.

Will Mr Paulson be content to go along with the odd twin-track approach of the past few years — publicly expressing support for a “strong dollar” while in practice happily acquiescing in the US currency’s decline?

A Wall Street man may not like having the dollar depreciate on his watch.

In fact his main task may be to prevent the dollar decline turning into a rout.

But the MSM is ready to cheer. In Time Mike Allen echoed the White House line that they had “landed a whale.”

In the strict sense, he is right. Goldman Sachs today sits at the pinnacle of Wall Street. But can he make a difference as the Bush administration tries to deal with the triple threat of high oil prices, declining dollar, and rising interest rates?

The conservative base is sounding an alarm. In Human Events Robert B. Bluey notes that while Paulson has contributed to Republicans his wife Wendy is a financial supporter of Democrats and Hillary Clinton.

And there is the question of the Nature Conservancy. Both Paulsons are active in this conservation group that buys up land to transmit to the federal government. But there have been questions about the Nature Conservancy. That Hank Paulson is

chairman of the board of the Nature Conservancy, which is under investigation for financial misdealings that benefited some of its officers and donors, should automatically disqualify him for the top Treasury job.

Goldman Sachs also has dealings with the mortgage giant, the Federal National Mortage Assocation.

According to last week's report by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), Fannie Mae managers engaged in a series of questionable transactions, including two with Goldman Sachs, which improperly pushed $107 million of Fannie Mae earnings into future years.

Maybe all this explains why the markets took a dive on the day that Hank Paulson was nominated to be Treasury Secretary.

Who Is Stupid Now?

Everyone knows that the Democratic Party is the smart party and the Republican Party is the stupid party. We know this because liberals and journalists keep telling us. We keep hearing, for instance how smart FDR and JFK and Clinton were. And how dumb Coolidge and Reagan and Bush were.

But if Democrats are so smart, how come that their Culture of Corruption campaign is going off the rails. Remember? Republicans represented a culture of corruption. Tom DeLay and Duke Cunningham and all.

But now all we seem to hear about is the Jefferson bribery affair and the $90,000 in cold hard cash hidden in the freezer.

Oh and did you hear about Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) accepting free tickets to a boxing match from a state agency that was lobbying him?

The thing is that somehow those stupid Republicans have managed to remove their embarrassments from the limelight whereas the Jefferson scandal and the Reid boxing fixture look like gifts that keep on giving.

You have to wonder. Was Denny Hastert as dumb as everyone thinks when he complained about the search of Rep. Jefferson’s (D-LA) congressional office? And how is it that Sen. Reid’s boxing exploits are appearing in the public print?

Now Sen. Reid says that it’s his official duty to attend boxing matches, according to Kathleen Hennessey of the Associated Press.

As they say, never underestimate your opponent.

To Understand Our Liberal Friends

You’ll remember that in the twenty years before the 1960s black poverty declined by 50 percent. You’ll remember that crime was down. You’ll remember that unwed births were down. You’ll remember that more Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Acts in Congress.

Then why, as Thomas Sowell reports, could a liberal colleague of conservative writer Shelby Steele have a such an emphatically different opinion?

"Damn it, we saved this country!" he all but shouted. "This country was about to blow up. There were riots everywhere. You can stand there now in hindsight and criticize, but we had to keep the country together, my friend."

Now there are many of us who, while conceding the importance of the civil rights revolution, recall that many things got worse in the 1960s: crime, violence, education, dependency. It goes on and on.

Then why would liberals insist that they saved the country?

This is a vision of the world more precious than gold. To those who believe it, this vision is a treasure beyond price because it is also a wonderful vision of themselves.

Liberals came into the 1960s believing that they needed to rescue the country, and nothing is going to change their minds that the country needed changing or that they succeeded in rescuing it from a fate worse than death. Nothing can be allowed to shatter “the beautiful picture of themselves as wise and compassionate saviors of society.”

Remember this, and keep it in a special place in your mind, for use in emergency. If liberals ever came to doubt their role as saviors in the 1960s it would kill them.

English is Like an Ocean Tide

A century ago, writes Richard Cohen, his ancestors were squeezed into the Lower East Side. They “did Kosher” and spoke Yiddish. And historian Henry Adams, descendent of presidents, was sickened by all those Jews. But now, of course,

The grandchildren of those who did Kosher there have scattered throughout the country and the English their grandparents did not speak has been mastered and enriched by Bellow and Roth and Chabon and Ephron, not to mention Irving Berlin.

Now, as then, we worry about the immigrants learning English. We shouldn’t. The pull of the English-speaking culture is “like an ocean tide.”

In Los Angeles, for instance, radio station KDL shifted in 2003 from Spanish to English because the Latino audience it wanted -- the young -- was increasingly bilingual and what's called “English dominant.” English was cooler, hipper and younger, younger, younger. Spanish was the language of mom and dad, and nothing could be fustier -- or, in some cases, embarrassing.

That is just what Cohen thought when he refused to speak Yiddish to his grandmother. Sooner or later, everyone is sucked into English speaking.

The richness of Shakespeare's tongue, its universality in commerce and business and, above all, in entertainment, makes it unavoidable. Few things in life are certain, but death, taxes and English certainly are.

We should have faith in the power of our language and our culture.

Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling: Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish

That is a British colloquialism, if you were wondering, and that is what capitalist cheerleader Larry Kudlow is saying as he commends the vital work of the Justice Department prosecutors in bringing corporate crooks like Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling to justice—and hopefully to jail.

And, we hope, scaring a million other businessmen who might be tempted. For who is as pure as Caesar’s wife?

I’d say that a major motion picture jail term for major motion picture fraud ought to send a message.

But in the glow of our continuing Reagan economy, now restored after the crisis of confidence in the wake of the Enrons and their frauds, let us not forget, says Kudlow, the nadir of our great US economy.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the murderer’s row of economic morons &mdas; LBJ, Nixon, Ford, and Carter — in allegiance with their liberal Keynesian advisors, concocted a socialist policy mix that ultimately led to wealth-destroying big-government stagflation.

Yeah, thanks for nothing, pals. But then came the reign of Ronaldus Magnus, and the US economy “became the envy of the world.”

Since the early 1980s, more than 46 million new jobs have been created, with inflation-adjusted GDP increasing $6.2 trillion, or 120 percent.

And stock prices are up 900 percent since 1980.

There’s a downside to all this, of course. That giant sucking sound you hear is the sound of the blindingly successful US economy sucking workers in from all over the world, and in particular from Mexico, an unhappy land of corruption and incompetence in economic governance.

And there is no excuse, not any more, for economic incompetence. The chaps in Estonia read Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose, implemented its policy recommendations, and shortly thereafter became e-Stonia, doubling GDP in a decade.

Of course, they made one little mistake, the silly naifs. They thought that the west had actually implemented Friedman’s ideas. Little did they know, as they implemented a flat tax, that they were the first, after Hong Kong, to try it out!

Pentecostals Experiencing Possibilities and Breakthroughs in Nigeria

We hear a lot about the lovely Muslims doing a spot of genocide on the Dinka tribes in South Sudan. And we hear about Muslim gangs burning Christian churches in Nigeria. But we don’t often hear about the Christians themselves.

Here is a report on the Pentecostals in Nigeria, led by “Daddy,” Rev. Enoch Adejare Adeboye. His church is about 5 million strong, and its growing. In Nigeria, in China, and in South Korea.

Here’s how it feels to attend a service of the Redeemed Christian Church of God in Lagos, the capital of Nigeria, reported by Brian Murphy of the Associated Press.

It's eight hours into the service, and the congregation is still dancing. Shout, they're told. Yell out to the Lord. Their cries melt into a muggy night with the odor of sweating bodies, jasmine and the tropical musk of the Nigerian bush land.



"Hallelujah," rumbles the head pastor as the church band kicks into a new number. "Hal-le-luuuuuuu-jah."

Yes, it’s not really approved of by the World Council of Churches, but Christianity is alive and well in Africa. There were an estimated 300,000 people at that all-night service.

What is the attraction of Pentecostalism, now estimated by some at 500 million out of a total of 2.2 billion Christians worldwide?

Eve Akindabe, a 35-year-old seamstress who was raised as an Anglican, does some hemming work as she waits to worship. She's been giving a monthly tithe -- worth about $10 -- for five years.



"Why did I join Daddy's church? Take a look around," she says, waving her hands at the crowds. "Daddy inspires. Daddy tell us Jesus is right here to help improve our lives. The Anglican church was all about, 'Don't do this, don't do that.' Daddy is all about possibilities and making breakthroughs. It deals with heaven, but also the here and now."

Possibilities, breakthroughs. You chaps familiar with modern American pschology like Spiral Dynamics will know what that is about. It is the orange world of creativity, beyond red power gods, beyond blue discipline and purpose, to orange creativity, and life as a game to be won.

The thing is, it’s almost miraculous. Why would the struggling masses in third-world cities be responding to a Gospel of Prosperity? Not red victimization, not blue rules and roles, but possibilities and breakthroughs. It is a testament to the eternal hope breaking through in the human spirit.