The Press-Dispatch
Issue link: http://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/1092055
The Press-Dispatch Opinion Wednesday, March 13, 2019 B- 9 Trump in their one meeting, "The greatest gift that you and I, Mr. Pres- ident, can give to our children is mak- ing sure that we give them a democ- racy that is ... better than the one that we came upon." But how did giving a broken, resent- ful man now facing a prison sentence a national platform on Capitol Hill to spew defamatory remarks against his former boss, now the president, make us a better nation or strengthen our democracy? How did allowing Cohen to state before a congressional committee something so absurd as "Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, that there will never be a peace- ful transition of power" improve our country? Cummings felt it important to note in his summation that accord- ing to The Washington Post, Trump has made "8,718 false or misleading" claims. And here, he was uninten- tionally honest that really his objec- tive and that of his party is to dam- age the president in any way possible. This includes one member of his committee, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, whose first public declaration after being sworn in as a member of Congress was to announce, "We're going to im- peach the (expletive)." Let's recall that representatives' oath of office includes the pledge that they "will support and defend the Con- stitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Despite Cummings' stated concern about our democracy, it is our Consti- tution that directs our elections. In its preamble, we find that the Constitu- tion's purpose is to "secure the Bless- ings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." If Cummings and his party truly want to fix our shortcomings, this is where their focus and concern should be — on preserving the integrity of our Constitution and securing the blessings of liberty. This is exactly where the Demo- cratic Party comes up short. Blessings are outpouring of divine favor. When members of Congress take their oath to "support and defend the Constitution," they conclude with "So help me God." The Constitution secures our liber- ty by defining a limited government under God. Democrats want an expansive, pow- erful government in a godless nation, and somehow they think that would make us better. President Trump is right; socialism and secular humanism are not what America is about. Let's hope he is al- so right that it is never what America will be about. The groundwork for 2020 is open- ing before us. Star Parker is an author and presi- dent of CURE, Center for Urban Renew- al and Education. Contact her at www. urbancure.org. no T V, computer, or electronic nights. You'll be surprised how peaceful life is without so much electronic distrac- tion. Remember those nights when we have a temporary power blackout and it does get so serene? Try to exercise instead of picking up a favorite snack. Almsgiving- Visit someone who lives alone, invite or bring them to your home. Visit somebody in a long term care home, you'll be surprised what joy it brings to you and the other person. Volunteer your time to a worthy cause or project. Sign up for the next blood drive. Baby sit –without pay- for parents who don't get to go out. Take time to listen to someone who desires just to be listened to. Write to relatives or friends whom you have "been meaning to write." Do something good or generous for someone. Even for those no one will know about. Plan one activity that the whole family can take part in. • • • A prayer of St. Francis of Assisi: "Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is in- jury, pardon. Where there is doubt , faith. Where there is despair, hope. Where there is darkness, light, and where there is sadness, joy. O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console. To be understood as to under- stand. To be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive. It is in pardon- ing that we are pardoned. And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life." Continued from page 8 LENT Court Report CRIMINAL Pike Circuit Court Carl E. Brawdy charged with four counts of domestic battery, a level 6 felony. Kelsey R. Kelley charged with count I possession of methamphet- amine, a level 6 felony, and count II battery against a public safety official, a level 6 felony. David D. Schutz charged with count I strangulation, a level 6 felony, and count II domestic battery. Andrew Cody Swain charged with failure to remain at an accident with serious bodily injury, a level 6 felony. Timothy R. Robinson charged with operating a vehicle after being a ha- bitual traffic offender, a level 6 felony. Anthony T. Beckham charged with unlawful possession of a syringe, a lev- el 6 felony. TRAFFIC AND MISDEMEANOR Pike Circuit Court Alex K. Poselwait charged with count I leaving the scene of an acci- dent and count II operating a vehicle while intoxicated. Joshua Ryan Tindall charged with driving while suspended. Karenssa H. Roysdon charged with operating a vehicle with ACE of at least .08 but less than .15. Brandon M. Brumfield charged with domestic battery. Jayden C. Williams charged with possession of marijuana. CIVIL Pike Circuit Court Midland Funding LLC sues Darlin- da Petry on complaint. Portfolio Recovery Associates, LLC sues Edward Petry on complaint. Crown Asset Management, LLC sues Christine Gibson on complaint. Discover Bank sues Steven Volans- ki on complaint. Cassandra Rainey sues William Rainey for dissolution of marriage. INFRACTIONS Pike Circuit Court William A. Rainey charged with seatbelt violation. Cole G. Bellmore charged with speeding. Michael R. Smith charged with seatbelt violation. James T. Lang charged with speed- ing. Avery M. Johnson charged with count I throwing burning materi- al from a moving motor vehicle and count II speeding. Tammy K. Staats charged with speeding. Renee A. Lyle charged with speed- ing. Joshua M. Brenton charged with speeding. Cale M. Hoffman charged with un- lawful possession of tobacco. Neuman C. Arminta charged with speeding. Teri A. Lamar charged with speed- ing. Amanda Lee Mossgrove charged with speeding. Gabrielle M. Emberton charged with speeding. Yelena Tkachuk charged with speeding. Alek D. Dill charged with speeding. Paul Semsair charged with charged with speeding. Trump administration is tak- ing the right steps. Consid- er Venezuela, where Nico- las Maduro's regime repre- sents a clear threat to U.S. interests and regional sta- bility. Vice President Mike Pence, who has taken the lead there, has done a great job. Mr. Maduro is, quite sim- ply, a thug — one whom President Obama and Sec- retary of State John Kerry apparently couldn't handle. He came to power in 2013 and distinguished himself by such humanitarian ges- tures as blocking aid from coming into his country, and burning food and med- ical relief — in the process of turning his country into a socialist hellhole. The Trump administra- tion has done much to dis- credit Mr. Maduro, though. Dozens of other nations have joined us in recognizing the new post-Maduro adminis- tration of Juan Guaido. Now's the time to move ahead with further sanc- tions on Venezuela's state- owned oil company, Petro- leos de Venezuela, S.A. All of Mr. Maduro's cronies and their families are living the high life in Paris, Madrid and even Miami. It's time we stopped allowing them to en- joy the fruits of kleptocracy. From North Korea to Ven- ezuela, Team Trump is tak- ing action. The president and vice president, along with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Secu- rity Adviser John Bolton, are not only cleaning up mess- es created by earlier admin- istrations. They're charting new and positive courses for the future. As President Trump of- ten says, no option is off the table. His agenda is simple: Do what's in America's inter- est. "America First" doesn't mean "America Alone." But it does mean ensuring that our interests aren't sacri- ficed on the Altar of the Pho- to-Op. Ed Feulner is founder of The Heritage Foundation (heritage.org). Continued from page 8 INTEREST egates - 6 percent - decided the issue. However, 31 delegates from the Cen- tral Conference could not attend, and in all probability would have voted for the Traditional Plan. This may be a "turning point." The Traditional plan was opposed by 75 percent of the American del- egates [they supported the One Church Plan]. The majority of the Central Confer- ence delegates supported the Tradi- tional Plan. It is noteworthy that the Central Conference is made up of churches outside of the United States and comprises almost 50 percent of the UMC. The Central Conference delegates voiced their concern that the Special General Conference was an initiative by the American progressives within the United Methodist Church to leg- islate their LGBTQ ideology to the churches outside of the United States. The United Methodist Church out- side of the United States by enlarge holds to traditional church teachings of marriage and sexuality. In many countries served by the Central Con- ference, laws are in place prohibiting same gender sexuality. The plea coming from the delegates of the Central Conference was that the Methodist Church would become non- existent [in A frica] if the One Church Plan was accepted, even though the plan contextualized sexuality within the local community. The Central Conference [along with a minority of traditional dele- gates from the US], exercised their votes and stymied a push to global- ize the progressive western Church views of LGBTQ. Therefore, as of the moment the UMC by the vote from General Con- ference remains a global "orthodox" church. For now the United Methodist Church remains the only major old Protestant denomination that em- braces the traditional teaching of the church on sexual issues. All people remain of sacred worth, but the ban on LGBTQ ministerial participation remains. This in no means settles the issue, and be sure it will be revisited in the 2020 General Conference. However, the Central Conference will receive about 20 more delegates. The United Methodist Church [and Christianity as a whole] is growing outside of the United States, and the center of Christianity is shifting to A f- rica and Asia. The dominance of the United States and Europe in the af- fairs of the global church is fading along with its influence. The United Methodist Churches outside of the United States changed the projected course of the church as perceived and planned by the "estab- lished" American Church. That is something to think about! Continued from page 8 TURNING Continued from page 8 MUZZLE people, including 65 million North Americans, would surely perish in "the Great Die-Off." I doubt that 97 percent of scientists agreed with Eh- rlich's opinions on popula- tion and resource exhaus- tion. But the population con- trol establishment acted on his alarms. Millions of people were sterilized in Mexico, Bo- livia, Peru, Indonesia and Bangladesh. In India, many states withheld water, elec- tricity, ration cards, medi- cal care and pay raises from men and women who failed to undergo mandatory ster- ilization. Teachers expelled stu- dents whose parents failed to get sterilized. In a sin- gle year (1975), more than eight million men and wom- en were sterilized. World Bank president Robert McNamara cele- brated that "at long last, In- dia is moving to effectively address its population prob- lem." China's "one-child policy" provided cover for millions of forced sterilizations and perhaps 100 million forced abortions, many of which re- sulted in infections, sterility or death. It was an entirely avoidable humanitarian di- saster on a scale that is dif- ficult to imagine. And reck- less U.S. environmental ex- tremists like Brower and Eh- rlich never accepted blame for their role in it. Can we expect more in- tegrity from environmental- ists this time around? Well, they're not off to a very good start. Begin with their claim that 97 percent of scientists agree with them. John Cook is the most recent partisan to claim he has surveyed cli- mate scientists' publications on the issue. He wrote that he found more than 97 per- cent of the scientific papers he surveyed "endorsed the view that the Earth is warm- ing up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause." But skeptic Mark Bahner checked Cook's work across 11,944 scientific abstracts and found only 64 that en- dorsed Cook's proposition. That's 1.6 percent, not 97 percent. Dr. Richard Tol is a pro- fessor at two European uni- versities. Cook surveyed 10 of Tol's 122 eligible papers. Even within this cherry- picked data set, Tol wrote that Cook rated five of 10 papers incorrectly, includ - ing four that Cook falsely rated as "endorse" rather than "neutral." To the best of my knowl- edge, former Vice President Al Gore is the only environ- mental alarmist to win an Academy Award and a Nobel Prize for his efforts. In his Nobel acceptance speech, he said the Arctic sea ice might be completely melt- ed by 2014. But it wasn't. I worked in Alaska that year, and I think we would have noticed. NASA chief climate sci- entist James Hansen was arguably the original global warming alarmist. He gave some 1,400 interviews about his climate change views, but nevertheless accused the Bush administration of muzzling him. Whether it's gay mar- riage, illegal immigration or climate change, Leftists un- derstand that they can pre- vail through corporate exec- utives and media organiza- tions, top-down even if they can't persuade rank-and-file Americans. Hansen is the man who proposed Nuremberg-style show trials of anthropogen- ic (human-caused) climate change deniers. That is the climax of tyrannical Left- ist coercion. Hansen's NA- SA supervisor, John The- on, declared himself a glob- al warming skeptic after re- tirement. Theon would thus be one of the people Hansen proposed to prosecute. Theon said after retire- ment that Hansen embar- rassed the agency but was never muzzled. You can't muzzle the Deep State. That's fine. But I don't want to be muzzled or prosecut- ed, either. (1947) — spewed more car- bon dioxide and sulfur di- oxide into the atmosphere than all of mankind's activ- ities during our entire his- tory. Our so-called fragile earth survived other cat- astrophic events, such as the floods in China in 1887, which took an estimated 1 million to 2 million lives, followed by floods there in 1931, which took an esti- mated 1 million to 4 million lives. What about the im- pact of earthquakes on our fragile earth? Chile's 1960 Valdivia earthquake was 9.5 on the Richter scale. It cre- ated a force equivalent to 1,000 atomic bombs going off at the same time. The deadly 1556 earthquake in China's Shaanxi province devastated an area of 520 miles. Our so-called fragile earth faces outer space ter- ror. Two billion years ago, an asteroid hit earth, cre- ating the Vredefort crater in South A frica, which has a diameter of 190 miles. In Ontario, there's the Sud- bury Basin, resulting from a meteor strike 1.8 billion years ago. At 39 miles long, 19 miles wide and 9 miles deep, it's the second-largest impact structure on earth. Virginia's Chesapeake Bay crater is a bit smaller, about 53 miles wide. Then there's the famous but puny Mete- or Crater in Arizona, which is not even a mile wide. My question is: Which of these powers of nature could be duplicated by man- kind? For example, could mankind even come close to duplicating the polluting effects of the 1815 Tambo- ra volcanic eruption? It is the height of arrogance to think that mankind can make significant paramet- ric changes in the earth or can match nature's destruc- tive forces. Our planet is not fragile. Occasionally, environ- mentalists spill the beans and reveal their true agen- da. Barry Commoner said, "Capitalism is the earth's number one enemy." Am- herst College professor Leo Marx said, "On ecological grounds, the case for world government is beyond argu- ment." Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. 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