Friday, December 21, 2012

Larry "Teach 'Em How To Pray" Kudlow

By, Chris Rossini
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Pseudo free market advocate, Larry Kudlow, dropped this pearl onto Twitter:


When The Maestro and The Bernank create their artificial booms, they can always count on Larry Kudlow to wave his pom-poms and dupe Americans into thinking that it's free market capitalism.

Then a tremendous tragedy occurs (in a government school). One that calls for the lovers of liberty and freedom to stand up and fight off the inevitable government solutions that will make things worse; and what does Larry do?

He shows his true statist colors.

How about getting rid of the one-size-fits-all government indoctrination centers? How about letting (say it with us Larry) the free market handle education.

If some schools want to emphasize faith and prayer, fine. If others don't, that's fine too. Let the market decide.

Some schools may advertise that they are armed. Others may remain unarmed and appeal to those who cling to that idea. Let the profitable schools, that satisfy their customers best, prosper. And let the schools that are run poorly, and that don't satisfy the desires of consumers, go bankrupt.

And just so readers know where I'm coming from, I personally believe in faith and prayer. But to think that these should be forced on all kids is ridiculous! It's up to each individual to decide what he/she believes.

Then to add insult to injury, does Kudlow really think that The State (of all institutions) should be teaching faith and prayer?

Really Larry?

The State?

What a disgrace.

13 comments:

  1. Kudlow found religion in rehab.

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  2. Here is a great suggestion for Larry. Let's take a nut-job on Fanapt armed with a 9mm handgun and put him and Larry in a room together. We'll lock Larry in the room for say 60 minutes before Operation MK Ultra Nut-Job shows up, just to be fair, so he can have a very large head start on praying, because Hashem almighty is especially busy this time of year.

    My guess is Hashem almighty shows up as soon as Larry bleeds out from the perforations left in his body cavity by Operation MK Ultra Nut-Job. I'm just sayin'...

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  3. This is certainly one of the more ignorant posts ever on EPJ. No where did Kudlow advocate GOVERNMENT mandated prayer or faith. It seems Chris is also oblivious to the history of faith in this country including the founding fathers WHOSE FIRST SESSION IN THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS WAS TO AUTHORIZE GOVERNMENT PRINTING OF BIBLES. (I think it was one of the first 10 pieces of legislation passed.)

    And you are an idiot if you think prayer in schools (albeit government or otherwise) isn't important. Or even MORE essential to overall learning than other curriculum. Since prayer was taken out of schools in 1962:

    - violent crime has increased 544%
    - SAT scores took a rapid decline for 18 consecutive years, even though the same test has been used since 1941.
    - teen pregnancy increased 187% ( For younger girls, ages 10 to 14 years, pregnancies since 1963 are up 553%.)

    THOMAS JEFFERSON said: "The reason Christianity is the best friend of government is because Christianity is the only religion in the world that deals with the heart."

    I'm sick of Libertarian rewriting of American history an complete ignorance (and distortion) of conservative religious views. Frankly, this kind of reporting is as untrustworthy as DailyKos or NYT.

    If you want to understand how important spiritual life WAS to those who fashioned the Constitution (largely from biblical and historical study) this is a good start: http://www.biblebb.com/files/HERITAGE.HTM

    Oh yeah.

    Merry Christmas.

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    Replies
    1. If religion and prayer would keep the very small minority of people from committing atrocities, why doesn't such an abundance of prayer and religion keep the very small minority of priests that molest children from committing sexual assault?

      I am not anti-religion, but people need to look at reality when making arguments such as above. Even in colonial America where religion was mandatory, people still committed murders, rapes, robberies, etc.

      I, for one, do not need prayer and religion to keep me from murdering people.

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    2. Your attempt at forming an empirical argument for prayer in schools is not in the least bit successful. After all, since the Civil Rights Act was signed into law in 1964, violent crime has increased nearly 544%, SAT scores began declining (thirty years later), and teen pregnancies are up nearly 187%. The early 60s also correlate with the beginning of desegregation. Is that the reason for increases in crime, violence, pregnancy, etc? Surely you see the flaw in your argument by now.

      Your data are also fairly ill-chosen. For instance, by setting your endpoints half a century apart, you miss the fact that violent crime is declining and has been for the past couple of decades. Your SAT comments are especially heinous. Not only has the SAT just recently been changed, since 1962 the number of people taking the SAT has exploded. Of course scores are going to be lower when it's more than just the top students taking the test.

      Lastly, even if the founders' opinions on prayer were of any material importance to prayer in schools with compulsory attendance (which largely did not exist in their time), the citation you give from Jefferson is not something he ever, technically, said:

      http://eyler.freeservers.com/JeffPers/jefpco13.htm
      http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/christianity-best-friend-government-quotation

      Your suggestion that the Continental Congress authorized the printing of Bibles is also similarly spurious:

      http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-rodda/no-mr-beck-congress-did-n_b_598698.html

      Perhaps you should be more wary of conservative rewriting of history - and more careful with your accusations of ignorance.

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    3. umm.. do you seriously want to start citing Jefferson? I mean, do you really want to use the Deist founding fathers who were extremely critical of the Christian *theology* as your examples of evidence?

      Jefferson admired Christ as thought of him as an excellent moral example. BUT he loathed the religion. So much so, he wrote his own version of the Bible, now called the Jefferson Bible, after examining various sources and cut nearly everything out. He quite rightly thought of Saul/Paul as a charlatan who hijacked Christianity.

      "Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burned, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth...

      Our sister states of Pennsylvania and New York, however, have long subsisted without any establishment at all. The experiment was new and doubtful when they made it. It has answered beyond conception. They flourish infinitely.

      Religion is well supported; of various kinds, indeed, but all good enough; all sufficient to preserve peace and order: or if a sect arises, whose tenets would subvert morals, good sense has fair play, and reasons and laughs it out of doors, without suffering the state to be troubled with it.

      They do not hang more malefactors than we do. They are not more disturbed with religious dissensions. On the contrary, their harmony is unparalleled, and can be ascribed to nothing but their unbounded tolerance, because there is no other circumstance in which they differ from every nation on earth.

      They have made the happy discovery, that the way to silence religious disputes, is to take no notice of them. Let us too give this experiment fair play, and get rid, while we may, of those tyrannical laws."

      Interestingly, he was suspicious of official doctrine, as well as Calvinist, Protestant hellfire Trinitarians long before modern discoveries at Nag Hammadi of Gnostic and non-canonical sources (non-Q-documents) that managed to escape the burnings and heresy raids by the Church. In a way the Jefferson Bible is oddly reminiscent of the The Gospel of Thomas, which *only* contains various sayings Thomas supposedly heard or communicated to him, without any myths, without any miracles, without any historical events surrounding the Christ character whatsoever.

      And this is without even getting into Thomas Paine's harsh criticisms, nor of Washington's or any of the others' Masonic activities.

      Needless to say, true historic revisionism is needed, but likely not yielding truths you favor

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  4. Back in the colonial days, colonists were REQUIRED to be members of the church, attend services, and obey the established church's religious rules. Penalties for disobedience were very severe. The religious conservatives seem to believe we would be better off moving back towards the old theocratic system. But Rossini is right. Freedom's the answer, not religion (or philosophy of any kind) imposed by the power of the state.

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  5. Anyone who cares to google news search the word "amendment" today will find journalists in several different contexts noting the threat from or outright disregard of US government with regard to the 2nd, 5th, 4th, 9th, and 1st. All of these news stories are correct. Drones, NDAA, various proposed internet strangulations, surveillance strangulations, DHS database cross-checking, and oh yeah, the TSA. None of these stories require any conspiracy of dark or mysterious forces. They are all happening in plain sight. No one is pointing out the rip roaring success of the two-party divide and strangle strategy here. Not even Ron.

    Above me is a commenter who would gleefully supersede my kid's 1st with his 1st. This is the conclusion his beliefs have led him to: the 1st protects only his flavor of prayer, not any one else'.

    This is similar to the logic that the 2nd may be excised without threat to any of the others. After all, it's only a police state if you disagree with the police. For those who agree with the police-ruling party, it is a security state, and wheww! are we grateful for the security from all you dangerous hooligans with impure thoughts. There aren't many writers in native English with the experience to point out that few founders or cheerleaders of police states foresaw the moment when they themselves would be turned upon by their own creation.

    This is the tragedy of tyranny. It's so seductive to everyone who has never tried it.

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    1. Butler Shaffer rightly harps on this all the time: Words don't mean squat. They mean whatever someone wants them to mean. The Constitution is a flawed document along with the Bill of Rights. The Anti-Federalists wrote about what was going to happen with these words on paper before they were ever ratified.

      The nature of government is that as long as you abdicate monopoly powers to it, nothing is safe. No words, no property, no common sense, no life, nothing.

      The flaw is the state itself. The Constitution of the US was a counter-revolution against the Algernon Sydney and Lockean principles in the Declaration of Independence. The statists like Hamilton wanted a strong central authority to do exactly what is done now, create crony capitalism. The Articles of Confederation needed amending for slight issues. It was only fatally flawed via the perception of the Federalists. Basically they hated there was no central taxation authority. They lied about only modifying the articles, changed the rules in process (went from unanimity to majority), and made it a constitutional convention to throw out the whole confederation. Sound like familiar tactics?

      The perception of what this country is in relation to freedom and liberty was created by the winners, who were the Federalists. The reality was that liberty was shown the door in 1787. Shays' Rebellion was used by the Federalists as a propaganda tool to centralize the government via the convention and to put a clamp on state sovereignty. Not unlike Adam Lanza being used as a reason to curtail firearm ownership.

      The state is the antithesis of liberty, and no words on paper are going to stop anything with a monopoly on force.

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  6. Better yet, how about holding accounteable the doctors prescribing these drug? Aren't bars held accountable if an overly intoxicated customer causes an accident (which it would be if sober but really negligence)?

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    1. Maybe in a private law society. Currently, I bet the "doc" who prescribed Fanapt is going to get a pass. He didn't build it. Just sayin'...

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    2. Sounds like the Lanza family may have a legal issue to pursue with this "doc". At least it will turn the spotlight where it belongs.

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  7. Krudlow, on his nightly program, has done more damage to free markets than anyone I know.

    Travis

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