Don't worry, the government only wants to know what you're praying about

The IRS scandal currently engulfing the Obama administration is, as fighter pilots like to say, a "target-rich environment." There are so many different abuses, so many lies and attempted coverups that it's difficult to single out which is the most egregious.

But I have a candidate for the worst offense.

A pro-life group in Iowa known as Coalition For Life of Iowa had applied for tax-exempt status. As we now know, the IRS' Cincinnati office was charged with reviewing such requests, and since at least 2010 the IRS was targeting conservative groups who made those requests, delaying their applications, asking illegal questions and harassing many of these groups to the point where they abandoned their applications.

Some IRS employee in the Cincinnati office reviewed the application of the Coalition For Life of Iowa, and decided they needed a little more information. They sent the Coalition a laundry list of requests, but one stands out above rest. It's the IRS response to the Coalition's mentioning that it held prayer meetings:

"Please explain in detail the activities at these prayer meetings."

That's right, folks, an employee of the Internal Revenue Service thought it was absolutely proper to ask people what they were praying about.

Lefties love to sit around and laugh about what they consider right-wing tinfoil-hat paranoia about "big gummint," but when the government decides it has a right to know what goes on between you and God, there is no longer a Constitution, no longer a Bill of Rights, only a huge, tyrannical bureaucracy that wants you to only think thoughts the government approves of.

What we've learned this week only scratches the surface, and this scandal is going to keep on getting worse and worse and worse for all the utopians out there who believe that letting the government do everything for you is a nifty way to run a country. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Here's a screenshot of the actual IRS letter:

Proud moment in Chicago

My grandfather - Henry Droogsma - was a very devout man who, with my grandmother Anna, raised eight children on a farm outside of Princeton, Minnesota. He spent his entire life attending the Christian Reformed Church of Pease, Minnesota - a place I wrote about here - and I'm told that he had hopes that someday one of his children might feel a calling to the ministry. That didn't happen, although I believe my father and all of his siblings served in various church capacities over the years....Sunday school teachers, board members, elders, deacons, mission trip leaders, etc.

Those eight Droogsma kids produced 30-some offspring - my first cousins - and again, while many of us have served the church in various ways, none of us ever went so far as to attend a seminary, obtain a divinity degree and enter the ministry. Sorry, grandpa.

Todd and Erin

The next generation, however, has done right by Grandpa Droogsma. My cousin's children - and I can't even generate an accurate guess as to how many people that encompasses - have found a remarkable number of ways to be involved in Christian ministry. My own daughter, Erin, graduated from North Park University in Chicago with degrees in both Youth Ministry and Bible and Theological Studies. But we've never had an actual seminary graduate - a Master of Divinity - until this past weekend.

Penny and I were able to go to Chicago this weekend and watch Erin's husband, Todd Spieker, graduate from North Park Seminary. A bright, personable kid from Colorado Springs, Todd graduated with honors, and he and Erin are currently in the process of interviewing with a couple of different churches that are considering calling Todd to be their pastor. I found the graduation ceremony to be a very moving experience, with about three dozen young men and women accepting their degrees and accepting a charge to go out into the world and preach the love of Christ. I admit to choking back a few tears, and having a lump in my throat, more than once.

 And while I realize that an "in-law" is not a direct descendant, I have to believe Grandpa Droogsma would have enjoyed the moment very much.

May 3, 2013, the day on which I make my triumphant return to the blogosphere

Hello everyone - First of all, an abject apology for what has become several months of blogging silence. I wish I had a great excuse, like I was busy in the lab curing cancer, or Bobby Hull called and wanted to hang out for a few weeks, or I was hot on the trail of Nicole and Ronald's real killers, but the fact is I have no excuse.

Despite my slothfulness, I continue to get emails and phone calls and friends poking their finger in my chest, all saying, "Start writing again." And so I will. I promise. But not until after I simply post this picture, which I stumbled on to tonight and which gives me great pleasure.

See you soon.

Droogs

The Jackson Family tree

Yesterday, Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. pleaded guilty to converting campaign funds to personal use, and will likely face substantial prison time when he is sentenced in June. The list of things he bought with about $750,000 in campaign funds is almost comical - $7,000 for an elk head, $320 at a Build-A-Bear store, $4,600 for one of Michael Jackson's old hats - and you can read more of the details in this New York Times account.

But I'm not here to revel in the failings of another. Instead, the story of Jr.'s downfall reminds me of a story I was once told about his wretched father, the "Rev." Jesse Jackson. The old man has been poison in the American political system for decades, a race hustler of the worst kind who has conned and extorted businesses and organizations out of millions of dollars over the years by threatening boycotts and demonstrations, all in the name of "civil rights."

I came to know a businessman who had a number of successful stores in the Chicago area in the 1970s. (I'm not going to use his name because I've never asked permission to tell his story.) One day he was approached by the "Rev." Jackson, who claimed to be very "disturbed" that my friend was running a successful chain of businesses, but didn't have enough black managers or employees to make Jesse happy. Jesse intimated that this situation would need to change, or else there could be "trouble" ahead.

My friend - not well-versed in the Jackson shakedown method - took Jesse at his word, and set to work designing a plan that would make it possible for a number of black would-be entrepreneurs to enter the business. My friend would identify possible locations, make a personal loan to provide a down payment, and work with a local bank to guarantee loans that would allow the individuals to open a franchise. It was a pretty ambitious plan.

He summoned Jesse to his office and laid out the plan, which would have allowed for black ownership of successful businesses and increased black employment in the Chicago area.

Jesse had no interest in the plan. What he wanted, he said, was a substantial cash contribution to his organization - PUSH, or the Rainbow Coalition, or whatever scam he was currently running - and all of the problems would go away.

About that time, the light bulb went off over my friend's head as he realized that Jesse's agenda had nothing to do with improving the lives of blacks; The only agenda item was lining Jesse's pocket. He more or less told Jesse to get lost - essentially calling his bluff - and Jackson slinked away.

Years later, Jackson's methods were exposed in the book "Shakedown," which documented the many ways Jesse leveraged alleged racial grievances to steal money from the government, businesses and
charitable organizations. The book is still in print, and is a terrific read.

(Fun part of the book: Jesse loves to tell the story of how he wanted to play quarterback at the University of Illinois, but says he was told by the coach that "blacks can't play quarterback." Except that it turns out that Illinois DID have a black quarterback that year, just one who was more talented than Jackson.)

(Another fun part of the book: The morning after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, Jesse flew to Chicago to appear on the "Today" show, wearing a shirt that he said was stained with the blood of Dr. King, who "died in my arms." The fact is that Jesse wasn't even on the balcony when King was shot (he was down below, in the parking lot) and he never got close enough to have been bled on by Dr. King. But he created his own myth, and told the lie over and over again until he probably even believed it.)

(For a great interview with the author of "Shakedown," click here.)

Which brings us back to Jesse Jr., for whom it's hard not to have a little sympathy. If you spent your formative years watching daddy lie, extort and steal his way into Democratic Party prominence with race hustling, that probably seems like normal behavior. Now the kid will go away to prison for being an only slightly different kind of grifter than his father was. The apple didn't fall far from the tree.

One of my favorite days of the year

Every day there are fewer and fewer people alive who can say they've been around for every Super Bowl, the 47th of which will kick off in a few hours. I'm happy to be one of them and, obviously, I hope I'm still able to say that when Super Bowl LXX rolls around.

The first Super Bowl wasn't even called the "Super Bowl." On January 15, 1967, the champions of the National Football League - Green Bay - and the champions of the American Football League - Kansas City - met in what was called "The AFL-NFL World Championship Game." In 1966, the two rival leagues had agreed to a merger, but the entity wouldn't become a single league until the start of the 1970 season. In the meantime, they would operate as separate leagues, but would each send a representative to this new-fangled "Championship Game."

(Some time later, the story goes, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle's young daughter was playing with a toy known as a "Super Ball." Rozelle heard the name of the toy, and decided the championship game would be known as the "Super Bowl." If you go to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, you can see young Ms. Rozelle's Super Ball on display.)

What I remember most is that the game was broadcast on two channels. CBS (Channel 4 in the Twin Cities) had the NFL broadcast rights, while NBC (at that time Channel 5) had the AFL rights. With no agreement in place, both networks decided to carry the game, and 10-year-old Tim Droogsma thought it was great fun to switch back and forth between channels and see the exact same thing happen from different camera angles. (Though I had to kneel in front of the TV and manually turn a knob to change the channel, remote controls having not yet been invented. Yes, kids, I'm THAT old.)

That sort of dual-track approach applied to a number of aspects to the game. When Kansas City had the ball, they used the AFL football, made by Spalding, and when the Packers had the ball, the NFL football, manufactured by Wilson, was put in play. The officiating crew was partly NFL refs, partly AFL.

It was close for a while, but the Packers eventually pulled away. Played at the Los Angeles Coliseum, the game wasn't even a sellout.

Over the years, of course, the NFL's popularity exploded, as did that of the Super Bowl, which grew to become the global event it is today. I can't say that I've watched every minute of every game, but I've certainly watched parts of every one. The only one I attended in person was Super Bowl XXVI in 1992, at the Metrodome. A friend arranged for me to work for UPI that week, so media credentials got me into good parties - I met both Donald Trump (with Marla Maples on his arm) and Jill Goodacre that week - and on Sunday I was assigned the job of writing the story on whomever was selected as the game's MVP. The Washington Redskins trounced Buffalo, and midway through the 3rd quarter Washington led 24-0 and it was obvious that Redskins QB Mark Rypien would be the MVP. The story practically wrote itself, and all I had to do was plug in a couple post-game quotes. The halftime show included Dorothy Hamill skating little circles on some synthetic ice, and Gloria Estefan doing some singing. I sometimes still wear my Super Bowl XXVI sweatshirt, much to my family's chagrin.

But what I've grown to love about the Super Bowl is not so much the game itself as it is the spectacle of it all. I see the Super Bowl as a celebration of everything American. Sure, other nations can compete with us in baseball or basketball or hockey, but football is the uniquely American game. And when the Super Bowl rolls around, 110 million or so of us sit down to watch in the closest thing we have to a communal national event. We eat tons of nachos, drink oceans of beer, wager millions of dollars and watch to enjoy the commercials as much as the game. It's the ultimate example of wretched American excess, and I love every minute of it.

Everything is overdone, from the multi-hour pre-game shows to the gaudy player introductions to the coin flip, and I take great joy in all of it. When they roll out the big flag, strike up the anthem and the flyover comes roaring by (the effect of which is somewhat diminished when the game is played in a dome, as it is this year), I'm not ashamed to say I choke up for a moment. The Super Bowl is America's moment, doggone it, and while the Chinese are buying up our economy, the Japanese and Koreans make better cars than Detroit  and we still need to import most of our great hockey players from Canada and Europe, none of them have anything to compare to the Super Bowl. It's our day, our moment, and it trumps your World Cups, Grey Cups, Tours de France and everything else put together.

Journalists behaving badly (part 1)

Over the years that I have held a job or two that, in retrospect, I find embarrassing. For example, my sophomore year of college I worked for PBS. My defense is that I was young, naive and it was the job assigned to me by the folks running the work study financial aid program at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. "Public broadcasting," I now know, is a gigantic fraud, a wasteful black hole of government spending and I stopped putting my stint on the liberal plantation on my resume years ago, lest my shame be more widely known.

Lately, however, I've begun to believe that what I should be even more embarrassed about is having once been a journalist.

It's been a tough few weeks for journalists, partly because of the way the issue of guns causes knee-jerk bedwetting among reporters and editors.

Example #1 is NBC's chief clown, David Gregory, who hosts "Meet the Press" every Sunday. In late December, National Rifle Association vice-president Wayne LaPierre appeared on the show to discuss gun control. Gregory thought he would play "gotcha" by waving a high-capacity rifle clip in LaPierre's face and asking why such clips shouldn't be banned.

But it turns out that in Washington, D.C., where Meet the Press is taped, it's illegal to possess such clips. It's a stupid law that does nothing to improve public safety, but it's still the law. And it turns out the Gregory knew it was illegal to possess the clip, his staff having asked D.C. police if it was okay. They were told no, but went ahead anyway.

Gregory clearly should have been prosecuted for a willful, blatant violation of the law, but NBC lawyers found a prosecutor who was a social acquaintance of Gregory's, and got him to decline prosecution.

The message is clear: Big-time journalists consider themselves above the law, and can pull strings to avoid punishment for their crimes. The tiny shred of journalistic integrity NBC had - this is the network that faked a truck explosion to attack General Motors, and that altered a 911 tape to make George Zimmerman sound racist - was demolished by Gregory's action.

About the same time, a suburban New York newspaper called the Journal News rounded up the names and addresses of everyone in their area that had a legal gun permit, then posted an interactive map on its web site allowing anyone to identify the homes of those permit holders. It was an unconscionable invasion of privacy, and put lives at risk. Among those who had their names and addresses published were - just to mention two groups - such folks as:

  -- Law enforcement officers, who could now be found by criminals they had arrested;
  -- Women who were hiding from abusive spouses or partners, and had a gun for self-defense;

Some enterprising bloggers responded brilliantly, tracking down the home addresses and phone numbers of the Journal News publisher, editor and staff and publishing them on the Internet. That resulted in a number of very direct complaints to the paper's employees, and the anti-gun paper responded in the most hypocritical way possible: Hiring armed guards for their offices.

Predictably, a number of area homes were burglarized by criminals looking for guns, who - thanks to the Journal News - no longer had to guess where their best chance of finding guns was. Yesterday, after a barrage of criticism, the paper finally took the map down.

It was a cheap, tacky bit of "journalism" that put lives at risk, and the newspaper's only defense for doing it was "we could."

It's enough to make me think I need to get those years as a broadcaster and newspaper reporter off my resume.

A modest proposal to save our kids

Most of America, it seems, is lined up on one side or the other of what we're calling the new "gun control" debate. The fact is that we've been having this debate for decades, and it's pretty much over: Americans have - and will continue to exercise - a constitutional right to own guns. The rest of the shouting, over marginal things like "what's an 'assault weapon'" or "gun show loopholes" (Fact check: There's no such thing) are just a lot of noise.

If you want to stop mass school killings, here's how you do it: You post a trained, armed guard in every school in America. Let's think about the mechanics and cost of that.

There are approximately 99,000 schools in America. Across America there are currently about 800,000 trained police officers, along with tens of thousands of former military personnel as well. So finding 99,000 men and women to train as school guards is a snap.

And because we only want they very best guarding our children, let's make it a relatively high-paying job. Say, $70,000 a year. Would you be willing to work what would essentially be about a 7:30-3:30 job, about nine months out of the year, for $70K? I think we can find lots of qualified people who would say "yes," particularly when they understand they would be serving to protect the lives of innocent school children.

(I realize $70K isn't a big draw in a New York City public school, but there are thousands of rural districts where gun-toting talent can be had for a lot less. It will average out.)

So how do we pay for it? 99,000 schools at $70K per school is about $6.9 billion dollars, which seems like a whole big pile of cash. Let's round it up to $7 billion a year. Where can we find that kind of money?

Well, first of all, in the grand government scheme of things, it's almost nothing. The federal government spends $1 billion about every 2.5 hours. Multiply that times seven, and we're talking about less than 18 hours of federal government spending, in order to protect every schoolchild in America with an armed guard.

But that's overall government spending. Let's look at a few specific places where we might be able to carve out $7 billion to protect school children.

 - Let's start with everyone's favorite whipping boy, defense spending. We're going to be somewhere around $633 billion in defense spending this year. Could we drop that to $626 billion? It wouldn't be my first choice, but we could probably find the money.

 - The U.S. Dept. of Energy spends $27 billion a year. Of course, it's never produced a drop of oil or a kilowatt of electricity. All it really produces are regulations that drive up the cost and reduce the availability of energy. Could they continue to push paper for only $20 billion a year? I think so.

- Over at the Dept. of Agriculture, they're planning on spending $23 billion this year, and their web site says that their budget "invests $6.1 billion in renewable and clean energy." Hmmm...Couple of questions there:

 1) We've been "investing" billions in "alternative energy" firms like Solyndra (bankrupt), A123 Batteries (bankrupt), Beacon Power (bankrupt), Ener1 (bankrupt), Abound Solar (bankrupt) and many others. Should we maybe leave the development of these "alternatives" to the private sector? And are these "investments" really more important than the safety of our schoolchildren?

 2) If the Dept. of Agriculture is "investing" billions in alternative energy, what's the Dept. of Energy doing? So it probably seems reasonable to think we could find $7 billion - for the children - in the Ag budget.

 - We send out over 62 million Social Security checks a month, about 744 million a year. If we just take $9.40 or so from each of those checks, we've got our $7 billion. The average check is $1,240 a month, so $9.40 seems like a pretty small price to pay to prevent another Columbine or Newtown from taking place, doesn't it?

But maybe all of these programs are absolutely vital and need every nickel they currently get, and we should be looking for "new" revenue for our school guards. I can think of a couple sources:

 - Newspapers. The editorial boards of newspapers seem especially interested in protecting school kids, at least for a couple of weeks after any shooting, so let's give them a chance to put their money where their mouths are. On an average day, 55 million newspapers are sold in the United States. That's 385 million papers a week, just over 20 billion papers a year. Let's put a modest 35-cent per paper tax on each issue - we'll call it the "Save a child's life surcharge" - and there we have it: A fully-funded school guard program, and the editorial writers can have the satisfaction of knowing they actually helped solve a problem, rather than simply complain about it.

 - There's considerable research that shows violence in movies, television and video games encourage increased violence. U.S. box office receipts were about $12 billion last year, TV ad revenue was about $8 billion and video game sales were about $17 billion. There's nearly $40 billion in annual revenue, so just a 17% or so surtax on this revenue would protect every school child in America.

The overall point being that where there is a will, there's a way. I'm suspicious of most government spending, but this seems like a really good use of $7 billion, certainly better than most of what we currently spend on.

Or, of course, there's the Obama method: Just add another $7 billion a year to the national debt. Borrow the money from the Chinese and pass the tab on along to the children who, after all, will be the most direct beneficiaries. What's another $7 billion in a $1.2 trillion deficit? If it's a good enough way to pay for Solyndra, fighter jets for the Muslim Brotherhood or ag subsidies, it's certainly good enough "for the children."