God helps those who help themselves

The Wire: Lakewood Church — the giant Houston headquarters of celebrity pastor Joel Osteen’s evangelical empire — alerted its congregants that as much as $600,000 in cash and checks were taken from the building over the weekend. Even more concerning: The stolen goods include envelopes on which congregants wrote down their credit card information.

According to an email from Lakewood,  the theft “is limited only to those funds contributed in the church services on Saturday, March 8 and Sunday, March 9, 2014,” and does not include donations made electronically. A church employee discovered the theft on Monday morning.

Pastors Joel and Victoria Osteen are well-known proponents of a modern version of the prosperity gospel — a theology that believes God blesses people with material success. Among evangelicals, it’s a theologically controversial, yet obviously appealing approach to Christianity…

Osteen’s “prosperity gospel” scam is almost beautiful in it’s simplicity. The marks are told that God rewards the righteous with money, so they should send the church money and then God will reward them. Those God favors most are therefore the richest, so obviously the wealthiest Christians are the most righteous and the obvious leaders. Shut up and do what rich people tell you to and you’ll get rich too. Coincidentally, Osteen — having collected all this money from the marks — is the richest guy in his church. So he says send him more money and lather, rinse, repeat. And, of course, the flock has to go out and spread the Gospel, which means Osteen gets even more of everyone’s money as time goes on.

It’s a tremendous perversion of everything taught in the Sermon on the Mount, but since when have evangelists given a damn what Jesus actually said?

But seems that someone in Osteen’s congregation decided that God was getting a little slow in the rewarding department. That person is now more than a half-million dollars more blessed and Osteen’s church is now out that money — with the very real possibility of further loss. By the rules of his own con, Osteen’s righteousness and fitness to lead has take a pretty decent hit and some unknown prophet/thief is now a half-million dollars closer to the Almighty.

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

Slow learners make the best pigeons

Do we really want to elevate George Zimmerman to the status of celebrity game show contestant?

Alyssa Rosenberg, ThinkProgress: In the aftermath of his acquittal in the death of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch coordinator whose shooting of Martin sparked a national debate about racial bias and so-called Stand Your Ground laws, has engaged in a series of provocative misadventures. He went rifle shopping. He’s begun a painting career. And on Tuesday night, right before what would have been Trayvon Martin’s 19th birthday, boxing promoter Damon Feldman announced Zimmerman’s latest stunt: he’ll be fighting the rapper DMX, theoretically for charity. (Feldman says the timing was incidental.)

My colleague Judd Legum has one great reason not to spend your pay-per-view dollars on the fight: it’ll almost certainly be a fraud. Feldman has a long record of promoting fake fights, though as Judd explains, “That’s not to say Feldman doesn’t like to promote his fights as genuine in an effort to attract interest. Feldman maintains that he doesn’t fix fights, but in 2011, he pleaded no contest to ‘charges of fixing fights and promoting fights without a license’ and sentenced to two years probation by a Pennsylvania court.” And it’s not clear that Feldman could actually set up a real contest between Zimmerman and DMX in which the blows are real and the outcome uncertain: he’d need a state or tribal commission to sanction the fight, and it’s not clear that any approval is forthcoming.

But I want to raise another issue. Feldman has tried to stir up support for the match on the grounds that it represents a way for Zimmerman’s critics to get some measure of fairness after the courts failed to convict them. “Say he goes and gets his ass kicked isn’t that justice right there?” BuzzFeed reports him saying.

"…Even if you think turnabout is fair play, the idea that a fight between Zimmerman and a black man represents some sort of cosmic rematch between Zimmerman and Martin ought to be profoundly troubling," Rosenberg argues, "Buying into Feldman’s reasoning requires us to accept Zimmerman’s version of the events that ended with him killing Martin: that this was a fight between combatants of equal size, skill, and ill intent that ended in a shooting that was purely an act of self-defense."

I’d further argue that George Zimmerman has been trying to cash in on his crime since he got away with it, trying to sell paintings and showing up at gun manufacturers like some sort of visiting celebrity. Do we really want George Zimmerman to be the next Ann Coulter — i.e., a person who’s a celebrity mostly because they’re so widely hated?

Or does Zimmerman deserve to slink off to infamy, forced to struggle along in a world where anyone with any brains at all would have nothing to do with him and would never trust him out of their sight?

It’s hard to argue against the proposition that if anyone on earth deserves to get his ass kicked, it’s George Zimmerman. But that’s not the question. The question is this: do we allow Zimmerman to use our need to see justice done as his ticket to fame and fortune?

I vote no.

School vouchers a waste of taxpayer money

Politico: Ever since the administration filed suit to freeze Louisiana’s school voucher program, high-ranking Republicans have pummeled President Barack Obama for trapping poor kids in failing public schools.

The entire House leadership sent a letter of protest. Majority Leader Eric Cantor blistered the president for denying poor kids “a way into a brighter future.” And Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal accused him of “ripping low-income minority students out of good schools” that could “help them achieve their dreams.”

But behind the outrage is an inconvenient truth: Taxpayers across the U.S. will soon be spending $1 billion a year to help families pay private school tuition — and there’s little evidence that the investment yields academic gains.

In Milwaukee, just 13 percent of voucher students scored proficient in math and 11 percent made the bar in reading this spring. That’s worse on both counts than students in the city’s public schools. In Cleveland, voucher students in most grades performed worse than their peers in public schools in math, though they did better in reading.

Private school vouchers have always been a scam. They’ve allowed Republican governors to hand out taxpayer money without any real accountability, while undermining public school teachers unions. It’s never been about helping students.

And as always, a privatization scheme has turned out to be a bad idea. It costs more and delivers less — as any thinking person would predict. Government is a not-for-profit, meaning it can operate a school at cost. Businesses are for-profit, meaning they can’t. As I’ll continue to point out until the last conservative finally understands math, cost + profit > cost. Privatization has to be either more expensive or less efficient/effective. In many cases, as we see here, it’s both.

It’s simple math. Of course, if enough people get school vouchers, everyone will suck so hard at math that they won’t be able to see the problem. After all, here’s the sort of “education” these indoctrination centers are providing:

[A]cross Louisiana, many of the most popular private schools for voucher students posted miserable scores in math, reading, science and social studies this spring, with fewer than half their voucher students achieving even basic proficiency and fewer than 2 percent demonstrating mastery. Seven schools did so badly, state Superintendent John White barred them from accepting new voucher students — though the state agreed to keep paying tuition for the more than 200 voucher students already enrolled, if they chose to stay.

Nationwide, many schools participating in voucher programs infuse religion through their curriculum. Zack Kopplin, a student activist who favors rigorous science education, has found more than 300 voucher schools across the U.S. that teach the biblical story of creation as science; some also instruct children that the world is just several thousand years old and use textbooks describing the Loch Ness Monster as a living dinosaur. Parents at one such school in Louisiana received a newsletter calling secular scientists “sinful men.”

Shut it down. For good.