The now-fading publication evokes a distinct 20th-century kind of wealth and influence—like the Plaza Hotel and Elaine’s on the Upper East Side.
In June, The Washington Post discovered that what looked like a back issue of Time magazine featuring Trump on the cover—and displayed in at least five of Trump’s clubs—was, in fact, doctored. The fake cover featured a serious looking Trump with twin, glowing assessments: “Donald Trump: The ‘Apprentice’ is a television smash!” and “TRUMP IS HITTING ON ALL FRONTS . . . EVEN TV!” The real issue of Time magazine at the time featured the actress Kate Winslet on the cover.
.. Remember Newsweek? It once routinely determined the national conversation.
.. Donald Trump is a man whose concept of wealth is all Manhattan circa 1989. And in Manhattan in 1989, Timemagazine was the king of the newsstand.
.. Trump became a public figure and a celebrity at Time’s apex. But more than that, Time is the perfect manifestation of Trump’s attitude toward success.
.. In the 1980s, when Time was still a cash cow
.. the very public bankruptcy and surprising redemption.
.. Trump’s wealth—and the persona he built around it—has always been aspirational.
.. The superlatives that spill so easily from Trump’s lips—everything’s the biggest, and the best, and the most.
.. The magazine was founded by rich men playing with their fathers’ money—no member of the founding staff was more than three years out of college
.. In the early 1980s, as Trump was rising to fame, Time was absolutely flush with cash:
Worshiping a Golden Calf on Sunday Morning Is Deceptively Easy
All sin is idolatry because every sin is an exercise in trust of something or someone other than the one true God to satisfy, fulfill, or bless.
.. We must take great care, then, not to assume that even in our religious environments, where we put the Scriptures under so many noses, that it is Jesus the exalted Christ who is being worshiped.
.. Once upon a time, I sat through a little ditty in a church service in which the congregation was led to sing, “I can change the world with these two hands,” and the question struck me like a lightning bolt: “Who exactly am I worshiping right now?”
Likewise, every weekend men and women file into church buildings in order to exult in the rhetorical skill of their preacher, to admire him and think of their church as his church, not Christ’s church.
.. We worship the worship experience; we tithe with expectation of return from heaven’s slot machine; we dress to impress
.. We see in Exodus 32:5 that even the worshipers of the golden calf ascribed their worship to the covenant Lord Yahweh.
.. Tim Keller elaborates: “So Luther says that even after you are converted by the gospel your heart will go back to operating on other principles unless you deliberately, repeatedly set it to gospel-mode.”
.. The proclamation of the good news of Jesus and the extolling of his eternal excellencies is always an interruption, always a disruption.
The Attractional Church’s Trojan Rabbit
Those who’ve grown up in or cut their ministry teeth on the attractional movement often cannot see the ecclesiological dis-ease around them.
.. the attractional church (or “seeker church,” as it used to be called) was about getting as many people as possible inside the doors to then hear the good news of Jesus Christ.
.. In my youth ministry days, we used all manner of traditionally adolescent enticements—pizza, silly games, loud music—but the “big church” services in the attractional paradigm uses grown-up versions of these enticements
.. we might call this approach to ministry “the ol’ bait and switch”: get ’em inside with cool stuff, then share the gospel with the captive audience.
.. what you win people with is what you win them to ..
.. the gospel of Christ’s finished work became relegated to the end of a service, almost an addendum to to the real focal points of the goings-on, and then it frequently became pushed to the end of an entire message series, eventually became saved just for special occasions, and ultimately has been replaced altogether by the shiny legalism of moralistic therapeutic deism.
.. Eventually the attractional church became all bait, no switch.
.. The approach of today’s attractional church is like the Trojan Rabbit of Monty Python‘s Arthurian nincompoops—smuggled inside the castle walls with nobody inside.
McCain could save the country from this terrible tax bill
In 2010, he told Fortune magazine that the nation was “sleep-walking toward a debt crisis,” and he foresaw calamity on a grand scale. “Within a few years a sale of government bonds will fail,” he said. “The capital markets will go crazy, and the Fed and Treasury will run to Capitol Hill demanding a giant bailout.” Wow.
He offered much the same view in 2011. “We face a crushing burden of debt, which will take down our economy,” Ryan predicted. “It will lower our living standards.”
.. When it comes to the middle class, by the way, this proposal doesn’t even deserve to be called a tax cut. According to the Tax Policy Center, it would leave about half of taxpayers paying more by 2027.
Republicans are lying coming and going. They hold down the sticker price of the bill and minimize its impact on the deficit by having the middle-class tax cuts (but not the corporate reductions) expire. But they insist that future Congresses would keep the middle-class tax cuts in place.
So they are either lying about the deficit or misleading the middle class.
.. As soon as Republicans shovel every dollar they can to the people who pay their party’s bills, he’ll dust off those old the-sky-is-falling quotes and warn about the deficits he helped to bloat. He’ll tell us how urgent it is to slash Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and programs for the needy (although he’ll try to bamboozle us again by claiming to be only “reforming” them)... What can stop this duplicitous raid on the federal treasury? A mobilization at the grass roots