Obama Easter Celebration

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama officially opened the annual Easter Egg Roll Monday, calling it "one of the greatest White House traditions."

Yesterday, the first family celebrated the resurrection of Christ at St. John's Episcopal Church in Lafayette Square where the president along with his wife and two daughters received Communion. There the Rev. Luis Leon preached on how Easter is a matter of faith not of logical fact. "I can't explain Easter to anyone. It just can't be done. It's like a professor trying to explain one of e.e. cummings' poems," he said.

The Obamas have only gone to church twice since arriving in Washington in January. You know how difficult church shopping can be when you've moved.

Three Stooges Remake

I heard that the Farrelly brothers are planning to do a remake of the Three Stooges.  Apparently, the cast is pretty much set at this point.

Now to the picture:  Pres Obama seems to be having way to much fun with G-20 BFFs Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi and Russian Pres. Dmitry Medvedev.  However, the situationally aware scuba diver will notice that Obama is giving the "thumb this dive" signal, which indicates big trouble.

You Know It's Time to Go Diving When...

1.  The Obama regime wants to seize more businesses in the name of "economic security."

2.  The Fed is printing another trillion or so dollars to cover this month's national Visa bill.

3.  LCMS, Inc. still hasn't apologized for sicking their legal pit bulls on Todd & Co over the Issues, Etc. trademark.

4.  My friends are arguing over wearing pink in Lent.

Time for some serious bottom time.*

*Time at depth underwater in diver parlance, so that there's no misunderstanding.

Issues, Etc. One Year Later

Scott "Stand Firm" Diekmann is running a great one-year retrospective on the Issues, Etc. debacle this week complete with art, audio sound bytes, video clips, and guest bloggers including yours truly.  He's really done a great job bringing together the whole Issues, Etc. story.

Check it out:  Stand Firm

It's All Over But the Finger Pointing

Well, it looks like our little pre-Lent Issues, Etc. flare-up has successfully been put down thanks to the efforts of attorney Henry B. Madsen, the legal beagle who sent the snarling pack of synodical pit bulls scurrying in retreat.  Mr. Madsen has a great analysis of what transpired over at the John the Steadfast site.  Take some time to admire the craft.

The aftermath of the legal scrum seems to be a case of finger-pointing and whether anyone actually "threatened" anyone with legal action, the dialogue running something like this:

"Did."

"Didn't."

"Yes, you did."

"No, I didn't."

Not exactly Tom Clancy reading material, if you ask me.  I graciously provided the face-saving way out of this in my last blog post.  Just say, "Ours lawyers did it," and apologize for sicking the corporate pit bulls.  Simple.

My favorite quote from Mr. Madsen's summary is this one:  "Counsel is a 'mouthpiece' not a 'brainpiece.'"

Doesn't it remind you of Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz?

On Lawyers and Pit Bulls

Let me go on record from the outset - I generally like lawyers.  I admire their vocation, especially litigators and constitutional lawyers, albeit for different reasons.  Call me crazy, but I even enjoy jury duty as a chance to watch lawyers at work.  Maybe I'm biased because I know some good ones personally, but I like the way lawyers think, reason, work with evidence and the art of rhetoric.  I almost went to law school myself back in another day.  Some would say I didn't trade up very much, but that's for another time.

I appreciate the value of a good lawyer.  I once needed one.  I hired the biggest, meanest pit bull I could find.  In our adversarial legal system, you don't want a Bichon Frise in your corner.  A few phone calls and a couple of pieces of heavyweight letterhead and my legal troubles vanished into the depths of Hades with the father of lies from whence they came.  Hence, my appreciation and admiration.

In a recent letter to the Council of Presidents (CoPs - Are Lutherans acronym-challenged or is this just me?)LCMS, Inc. CEO Gerald Kieschnick denies he ever personally threatened our boys Todd and Jeff with a lawsuit by saying "I have not filed, initated, supported, or encouraged any lawsuit against Rev. Todd Wilken or Mr. Jeff Schwarz, nor have I ever had a desire to do so."  I'll leave the thoughts and desires of the man to God who searches the heart.  But let's parse that sentence.  Of course Pres. Kieschnick didn't "file, initiate, support, or encourage" anything.  The lawyers for LCMS, Inc. did that.  That's what you hire lawyers to do.

Here's what was written on that infamous piece of letterhead of December 16 :

While it remains our strong preference to continue negotiations and resolve this matter amicably between the parties, unless your client is willing to negotiate in good faith to finalize a mutually acceptable agreement in the near future, along the lines that we were discussing last summer, we will be left with no alternative but to recommend that The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod prosecute the opposition against Madsen's application and take action against your clients to enforce its rights to the trademark.

Take a moment and admire the beauty, the form, the craftsmanship.  No one is threatening anyone with anything directly; that would be illegal.  It's all couched in that wonderful passive voice.  "We will be left with no alternative...."  Nice!  

Oh, there are alternatives aplenty, like letting go of a dead trademark, but once you bring on the pit bulls, they know only one way of doing business.  All the LCMS, Inc. Board of Directors and CEO Kieschnick had say to the legal suits was "defend our trademark."  And the lawyers know what to do.  Let's face it, if you really want your trademark badly enough, you have to be willing to go to the legal mat to defend it, including suing your own mother.  Look at what the recording industry tried to do to college students with their mp3 downloads.  It goes with the trademark turf, kids.

In intertestimental Judaism there was an office called the shaliach (from shalach, "to send," kind of like apostolos from which we get apostle).  A shaliach was an authorized legal representative who could conduct business in the stead and by the command of the one who sent him.  The saying went, "To deal with a man's shaliach is to deal with the man himself."  So when you sick the legal pit bulls, you have to take responsibility for what they do.  If you don't want threatening letterhead, don't invite the lawyers into the conversation.

A good captain goes down with his ship; he doesn't toss the deckhands overboard.  I know that doesn't seem terribly fashionable in our day, but I'm sure there are still some old-fashioned captains around somewhere.  Call me a hopeless romantic.  A man needs to take responsibility for his shalachim and call the dogs off when the cost is not worth the fight.   Lawyers are used to be rolled under the bus.  That's why they get paid $250 a billable hour and laugh at us during happy hour.  Leaders need to take responsibility for corporate actions, including those of their own shalachim.

(Lawyer joke:  What do you call a shark and a lawyer swimming together?  Answer:  a big fish and a predator.  Sorry, couldn't resist.  My lawyer friends know better ones than that.)

If we are actually going to take 1 Corinthians 6:1-8 as inspired apostolic admonition of how to run a church in a God-pleasing manner, it means that we need to try our level best to keep the lawyers out of our family skirmishes.  

You know how it is with pit bulls; sometimes they attack the family's children.

Just Thinking Aloud

I just signed yet another Issues, Etc. petition, and it got me to thinking, which is always dangerous. Three questions came to my mind.

First, why the sudden interest in the trademark for Issues, Etc. on the part of LCMS, Inc.?  It wasn't interested enough in it to keep the paperwork current. It cancelled the show. Remember, it didn't fire the host and his producer. It cancelled the show. It wanted nothing to do with Issues, Etc. Issues, Etc. was done and gone. So why all of a sudden comes the sudden interest in reacquiring the trademark to Issues, Etc.? Is LCMS, Inc. planning to revive the show again on KFUO-AM? Not likely.

The legal docs spell out what LCMS, Inc. wants in return for permission to use the name Issues, Etc. Here's an image of it so I don't have to retype it and check for typos. My legalese and weaselese is not what it used to be.  The picture and the red highlighter are courtesy of Chris "Extreme Theology" Rosebrough.

OK, so correct me if I'm wrong here.  LCMS, Inc. will let Todd and Jeff use the Issues, Etc. name (which they don't currently hold trademark for, but really want it back now) so long as it's clear there is no LCMS affiliation to the show, LCMS, Inc. doesn't endorse or sponsor the show, and they don't utter a discouraging word about LCMS, Inc. on the show.  

Which brings me to my second question.

What exactly are they afraid Todd is going to say?  Todd's been spouting off for nearly a year now, and I haven't heard anything I didn't already know anyway.  What could Todd possibly say that would disparage the LCMS or cast it or its members in a negative light.  The LCMS does a pretty darn good job of that without having to worry about Todd and his little internet radio show.  As I teach in confession, keeping secrets takes a lot of energy.  You've got to wonder what sort of dark secrets are lurking at 1333 Kirkwood Ave.  

Which brings me to my third and last question.

Why bother?  This trademark thing is a total public relations nightmare for LCMS, Inc.  No one is going to support this kind of corporate bullying, except of course, people who want Todd Wilken to shut up and go away at any cost.  But here's the upshot.  LCMS, Inc. has sufficient control over Todd's message already.  He's a rostered pastor on the LCMS clergy roster.  If he says stuff under the Issues, Etc. banner that is false doctrine or slanderous or unbecoming a minister, defrock him.  Or at least torture him slowly with the Night of the Synodical Reconcilers.  If that's not enough, sue him for slander.

But why pick at the nits of a trademark that legally dropped dead in 1999 and that no one, but no one, was interested in except Todd and Jeff?  The only word that comes to my mind on this Fat Tuesday 2009 is "fear."  Whopping, sweaty, armpit-soaking, hand-wringing, molar-grinding, memo-generating, fingernail-biting, hair-on-the-nape-of-the-neck-raising, meeting monopolizing dollops of corporate fear.  Contain the message, control the vision, silence the critics.

They say dogs can smell fear over a mile away.