Dueling Love Songs from the Amalfi Coast

During my all too brief trip to Italy this summer, I was able to spend a day on the Amalfi coast and enjoy its breathtaking scenery. Sorrento is probably the best known town on the Amalfi Coast (also known as the Sorrentine Peninsula), having been immortalized by the Neapolitan classic love song, Torna a Surriento. The song is well known internationally, has been translated into English (Come Back to Sorrento) and at one point even inspired a hilarious parody by Allan Sherman.

Politics in Italy

I arrived in Italy with the assumption that most everyone I would run into would be to the left side of the political spectrum, particularly among my relatives. It would stand to reason that they would be pro-Obama and pro-public sector, having basically fallen for anti-business and anti-capitalist demagoguery.

I did indeed find that to varying degrees, but not as vehemently as I expected. On our second day in Italy, we were in a small convenience store in Lucca. The owner noticed me conversing in English with my wife Susan and then asking for items in Italian.

“Siete Americani?” he inquired.

“Yes, we just arrived from America yesterday for a short vacation.”

“How are things in America? Is the economic crisis very bad.”

The Tender Mercies of the TSA

“If you are traveling with children, please secure your own oxygen mask first before assisting your children with theirs.”

These are part of the rote but necessary safety instructions given by airline attendants at the beginning of all commercial flights. Everyone who travels by air more than once a year knows the entire safety routine by heart, which is why the attendants at Southwest Airlines can get away with spicing it up with comic relief variants, such as one that I heard recently on a flight from Cleveland to Baltimore:

“If you are traveling with children, what were you thinking?!?!””

I got quite a charge out of that one perhaps because of its special applicability to my wife and me. We not only travel with children, but very often with our autistic children, a surefire guarantee to turn any vacation into an adventure.

WWJD with Chain Emails?

I occasionally get unsolicited emails from friends, relatives and coworkers who share my values when it comes to religion and politics. I appreciate and read them all, but I very rarely pass them on to anyone else. This is particularly the case with chain emails. I am sure you have received some yourself. You know, the kind that encourage you to pass it on to ten friends for a variety of good reasons, such as: making someone’s day with kind and uplifting thoughts, saving someone’s soul. keeping our country from going to hell in a handbasket or… [fill in the blank].

The Fungibility of Government Funding

A while back I wrote a blog entitled “There’s a Ford in my Future”. Among other things, the post extolled the Ford Motor Company’s proud history of not succumbing to government intimidation back during the Roosevelt Administration, and more recently not accepting government bailout money during the Obama Administration. By contrast, I also lamented the foolhardiness and questionable legality of the Obama Administration’s bailout of Chrysler and GM.


As I was listening to the radio a week or so ago, I was beginning to think for a very brief moment that I had been mistaken. The syndicated ABC radio news broadcaster announced excitedly that GM was able to pay off its government loan in full. The taxpayers were getting their money back, even ahead of schedule!.

“Could I have been wrong?” I thought. “Was this an instance where an otherwise foolhardy and irresponsible waste of taxpayer dollars actually paid off?”

These questions were racing through my mind for a very brief moment indeed when they were interrupted by the concluding segment of the news segment: “GM is still losing money”.

Tax Day Musings: Let’s Abolish the IRS

I will grant you that the title of this post might seem a little over-the-top, unrealistic rhetoric that will turn off the serious reader. But I am actually serious, and if you bear with me, you will see why. But first let me digress with a couple of introductory side points:

Back in February I wrote a post entitled The Non-census of It All, which lamented, among other things, the whole approach to the census. Surely you have seen or heard the census bureau’s advertising campaigns stating, “Without a complete, accurate census, your community may not receive its fair share [of federal funding].” This is not the way things were supposed to work. Indeed, as I had pointed out:

Our founding fathers never envisioned—indeed they crafted the Constitution to specifically avoid—a behemoth federal government that did most of the taxing and spending. Rather, the majority of taxation and government influence was to be at the local level, where elected leaders are more easily held accountable. We have since turned the wisdom of our founding fathers on its head to the point where state and local governments are mere appendages of the federal government.

More recently I learned something else disturbing about our current fiscal and tax policy. The Heritage Foundation and others have pointed out that we have reached that dangerous point where more than half of the U.S. population pays no federal income tax. The reason this is dangerous is that, with demagogues in government always harping about those greedy rich people needing to pay their fair share, and with the majority of the population paying no federal taxes but receiving some kind of government benefits, this majority will soon realize that it can vote itself more and more benefits--and there is nothing that the tax-paying, productive sectors of society can do about it, except maybe leave the country. It is a recipe for tyranny and eventual economic collapse.

How much do you trust Congress?

I receive a regular email update from Ric Edeleman of Edelman Financial Services. The following Q&A from his last update is quite telling:

Q&A: Roth IRA Conversion

Question: Regarding Roth IRA conversions, what is there to prevent the government 10, 20 or 30 years from now taking these Roth IRAs and changing rules and making them taxable, either all or in part, or making them subject to the AMT?

Ric: There is nothing preventing Congress from doing that. That is one of our objections to the Roth IRA and specifically to the Roth IRA Conversion. Congress says Roth IRA withdrawals are tax-free, but we get a new Congress every two years.

Planning to retire in 20 years? That’s 10 Congresses from now. If the government needs more revenue, a future Congress might decide to tax the money held in Roth accounts. You can even argue that this is why Congress allows Roth conversions in the first place: The conversion does not necessarily lower your taxes, but it does accelerate your payment of them. By getting you to convert, Congress gets the tax revenue now.

Clever, huh?

Do you trust Congress to honor its promises? The more you do, the more confident you can be about putting money in the Roth IRA. Personally, I am not terribly confident.

Indeed. I am not sure I have ever been able to put much faith in Congress keeping their word; but given their shenanigans as of late, my level of trust for them has descended even further, if that were possible.  Something to think about as the blessed day of April 15 approaches.

Alla Luce del Sole

I don’t know much about Josh Groban, but I certainly enjoy his music. The man definitely has talent.

I guess he can best be described as an American Andrea Bocelli, lending a classical style and a tenor voice to a broad variety of musical genres. Some are just sappy love songs, the typical boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, please don’t-leave-me type of songs, but even these have a certain grace, dignity and class thanks to Groban’s commanding voice and classical accompaniment. The fact that many of his songs are sung in flawless Italian or Spanish further broadens their appeal.

While I am not sure of his religious background, a number of his songs seem decidedly Christian, such as his rendition of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring or You Raise Me Up (Though the latter doesn’t explicitly mention Jesus.) Others , such as Remember When It Rained (one of my favorites) are even less overtly Christian, but they have all the markings of a believer’s prayer.

Of First Importance

The “About” section of this blog explains three things that are important to me and which also, to a great extent, drive the content of my posts:

• Italy and anything pertaining to the Italian language and culture
• Conservative politics and commentary
• Christian theology and apologetics.
  

With all the rage going on lately with the health care debate and many of the other outrageous things that have been going on in our country, I perhaps have been devoting way too much space to matters political. But whether I am talking about politics, Italy, theology, family and friends or other musings, I view these as all secondary. There is something else that is of first importance: the Gospel.

I recently stumbled onto a blog that is aptly titled Of First Importance . It’s format is usually a daily quote, sort of an inspirational “thought for the day”. But this is not your typical kumbaya, “Chicken Soup for the Soul” type of inspiration. Each day brings a very pithy, meaningful message not from some pop psychologist or modern day inspirational speaker, but from giants of the faith of ages past and present. The messages simply remind us of the Gospel and encourage us to live each day in the good of the Gospel, and all of its far reaching implications in our lives.

The phrase “of first importance” actually comes from a verse of Scripture. In his first letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul was writing to a group of Christians who had spent way too much time majoring on minors and had forgotten the essence of the Gospel. They had forgotten the main event that defined who they were: that Jesus Christ had died for their sins and rose again:

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” [I Corinthians 15:3-4)

If we can lay hold of this glorious truth--or rather let this glorious truth take hold of us, then everything else that we deem so important will fall into its rightful place.

Has it really been 39 years?

Certain dates tend to stay etched in my mind. Not to sound morbid, but this is often the case with anniversaries of deaths. Not that they are constantly on my mind. Rather, like a macro lying dormant on a hard disk, they self execute with the arrival of the date.

March 20 is one of those days. Though I look forward to it as the first day of spring, it also marks the day my grandfather, Nonno Pietro, passed away. It was my first experience at losing a loved one. It has been 39 years and I was only a child at the time, but I can still remember the day clear as a bell. My dad was at nonno's bedside in Italy when he died. (On and off over an 18 month period, one or both of my parents spent weeks and months at a time in Italy, having dropped everything to show undying devotion to their parents during their final days--something else I will never forget.)