Larry Elder is again filling in for Dennis Prager and had a short colloquy about welfare and how a society should best respond — compassionately. So far we have done the opposite.
Larry Elder quotes a stat from Marvin Olasky’s book, “The Tragedy of American Compassion.”
Listen To Larry On-Line at CRN-Talk Radio.
For more clear thinking like this from Larry Elder… I invite you to visit: http://www.larryelder.com/ ~AND~ http://www.elderstatement.com/
Here is a longer version:
World Magazine h/t ~ and ~ Townhall.com h/t:
Jim Wallis has been the subject of some recent blogosphere humor. Hugh Hewitt wrote, “Most folks who receive donations from billionaires tend not to forget them, so pray for Jim Wallis’s memory.” Scholar William Voegeli wondered whether Sojourners “is drowning in money,” since Wallis didn’t remember that megabucks leftist George Soros gave $325,000 to his organization. With Jim’s denial appearing Clintonian, Baylor’s Francis Beckwith imagined Wallis saying, I did not have financial relations with that Soros.
This all grew out of my mention halfway through a July 17 WORLD column that Soros gave money to Sojourners. It didn’t seem like a big deal. Of course, Soros would find the religious left useful in drawing evangelical votes from conservatives and electing candidates who support abortion, same-sex marriage, socialism, and other unbiblical causes. Nor was it surprising that Jim, trying to keep his organization afloat, would take the cash. Yet Jim last month told an interviewer twice, “We don’t receive money from George Soros.”
It’s almost an axiom of politics that denials of evidence raise more questions than the original accusation—if the evidence still exists in one form or another. Other people besides myself had seen grants to Sojourners listed on pages in online reports from Soros’ Open Society Institute. Jay Richards wrote in National Review Online, “I have physical copies of these pages, which is good, because these pages seem to have disappeared from the OSI website (I’m sure that’s just a coincidence).”
The pages had disappeared—an OSI spokeswoman eventually said, “We are overhauling our website”—and that was disappointing, because I wanted people to be able to see for themselves proof of the Soros-Sojourners yoking. What to do? I examined on the Foundation Center website IRS Form 990s filed by Sojourners—but nonprofit groups merely have to list revenue from grants, not spell out their origins.
A stalemate? No, wait—OSI online grant pages were gone, but what about OSI’s Form 990 for 2004? (Grantmakers typically list their donations, and IRS forms cannot be so readily scrubbed, right?) Let’s look—wow, 283 pages, lots of income statements, various reports, no mention of Sojourners. But then . . . Grants to U.S. Public Charities . . . Yes! On page 225: Sojourners, 2401 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20009. “To support the Messaging and Mobilization Project: Engaging Christians on the Importance of Civic Involvement.” October 2004: $200,000.
This is a BIGGOV Import:
There is an old saying that politics make strange bedfellows. A great example of this is seen in the union of a George Soros, Jewish born billionaire who collaborated with the Nazis and was convicted of insider trading, funding the organization of Jim Wallis Christian writer and political activist, founder and editor of Sojourners magazine, leader of the Progressive evangelical movement, Obama adviser and advocate for “social justice.”
The original charge was made Marvin Olasky in the Christian Magazine, The World. Olasky reported that Soros had been giving money to Sojourners since 2004.
[Soros] bankrolled Sojourners with a $200,000 grant in 2004. A year later, here’s how Jim rebutted a criticism of “religious progressives” for being allied with Soros and MoveOn.org: “I know of no connections to those liberal funds and groups that are as direct as the Religious Right’s ties to right-wing funders.”
Since then Sojourners has received at least two more grants from Soros organizations. Sojourners revenues have more than tripled—from $1,601,171 in 2001-2002 to 5,283,650 in 2008-2009—as secular leftists have learned to use the religious left to elect Obama and others.
Maybe he was surprised by the charges, because the “man of God,” Walis lied about the Soros funding claiming that Olasky was trying to imitate Glenn Beck:
It’s not hyperbole or overstatement to say that Glenn Beck lies for a living. I’m sad to see Marvin Olasky doing the same thing. No, we don’t receive money from Soros. Given the financial crisis of nonprofits, maybe Marvin should call Soros and ask him to send us money.
So, no, we don’t receive money from George Soros. Our books are totally open, always have been. Our money comes from Christians who support us and who read Sojourners. That’s where it comes from. In fact, we’ve had funding blocked, this year and last, by liberal foundations who didn’t like our stance on abortion. Other liberal groups were happy to point out to them that our stance wasn’t kosher on abortion, so our funding was blocked.
So tell Marvin he should check his facts, and not imitate Glenn Beck.
Wallis got one part correct, Olasky did imitate Beck, both the TV commentator and the Christian writer both use facts and evidence to build their cases.
After starting with a lie (or maybe because the evidence was dug up) Wallis relented. Faced with his group’s tax returns which show donations from Soros, he fessed up to a partnership with the Democratic Party’s “sugar daddy.”
Recently, I participated in an interview about the future of Evangelicalism. The interviewer asked about a blog post in which an author made accusations about Sojourners’ funding. I should have declined to comment until I was able to review the blog post in question and consulted with our staff on the details of our funding over the past several years. Instead, I answered in the spirit of the accusation and did not recall the details of our funding over the decade in question. The spirit of the accusation was that Sojourners is beholden to funders on the political left, which is false. The allegation concerned three grants received over 10 years from the Open Society Institute that made up the tiniest fraction of Sojourners’ funding during that decade — so small that I hadn’t remembered them. Sojourners doesn’t belong to the political left or right. Sojourners receives funding from individuals and organizations across a broad spectrum who are committed to our mission of “biblical social justice.”
Holy Cow, Sojourners must raise lots of money to consider over $7 Million Dollars from one person a “tiniest fraction.” Or maybe Wallis is suffering from some sort of memory lost because the group’s total revenue in 2008 for example, was only $4.6 million, a person with a normal memory who ran an organization the size of Sojourners would remember a donation the size of Soros’ and wouldn’t describe it as a “tiniest fraction.”
[….]
Wallis has shown that he is a liar and considering his false charges of Olasky lying, he is also someone who disregards the commandment about bearing false witness. There is nothing wrong with Wallis having his religious beliefs even if I disagree with them. What is wrong is that the Obama adviser misrepresents those beliefs and their political nature, even to the point of lying about them.
Wallis claims his group is non-partisan. One of his favorite lines is
“We’ve seen religion made partisan. When I talk, I talk about a moral center. I want us to go deeper, not left or right.” He advises Obama while claiming he is “nonpartisan evangelical minister.
Yeah right! non-partisen my ass!
A blogger in New Zealand has a great post on Obama and Jim Wallis. I will excerpt from it here , but for the more in-depth person – you should read it in its entirety:
Obama File 100 Obama’s “Faith Adviser” Jim Wallis Mixes With Socialists, Radicals and “Truthers” (h/t – Exposing Liberal Lies)
…President Barack Obama spent 20 years under the ministry of Rev. Jeremiah Wright on Chicago’s South Side.
Wright is a Marxist and admirer of the founder of “Black Liberation Theology”, James Cone – who wrote in 1969 “All white men are responsible for white oppression. . . . Theologically, Malcolm X was not far wrong when he called the white man ‘the devil.'”
In June 1998 Wright attended the Black Radical Congress in Chicago where he shared a panel with Cornel West and and former parishioner Michael Eric DysonDemocratic Socialists of America Religion and Socialism Commission, plus a former Communist Party member from his own Trinity United Church of Christ named Kevin Tyson…. of the
[….]
Today President Obama gets his spiritual nourishment from another source, a leader of American “progressive” Christianity, named Jim Wallis.
Jim Wallis is white and oh so smooth and reasonable. He is no firebrand like Jeremiah Wright. He is a registered Democrat and the respectable face of the Christian left.
Rev. Wallis has served on Obama’s White House Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, or “Faith Council” since 2008, but the relationship is personal and goes back at least a dozen years.
[….]
Jim Wallis was raised in a devout Plymouth Brethren household, but broke with the Church at fourteen over its failure to commit to political causes.
Wallis went on to join and then lead the militant Students for a Democratic Society, at Michigan State University.
After College Wallis went on to attend Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Illinois where he joined with other young seminarians in establishing the community that eventually became Sojourner. In 1979, Time magazine named Wallis one of the “50 Faces for America’s Future.
In 1977 Wallis moved his radical Sojourner community, to Washington D.C., specifically to a small district named Columbia Heights, only a mile from the White House.
Meanwhile, many of Wallis’ old SDS comrades had founded a new Marxist organization with some older Communist Party veterans , patriotically named, the New American Movement. In 1982, NAM, in turn, merged with the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee to form Democratic Socialists of America.
The new organization took penetration of organized religion very seriously, immediately forming a Religion and Socialism Commission.
[To the right] is [a] clipping from a July 1982 DSA newsletter, listing the three Religion and Socialism Commission co-chairs.
After pointing out that the name is spelled a bit different and making the point that the address is similar to the area Wallis lived and that this is most likely a typo, New Zeal continues:
….Is the President’s “spiritual advisor” cut from the same cloth?
Jim Wallis, is socialist, a fervent believer in the state redistribution of wealth. He is connected to some of the most radical people in America.
Wallis works hard to portray himself as moderate and a “bridge-builder”. He is a Bible scholar and comes across as sincere and as trustworthy as the President himself.
But maybe the millions of Christians and Jews who voted for Obama, should remind themselves that it is not only men of God who can quote the Scriptures to suit their purpose.
The New Zeal throws another bone for the reader, entitled, “Obama File 101 Who’s Been Fibbing Then? Evidence That Obama Was Deeply Involved in Socialist New Party ‘Sister Organization'” I have to say that churches and Christians vary on lots of items and beliefs. Whether you believe Jim Wallis is kosher or not is not a salvonic issue. But for Christians to not want to engage even in a look at whom they voted for and his ties to all these organizations that are rabidly anti-Christian and wish to supplant the Gospel with a secularist/multi-cultural/politically correct version of religion, is, well, dangerous. It smacks of anti scholastic thought and shows how people are ripe for watering down the history of the Christian message and its power.