Follow this link and you will see a just released story about how the President is proposing a freeze on federal pay. I don’t have a problem with that. However, I find it funny that there have been those that I work with in the past, who vote Dem for pay raises and not Rep. When the opposite has happened in recent memory. That’s why I’m an independent. Neither party interests me. 

This is how I have been feeling and vote as of late.

My Political Views
I am a centrist moderate social libertarian
Right: 0.32, Libertarian: 2.72

Political Spectrum Quiz

The problem that I have with the politics currently in play is the ad hominen attacks not just from the right, but the left. I think that it was a little funny that there were teleprompters in a classroom for the President, but do we have to constantly hear about it? And now the left, as if to get even, says did you see Sarah Palin with her crib notes in her hand?  Oooo, burn. I have stopped watching news tv, because they are all running on entertainment. Looking for the ratings. I don’t want reporters editorializing as they report. I want them to ask hard questions. I unsubscribed from Blogging for Michigan because they continued to play blame the other side politics and use sexual terms for people they disagree with.

I don’t need celebrities telling me what to think, or worse, telling me that I’m unintelligent. There is dangerous divide of us versus them happening in our society. It doesn’t matter who started it, but it must end. Compromising in Congress shouldn’t be about who can take money back to their district, but truly finding the middle ground and work out the best deal to both sides.

I know some people that have attended some of the tea party protests. They aren’t, “intellectually malnourished,” and don’t necessarily subscribe to the right wing fringe that gets quoted in the papers and on MSNBC by Mr. Olbermann. I found the Tea Party Convention unimportant and slightly offensive so I didn’t watch it. The tea party movement looks more like a movement of folks at the local level. I’ll be watching what my local reps do so that I can see if I want them out or in.

Besides as a Christian (a Christ follower), I want to walk in love and help those that need help and healing, like Jesus did. From that, we might actually solve problems.

I think that this is one of the reasons. Not that you shouldn’t regulate some things, but when you want to switch grapes and the government won’t let you…

Expose people to an inspirational atmosphere and they will be inspired.

It almost sounds too simplistic, but it works. And it all started back in Pittsburgh with a man named Bill Strickland and the idea that environment can change people, their attitudes and their lives.

I saw Bill Strickland speak a few years ago about the Bidwell Training Center and wondered how something like the could come to Michigan. Well, here it is in Grand Rapids!

Grand Rapids poised to develop ‘triangular’ partnership to help impoverished students | Grand Rapids News – - MLive.com.

So where do I lie on the spectrum? In the middle. I have voted for Republicans and Democrats. I have described myself as a little right of center, but when I take quizzes I’m left of center.

I recently listened to a pastor talking about the fact that Christians should do things to bring healing, but the political scene had devolved into each side making a caricature of the other and shredding the caricature. I’m tired of it.

I read a blog about state politics from from the Democratic side of the aisle and about 1/4 of it is good, with 3/4 hot air. Notice, I didn’t mention Republican blog, they were all hot air. That’s why Michigan is in the mess it is in, hot air from both sides. We are floundering.

So I’m tired of Glenn Beck, Bill O’reilly, and Rush Limbaugh. I’m tired of Keith Olberman, Chris Matthews, and the Daily Kos. While they all may have good or interesting points from time to time, or they may catch the others in inaccuracies, they all yell and create hot air on both sides of the spectrum.  An astronomer that I watched during a Q&A for a book that he wrote mentioned that if we could get rid of the hot air on both sides, maybe we could have a conversation.

I get tired of Jimmy Carter insulting me by calling me racist if I disagree with a policy, or others from the left calling me a teabagger (a sexual insult) if I go to a protest.  I get tired of the Republicans using me because they think my protest against the current ones in power will help them.

I read today,

“We’re being out-Alinskyed by the anti-Alinskys”- Ben Jealous, NAACP president, on the ACORN story and other conservative Internet exposes.

I had to look that up what was being Alinskyed? I found this link on the rules for radicals.  Read the link to understand it fully, but suffice it to say that this dude came up with ways to confront the powers that be. I’m not sure, but I almost feel like we in the middle need to rise up and confront the fringes. If you have something constructive to say, say it, and be part of the conversation, if you have hot air, prepare to be confronted.

“For six and a half years under President Bush,” Senator Hillary Clinton told an audience in October 2007, “it has been open season on open inquiry.” Senator Edward Kennedy, in an April 2007 speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, bemoaned the many ways in which “the truth is taking a beating” under conservative influence in Washington. One popular recent book on the subject is entitled The Republican War on Science; another, by former vice president and Nobel laureate Al Gore, is called The Assault on Reason.

But beneath these grave accusations, it turns out, are some remarkably flimsy grievances, most of which seem to amount to political disputes about policy questions in which science plays a role. Ethical disagreements over the destruction of embryos for research are described instead as a conflict between science and ignorant theology. Differing judgments about the proper role of government in sex education in schools are painted as a quarrel between objective public health and medieval prudishness. A dispute about the prudential wisdom of a variety of energy policy alternatives is depicted as a clash of simple scientific facts against willful ignorance and greed.

The American right has no desire to declare a war on science, and nothing it has done in recent years could reasonably suggest otherwise. The left’s quixotic defensive campaign against an imaginary enemy therefore has little to tell us about American conservatives-who, of course, do have a complex relationship with science, though it is not the one the left seeks to describe. But if this notion of a “war on science” tells us little about the right, it does tell us something important about the American left and its self-understanding. That liberals take attacks against their own political preferences to be attacks against science helps us see the degree to which they identify themselves-their ideals, their means, their ends, their cause, and their culture-with the modern scientific enterprise.

I have heard the same things from Democratic leaning scientists whom I respect, such as Neil deGrasse Tyson, a noted astronomer. When asked the question at a forum in Los Angeles, he responded with, and I’m paraphrasing, there is no Republican war on science.

Read the whole first article.  You can read the second and third articles as well, if you want.

GREENIE WATCH.

American Thinker: By the Book: How Democracies Perish.

This is so true not only in NASA, but in the UM church as Amy Forbus points out. I say that most organizations that get large get into this rut. I think that Christians in general get into a tradition to the point that it is made into doctrine. All need to work at  breaking down those silos of compartmentation.

As funny that I could point at NASA, but my own agency can suffer from it as well, although I have seen some changes in recent years. I also see it in agencies that I have to work with as well, not only in the Federal government, but the state and local levels as well.

So, is this rampant in your own company or organization?  Look for ways to change. The end of the video has probably the best way for change…Servant Leadership.