Republicans Take Over House Gaining 60 Seats

The Republicans took over at least 59 house seats and now the Democrats are in the one hundreds with only 194 or less while the Republicans are well in excess of two hundred. The Republican gains will probably exceed sixty seats. In the Senate Harry Reid hung on to his majority seat and defeated Angler by 50% to 45% beating out the latest polls there. In late news Michael Bennet just won for Senate in Colorado. So the West is putting up resistance to the Republican tide. Marco Rubio won in Florida handily by more than his two opponents combined, including former governor Charlie Crist. The democrats hung on to the West Virginia senate race but lost in Illinois, Michigan and in Pennsylvania, so Joe Sestak lost. Joe Miller appears headed for defeat in Alaska as Lisa Marcoski with her write in campaign appears to be winning but they’re going to hold that one up for days. In the senate they say it’s 49 democrats to 46 republicans and two independents. The math doesn’t quite add up there. John Boehner began to cry as he gave his speech this morning on the Today show. In the thing I saw on the internet he was straightforward. Meanwhile in state races Jerry Brown won 52% to 43% to Meg Whitman and Barbra Boxer defeated Carley Feurina 50% to 45% or something though Feurina hasn’t conceded yet. Cooley gave a victory speech for Attorney General even though the San Francisco Chronicle yanked it’s victory call a half hour after it was given and Harris appears to be the next Attorney General. In the propositions proposition 19 lost, and there were all these allusions to “going up in smoke” but even if just 44% of the people voted for it that’s still a sizable minority. Proposition 20 passed and so we will take redistricting away from the legislature. The state parks initiative lost as did proposition 24 so say Hello to a giveaway to the rich taking money from school teachers and others. Proposition 25 won so the legislature is on notice now for no late budgets or they get the axe. Proposition 22 won to preserve local funds. And the dirty air initiate lost- - as Californians rejected this scheme by oil billionaires. Proposition 27 lost.

I wasn’t pleased with the coverage on seven last night because they didn’t keep us updated on key senate races enough. They kept talking about how tea baggers feel about taking over the House but in hard numbers the last figure I heard was 19 out of a needed 39. I switched to channel nine at eight. I stayed up relatively late by my current standards but I decided not to wait till after ten for victory speeches because they might have delays in those. KNBC in the morning was more obsessed with traffic and weather than they were the election results. Stephanie Miller wasn’t much better as far as giving anybody hard numbers. I had to go to the internet before breakfast for that.

President Obama is having a press conference at ten. I believe he will have to make a dramatic break with his usual pattern if people are going to care what he says. Just the usual lines about “Putting politics aside and working together” won’t cut it this year. Not if people don’t really feel the President has “gotten the message”. Senator Mitch Mc Conell has said his job is to massively obstruct everything and make Obama a one term President. Rand Paul won the senate seat in Kentucky, and that was hardly any surprise. People have been pronouncing him the winner for months already. As I say, this country now is going to slip back down into the depths of recession, which tea baggers like Judy appear to want. Facts are tricky things and the fact is our nation was more in debt after W W II after twelve years of Roosevelt spending than we are now, and we came out of that crisis just fine. As far as I know federal spending was not even a campaign issue back in that era. The “War” we are facing now is the war on massive recession and we have to continually be vigilant in that area.

Ten Things Republicans Think They Know

I'm typing on the back of that J Edger Hooveresque list of things Terry gave me to search out in terms of dark truths of the gay population. Thom Hartman tried to cheer us a little by saying democratic turnout has been higher than expected and democrats are feeling a sense of hope. What a change from the Judy barroge. But today we are doing reasons to be a Democrat and not a Republican. I ended voting just about as planned but at the last minute I decided to vote to re elect Ed Royce despite that "town hall" phone call. After all he's sent a lot of Christmas Cards and things over the years and I'm sure he'll be reelected. I tend to give "points" to long term incumbants. That's why I voted for Brown and Boxer. I voted for the Republican liutennant governor both to keep Brown on his toes and because I'd heard that Willy Brown hand picked that Mayor of San Francisco. It's a vestegial remnent of my conservatism and John and Key regarding Willy Brown as "evil incarnate" defending a bunch of pimps, gang members and murderors in his younger years getting them off. I voted Republican for Attorney General but Democratic for most other state offices. OK I guess we're ready to go, with a new paragraph. I reentered blogger and they told me my cookies were functionally disabeled. "Hey, keep my sex life out of this, will you?" But seariously, this new testosterone medication they're advertizing now sounds just the ticket for a lot of us older folk who feel the need to be revitalized.

The first things Republicans think they know is that President Obama trippled the national deficet. Instead it was fiscle 2009 that was Bush's last year and that's when the deficet exploded and Obama in his deficet actually reduced the figure. Item number two the Republicans don't know was that President Obama cut their taxes. They're a bunch of ungrateful jerks. The third thing they think they know is that the Stimulus failed when actually it succeeded. The fourth thing they don't know is that Business will hire if we give them more tax cuts. In actuality these business will just pocket the tax refund money. Actually jobs come about from demand created by the comon wage earner who has money to spend on product and create demand. The fifth thing republicans think they know is Health Care exploded the budget by a trillion dollars. By democrat accounting we will actually save money by implementing Health Care. Personally this one I have doubts about. The sixth thing republicans think they know is Government spending pulls money out of the economy that would otherwise be there. The Seventh thing they think they know is that Social Security is going bankrupt. It will be solvent till the year 2039 and people aren't living that much longer because according to Hartman most of the increase has been due to a reduction of infant mortality. This is another I have personal doubts about. To me there are a lot more really old people now and people age more slowly. The eighth thing Republicans think they know is that Obama bailed out the banks with TARP money, when of course that distinction goes to Bush. The nineth thing they think they know is that the US Dollar is doomed. This isn't true. Chinese wouldn't be trying to keep their currency so cheap if they thought we could make ours much cheaper and blow them out of the water. They are not afraid of a cheap US dollar becomming worthless. They are so glad to take our money they are willing to run a big economic surplus to do it. The Chinese would rather have our money than our goods. Think about it. Also as per the past posting "If you think the US dollar is doomed, how much gold have you purchassed over the years". Put your money where your mouth is. The tenth and final thing republicans think they know is that President Obama is too leftist, when in reality people with he would be more strident and show leadership. When Howard Dean was head of the democratic party they had a lot more respect. And they could have it again if they got Howard Dean back, or someone like him.

OK we’re going to jump to the second part of the day here. [name withheld] told us all in this hall “don’t close your doors. There will be people working in your rooms”. I was a little bit puzzled. It seems that they were installing new light switches even though the old ones worked fine. These have some “automatic” capabilities. Apparently if there is no movement in a room for over a half an hour then the light goes off. I’ll try and not read a book too quietly. The light goes on now automatically when you venture into the bathroom. Accronis has started its weekly run. I watched Days of our Lives and went out for afternoon coffee in the courtyard. I came back here hoping to catch Randy Rhodes and Nora came by and shewed us out to change the linins. I decided to wait downstairs in the courtyard still worried that my check didn’t arrive. It was a lengthly wait. Finally at 3:15 [name withheld] called my name. My name was the last of a list and a lot of names appeared to have been skipped. I’m glad I wasn’t one of them. I talked to Loretta Hill a little. I thought of telling Brenda Hess about “Night Skin” and saying “It would work wonders for your complexion. You don’t want to get old before your time, do you?” But I didn’t do that. But the line stalled. Richard Moore and I had been sitting in the courtyard waiting there before the first set of names were even called. Gayno went in front of us at the last minute and then some “H” guy stepped to the front of the line. After this a guy named John came in the office (?) and was a little eccentric but [name withheld] spent a lot of time with him. Then Sarah brought another lady in who spoke only Spanish and [name withheld] spent even more time with her. A lot of the M’s in line were getting restless, particularly Owen Martin. (“Isn’t that your grandfather?”) Not unless age and some other things are reversible. Finally she got to me. Mario Hernandez popped in at the last moment and I was pulling my hair out but [name withheld] shewed him off. [name] gave me the twenty I asked for and I went out the other door. I went right to the liquor store and bought two packs of John Blacks. The guy said “You didn’t want menthols did you?” I said “No”. I was waiting to pick them up till I got my change. We had an “enchilada casserole” for dinner that was more like Lazagna than the usual dish. There were baked beans and spinach. We had tapioca pudding for desert. I went to the bakery for a large coffee. I paid Gloria the $3.50 I owed her. I was thinking maybe I could Jap her out of the change by saying I’d get it to her later and then bum quarters or sell cigarettes. But she had the 50 cents so I was trapped. I’m thinking of posting tonight before I know the election results. Christie Mc Donald already lost, and that's an encouraging sign.

Today we are talking about paternity. We contrasted two people in a soap opera a few weeks ago, Melanie, who wanted the truth out, what she knew of it, and Kayla, who butted into her daughter (Stephanie's) private affairs. People thought Carley Manning was the one who changed the paternity results saying Daniel was the father of Clowie's baby. But now we know that Carley turned friendly twords Clowie and decided not to mention her affair to Daniel was exactly as she told us, "If the paternity tests show Daniel as the father I'll keep my mouth shut forever". Carlie is thus an innocent to this test tampering. The dark horse culperet if the Grandmother, the one you least suspected, Caroline Brady. She told daughter Kayla and now Kayla is in the process of telling her daughter, Stephanie, who has been endeavoring to learn the truth and probably wouldn't have stopped till she found it. Even so this will be a secret poorly kept. Neither the mother, Clowie, nor biological father, Philip, know the truth about the child to be. I know Dr. Laura is in favor of women keeping secrets. I'm not "down" with secret keeping of this nature. In like manner I am against "withholding evidence" in court trials. Were I to find out "the truth" about a defendant as a juror, I would disregard the Court's instructions and vote to convict because I believe the Truth trumps legal machinations. That's my opinion and I'm sticking to it. Secrets are time bombs. Why not defuse them as soon as you discover them?

Alarming Indicators at the Buzzer

Well we in blue California have won the battle against the tea partiers. Jerry Brown and Barbra Boxer are remaining comfortably ahead in the recent polls. That LA Times poll a week ago Sunday was not a flook. However on the national scene things don't look good. They say Republicans are winning generically over Democrats by 49% to 43%. They say this translates to picking up over fifty members in the House. Somebody said they would be more surprised if the Democrats held on to the house at under forty, then if the Republicans picked over seventy house members. Isn't that getting pretty close to a record? There are a lot of senate races where the statistics are a little alarming. The Republicans hold narrow but persistent margins in such sates as Nevada where Reid is trailing Angler by a few points. The Republicans are leading narrowly in Colorado and in Obama's home state of Illinois, and in Wisconsin where Russ Feingold appears to be going down to defeat. This is the loss of a valuable liberal. Rand Paul is pulling ahead in Kentucky, as was expected, and Joe Sestak, the Democratic candidate in Pennsylvania, seems to be on the losing end of a tea bagger assault. This is the loss of another valuable liberal. As Stephanie Miller is saying, historians will not look back kindly on this "historic" election of 2010. They will view it as a final last gasp of the reactionary right before this country finally moved on to bigger and better things. Ancient Chinese saying go, "He who routinely plays the obstruction card, one day will run out of cards". (Selah) This is how it will be with the tea party crowd when viewed by history fifty years from now.

Judy says her favorite president is Ronald Reagan. Need I remind you that Reagan didn't get this nation into any wars, but actually worked with the Soviets and Gorbechov to bring about a meaningful peace. I was not against "Star Wars". It was a bargaining card that worked. But I voted for Mondale the second time around because I basically thought Reagan had "served his purpose" in restoring the confidence of America, but now we needed a Democrat like Mondale to guide the economic ship of state and restore the tax cuts made for the rich. Ronald Reagan redistributed income from the poor to the rich. He cut their taxes but doubled FICA taxes on the working man for the first time making him fund his own retirement as well as that of his parents. Also Reagan in 1986 raised tax shelters for the working man such as eliminating cradit card interest as being deductable. But Ronald Reagan did not turn stem cell research into a political football and his wife, Nancy, and son Ron, are all for stem cell research if it can ease the ravages of certain diseases such as Parkinsons, Eplipsey, and Alsheimers.

One thing, one charge, these conservatives make is that it eliminates the incentive of people go go out and taken economic risks to earn money. I would strenuously disagree with this. These rich billionaires are for the most part born rich, and they'll die rich. They make their money not from honist "capital venture" as Judy suggests, but rather from feeding at the government troff of special prevelege and the ability to pay no taxes on billions earned. People impute such moral purity to these rich people as though they can do no wrong. Chuck Smith, in a hint of how he might "break" on this issue, once said "I've found that it's the poor people who love money and are avericious for more. Whereas I find the rich people to a large extent have transcended their need for money and they discover that it doesn't bring them happiness. Dr. Levy sings the same basic song. However there are ways of putting these assertions to the test. Are these rich campaigning to give their money away and help the poor, or are they fighting for every cent they make and trying to make the tax laws so it is even MORE adventagious to them and more averse fo the poor? Pete Richards may say that the dollar is doomed. But does Pete own any Gold in his portfolio? I don't think so. Were you to ask him he would say "Well, that is too risky and after all it might go down". Exactamundo. Of course it might go down. In that famous family argument at the Red Robin on Mothers Day 1994 I was alone in defending a Pastor whom Pete Richards had once worked for. And the issue was his propensity to take sensible risks. Of course one fact most likely left out of the story when Pete tells it is, the Pastor was RIGHT. But these right wingers are so risk averse they will say things like "The US dollar is finished" not because they actually believe it, but rather they don't want to spend one red cent on the poor but cut any programs they can in this State. Meg Whitman speaks of "taking back California" and I'm wondering from whom? Swartzenegger? Are they attacking him for being too Liberal? That's what it sounds like. Dr. Levy thinks our current governor is too liberal. So if this is any indication where Whitman is headed when she takes over, I'm going to do anything I can to prevent it, as a poor person. I'm going to keep quiet and vote Democratic, except for Cooley for attorney general. I still believe in law and order and the death penalty for the worse murderers.

You know someone might remark after watching me this week "You've been talking with that guy doing all the Christian witnessing around the place and you sound like a Christian yourself, quoting from the Bible. How come you aren't opposing his efforts?" Opposition is their game, not mine. I've been on the other side of the fence trying to witness to people and I know how hard it is. He has enough problems trying to get his message accross without adding my opposition into the mix. I still believe in the golden rule. In some of my blogs I come off as anti Christian, and I guess I am. I am anti institution, not anti people. My proclamations are based on my own experiance but I realize other people have other experiances with the Faith, and it's not my business to take away from another's experiance with God. But when these Christians say things like "God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life" if given the chance to go back and relive 35 years ago, I would not make the same mistake. Because once you accept their gospel, nothing in your life changes. And I'm not speaking about money now. As some of you may know, I had a rather large bank account in the mid seventies. Money wasn't a problem. I could splurge and buy lobster if I wanted to, or take a trip to Hawaiiai and hardly notice the dent. But these Christians would not be happy if they learned how I Got all that money. And it wasn't by following the rules they make for the rest of us. But I'm talking about how the right wing and perhaps Christians are utterly devoid of Love for their fellow man and woman. When I speak of my life not "changing" it's basically getting over certain hangups that have plagued me and improving my own self image. That didn't occur. And to the extent it seemed to occurr in the early years it was undone by later involvements, such as with the Asshole from El Paso, or "screwy Louie". We won't even talk about the immense amount of damage Gene Scott did to the Faith. I don't like to play the "Love" card all that often because "they" do that so well, when you never know what their definition of "Love" is to begin with. Dr. Levy can talk about having a good self image and a healthy respect for yourself, but that's not how these Christians see you. I don't know to what extent Christians are intertwined with the tea baggers. I have seen hints of the connection, sometimes strong hints. But as I told that guy witnessing around here "I don't think the sort of politics the tea party set preaches belongs at all in Christianity. " What do you think?

Vivian Alamaine Has No Friends

The Bible warns against people who trust in riches. You may be fermiliar with the movie "The Two Mrs Grenvilles". It was about a wife who murdered her husband and thought her riches could get her off on one of those legal technicalities if her funds could just buy her a good attorney. Well the rich people did indeed rally around her- - in court - -and she was legally acquitted of the charge. However the rich community of which she was a part - enforced their own form of "justice" in the form of social isolation, and later she went on to live an utterly desolate and generating quality of life. Well if you're rich enough you think you don't need the government. Who is Meg Whitman to suppose that she can win an election for California governor when she's been found guilty of insider trading and other faults. She'll find that the conservatives turn against her the same way they turned against Swartzenegger before her. I have as much as deduced that no amount of electoral victory in November will be able to ashwage the fears of the Rich about this economy. Even do nothing gridlock for two years in congress will not satisfy them. Whitman, a woman who never voted at all till recently, is running against Jerry Brown, a man with vast political experiance and know-how to get things accomplished. As he says 'At this stage in my life" he has the maturity and seasoned experiance to be able to exercise sound political judgements. Of course Carley Feurina is worse. She out-sourced all our jobs to China AND took a tax deduction- - so cutting taxes will not satisfy the rich. There is no way you can make it low enough to suit them. This brings us to Vivian Alamaine. She is a soap opera character who has been trapped inside a big old crypt these past few weeks, being spoon fed grewl through a straw. She can see and talk with passers by who are aware of her existance. But a funny thing has happened. She was put inside the crypt as a pay back for plans to entomb a romantic rival of hers, Maggie Horton. It's like the story of Hamen in the Bible being hung on his own scaffold. You can say the original guy did an an impulsive act and maybe he himself was having a personality melt down when he did it. Then his girlfriend Nicole finds out the entombing. She goes along with it. Then her former husband, Victor Kiriacus finds about it. He goes along with it, too, refusing to let Vivian out. Now Victor's ex wife Kate finds out about the little family secret. She hasn't decided quite how to react, yet, but it seems she too will be happy to go along with it. Vivian has money. She tried to offer Nicole untold riches saying if she lets her out she can have her own plantation on a private Isle and some oil fields. She also told Nicole that her boyfriend, Brady would dump her because, as Vivian puts it "visions of dead corpses of former lovers are a poor aphrodesiac to a relationship". She has a point. Then Vivian decides to bargain with Kate saying "If you really want to cheese your enemies off like Nicole and Voctor, you can do that by letting me out". But nothing works for her. In the life to come the rich will try and use their untold wealth trying to curry this or that favor from God trying to aquire power over others like they did in this fleshly life, but they will find that their money and power is of no used to them in the Life to Come. And so it shall be with the rich. They find themselves trapped in an illusiary sea of their own self-obsessed thoughts.

You know some people are hard to talk to because they’re swimming in their own negativity, lost in their own thoughts. Trying to cheer Judy up about the future of the US economy is darn near impossible. Even when I tell her the Republicans will sweep into power and block all spending bills in the next two years she isn’t happy. She’s obsessed with the idea that we have “monetized our debt” or have turned on the printing presses in an attempt to cheapen our currency. When I suggested the federal government accumulate Gold she said that we may well do that but we won’t pay people fair market value for it. She said in the 1930’s that Roosevelt only paid people twenty per ounce for their gold and then revalued it at $35.00. So he pulled off a fifteen dollar per ounce scam. Judy still imputes cherub like qualities to the idle rich believing they can do no wrong. She says “being an astute money manager is no crime”. These people are anything but astute because they sponge off privileged government regularion the rest of us will never experience. She again repeated this line about “Thou shalt not covet” and we are not to question the rich’s right to hang onto their money and she says “Pretty soon the rich will realize they are the Only source of the government’s money and they will leave the country”. She condemned this high speed rail thing as “make work” and says once these phoney jobs wear off the government and people will still be in recession as the new high speed system collects dust because nobody will ride it because nobody wanted it. She as much as said that no matter what we do we are doomed. We are either doomed to be in a worsening recession (from cutting government projects) or else we will be like the Wimar republic. (She’s still on that kick) You know Vivian Alamaine is another person who is lost in her own thoughts these days. She has no friends. Everyone who find out she’s been trapped inside a heavy coffin is content to leave her there. It’s kind of like the big Kiriacus secret. When you don’t have friends there is no one to come and rescue you in your hour of need. The people on the right will feel pretty darned isolated after two years of republican rule. By that time some of Judy’s fears may well come into reality. Later in the morning she’s taking Mom to the doctor.

Thom Hartman has a stand-in for today as Hartman debates Michael Medved tomorrow night. This morning I went to the bakery as usual for a large coffee. We had oatmeal with that burnt taste in it and visable burnt chunks. We had scrambled eggs and waffles. Once upon a time they offered seconds on waffles. I wasn’t even able to get seconds on coffee. Yesterday Bill Handel endorsed the marijuana initiative. A man of his prestige and background carries more weight with me. He’s used drugs and knows what they are all about and has overcome then. And if he says it’s OK, then I’ll vote for it. Bill says that the initiative will cut the Mexican cartell’s money to 80% of what it was.

We have had wild and wooly weather in the midsection and middle Atlantic part of the US. There is a mamouth 950 milibar low system that used to be centered in Minisota. This is a Low equivalent to a level three hurricane. There have been winds in excess of a hundred miles per hour all over that have caused massive destruction, punctuated by a few local tornadoes. Minisota has seen snow. Tornadoes usually occur between March and June and usually start in the mid south and work their way to the northern plains as spring advances. I blame it on Global Warming.

Now the media is telling us like a steady drum beat thare will not be one big strike by Al Qaeda but rather the hope is a lot of ordinary US citizens will be radicalized. And so you have yesterday’s arrest in a sting operation. This guy was conspiring to set off a lot of these bombs in satchels on sollers in subways around the Pentagon in Washington DC where a maximum amount of government people would be killed. Well, I’m glad our government is at work infiltrating and stopping these people before they can act.

Last night San Francisco beat the Texas Rangers in game one of the World Series by a score of 11 to 7 or something. It was definitely a high scoring game played in San Francisco. The top of the ninth inning was a little suspenseful. The game ended just a little past 8:30. I had ABC news on some of that time. The pattern with their news is they increase the commercial breaks as the show progresses so know when to cut away.

Brown and Boxer Leading by Bigger Margins

The LA Times poll yesterday was a real eye opener. Let's just hope it's right. It says that Brown has opened up a double digit lead over Meg Whitman by 52 to 39 percent. The same poll reports that Barbra Boxer has now risen to 50% against Fiurina in the Senate race so leads by 7%. Before these candidates on the democratic side have led by only two or three percentage points and the Media would tell us that these numbers are within the margin of statistical error. It might well be that the democrat's story is getting out. All the democrats need to do is to remind voters that if they don't like this recession there will be a lot more where that came from if the Republicans win, both nation-wide and state-wide. In Nevada Harry Reid is in a tight zigzag race with Angler and many are worried that Harry Reid lacks the testosterone to really assert his leadership. Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania, in that democratic Senate race, has opened up a narrow lead. In Delaware that tea bagger is going down to defeat due to her major verbal gaffs, such as not knowing that no establishment of a religion was in the first amendment. In Florida this truely looks like a lost cause with Marco Rubio pulling way ahead in that senate race.

I would now like to cover the statewide propositions here in California. The marijuana initiative looks to be going down to defeat. They are running commercials to the effect that people in emergency worker jobs will be allowed to come to work high and that there will be no way to prosecute them if proposition 19 passes unless they actually injure someone.

Proposition 20 is about redistricting and my belief tends to be "to the victor go the spoils". My only concern here is that if it passes what will be the nature of the committee that will be drawing the district lines. Proposition 21 is about keeping our State Parks and Recreation areas open and I'm all for that. These parks give people a needed refuge from life and an opperttunity to get back to nature. Proposition 22 involves prohabition against raiding funds set aside for transportation and I'm all for this measure. We need to keep the trust of the voters.

Proposition 23 is about the delay of a number of pollution and tax measures designed to steer us away from fossil fuels and on to other forms of energy. Most of the adds on this one have talked about the two Texas oil billionaires who are promoting this measure. This one however is not a slam dunk because I don't like the idea of raising taxes on the consumer in the middle of a recession and all this measure does is says "wait for the unemployment rate to drop a little". I have been saying the same thing in my blogs, so I should actually be voting for this measure.

With proposition 24 we get into the heavy duty lying on ads. They call this one a new "Jobs tax" and say voting for it will worsen the recession. In actuality this proposition is to prevent a cut in taxes for billionaires that would otherwise go into effect next year. We need this money for vital services such as education, fire and law enforcement. We comon people have suffered enough from these budget constrictors, without this new tax CUT for billionaires making things worse for all of us. As in the case with the national situation, if this measure does not pass the deficet will be a lot worse.

Where they really get into world class lying on TV ads is in proposition 25. This proposition is to insure that the legeslature gets State budgets done on time by July first of each year. The budgets most years lately have been averaging between sixty and ninety days late. This measure will permanently dock legislators pay for each day that goes by without a budget being passed. Budgets will be passed by a simple majority vote, except for raising taxes, which still takes a two thirds vote. This measure as well as 24 are advertized against as though they somehow taxed the people of California and "Instead of the state living within its means, this measure would go straight to legislator's expence accounts" and they would buy hundred dollar bottles of wine and the like. The anti 25 people call themselves anti legislator but in reality they are trumpeting the pro legislator line. There is nothing at all in this measure about raising taxes on anybody. People think if you tell a big enough lie people will believe you.

Proposition 26 is one conservative measure I am voting for. It gets rid of the "Fees" loophole. If they call it a fee then you don't have to submit it to the people. I think people should have the right to approve Fees too. Some liberals have said that if this measure passes that polluters won't have to pay to clean up their own mess. I can't follow their logic. A lot of liberal groups, for whatever reason, are against this ballot measure.

Let's talk for a while about something "Jesus" of KFI said yesterday. He said that the way you decide who goes to heaven and who goes to hell is whether they have repeated the sinner's prayer about "accepting Jesus into your heart". According to Jesus- - even though God knows that nine tenths of the world's population is predestined to go to Hell, this is "the most perfect moral system that it's possible to come up with" on God's part. So even though God knows every man's choice ahead of time it's like knowing whether your girlfriend prefers chocolate to vanilla ice cream in a resturant. The argument goes that "free will has to be preserved". Jesus goes on to talk about how it's incumbant on every man doing some Significant Moral Act for God or else he can't be saved. But the question is what do you do about those scriptures that say "No man can come to the Father (and be saved) unless the Holy Spirit draws him". So you can't just "decide that you're saved" if God hasn't willed it in his divine providence. But I might add that getting saved is like quitting smoking. You can do it ten times a day and it means just about as little. The question is - - in order for an Offer to be "rejected" it has to be a real offer. So the proposition goes if you accept Jesus you can "have assurance you're going to heaven with Jesus six inches below the collar bone". You are told if you take this step you never need have another doubt about your standing with God. Tell that to Marcus Arelius. Tell it to me. You know the line you hear about 'I'll have what he's having" in a resturant. I told God, 'I'll have what Pete Richards is having". But I didn't get it. Jesus loves to talk about how evil is a necessary part of God's plan for our lives. Jesus of KFI is so against healing he won't even allow a father to die in peace at a hospital. The caller said "My dad was subjected to needless pain tword the end" and Jesus just said "Your father is a tough man. He can take it" I have all sorts of doubts about my salvation. But if I were to go to "Jesus" on KFI with my complaints, he would most assuredly quote me the scripture of "Don't put God to the test". There is much talk of "Moving out ahead of God" in Chuck Smith's sermons. Somebody says "Try Jesus and see if he words aren't true" and you go "Ok, I'll try it". In this line of thinking if you trust God you are "testing" him to see if he will come through. Is there any major "pattern" in your life that's different after you're saved than before, or do you seem subject to the same old jinxes you ever were? And if he doesn't come through then it's your fault for trusting in his word, because scripture says "Don't put God to the test". This is an actual scripture Jesus quoted at the Devil. There are a lot of scriptures about Heaven and Hell and who goes to which. I can't think of a one however where the deciding factor was whether a person has gone through the Sinner's Prayer. There are scriptures about mistreating servants and getting drunk, and "having the oil of God's spirit fresh every day". There are scriptures about welcoming strangers and being merciful to the weak and sick. There are scriptures about the poor going to heaven and the rich being excluded. But I don't think there is a scripture about 'accepting Jesus into your heart" or not- - being a reason why Jesus sends you to Hell, or as he puts it "In the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth". Many of Jesus' parables end this way.

The Verdict of the American People on Wikkileaks

“I went down to the market place,

where all the children shop”

“I pulled out my machete – and I began to chop”.

This is one of the songs US soldiers are forced to sing by their commanding officers. They say that 150,000 civilians of Iraq were killed in the war. We had a 360 degree policy of firing in a complete circle killing every living person in sight, at the site of any IED explosions. There were raids against civilians from hilocopters, and abuses at check points. It is well pointed out that all of this abuse lessens rather than increases US security, and that the whole Iraq war is not a was of national security but rather a “war of choice” which has the effect of lessening national security. If the Obama administration doesn’t get their head out of their ass on this one they will be no better than the Bush Administration before them. There appears to be no cleavage of differentiation between the Bush and Obama administrations on this whole War thing. Any moral authority Obama had during the campaign is now shot. He campaigned on the notion that the Iraq war was immoral, and now his administration is endorsing it. But the thing is these wikki-leaks aren’t sharing information with the enemy. The enemy knows they’ve been killed. It’s only the US population whom they want to keep in the dark, so that the party in power can win the next election. The question is what the verdict of the American people will be. There seems to be a strong strain of “My country – right or wrong” in the Republican party. We know the Republicans can get on the radio and tell lie after lie about the US economy week after week, and the American people eat up every word. Their powers of critical thinking are “gone” when it comes to the economy. Have the American people last their reason when it comes to the War also? The thing is these documents in wikki-leaks are generally American documents put together to put the best possible light on the war and American morality. It’s American atrocities in our own words, kind of like Samantha Brady. But someone decided that despite the fact these documents were originally designed for public consumption, we better not release them. People see us Vetterans as angelic victims who were self-sacrificing and noble, and yet you know the people who committed these atrocities are “veterans” also, now. You know it used to be that being a Christian meant you were against war. But I don’t even think I want to hear Neil Savedra’s opinion on these documents by wikki-leaks. You know we were told that Iraqi civilian deaths were never counted or documented. And now we know that indeed they were counted, and that the figure is sky high. I don’t know how long American can continue to exist as a country with its policy of contempt for the lives of every other citizen in the rest of the world.

You know they flipped the stars on the Republican logo upside down in 2000 for the first time in history, turning them into Satanic pentagrams denoting the Goat with the horns and the beard. In Tarot cards everyone knows that in an inverted card has an evil meaning and that a right side up card has a beneficial meaning. If you read my writings you know that perhaps the original “Cross” insignia of the Christian church was the upside down cross. It was the cross of distress because a Roman guard had to be executed for letting the prisoner Crestus, escape in the night, so that the life of a Roman has to be forfeited. It would seem that the Republican party made a pact with evil in the year two thousand, and they promised a whole different kind of foreign policy. But what really hurts is that Obama, a man who campaigned on a platform of Peace, has taken up this mantel of the upside down pentagram, and adopted the policy as his own.

According to George Washington’s blog not only are 70% of stock transactions done by computer these days, but the average stock is held an average of eleven seconds! I can’t believe that. It’s clear that what we need is some sort of national trading tax like they have in Hong Kong and other places of a half of a percent or something to slow down these trades. A small investor could not possibly compete because he pays a fat percentage of the trade to his broker for each stock transaction, no matter how small.

Not only do sometimes real estate loan companies not want to bail out home owners who are in default, but indeed these loan companies have contracts with investors to seemingly meet a quota of home foreclosures, because for some perverse reason unknown to me, these loan companies make more money from foreclosures than they do from home owners continuing to pay. In fact employees who think they are there to help home owners with a loan and to get through a financial crisis are in for a rude awakening when they are in fact repermanded and penalized for helping out a home owner.

Iraqi Army Tortures Post 2003 and We Knew It

Wikki-leaks has now released Iraqi documents to the effect that there was wide spread Iraqi on Iraqi systematic torture by the Iraqi army during the time our forces were liberating Iraq in 2003. These range from beatings, sometimes with chains, and also electricity applied to the toes and genitals, and many died from these electrocutions. US troops have been aware of these tortures but were admonished by superiors not to report these tortures. Donald Rumsfeld interrupted one speech to amend the speakers remarks to say “not to stop the torturing when you see it, but merely to report it”. Of course they aren’t supposed to report it so if they follow their continence they themselves will get into trouble. Authorities in the Obama administration including Hillary Clinton, and also NATO have condemned this massive release of information by wikki-leaks. I myself am all for it. We are America after all. We were all told that the Iraq army was “de-Saddamized” (that sounds almost gay, doesn’t it?) In fact democrats criticized Bush for dismantling the Iraqi army. But now we find they were anything but dismantled, and that somehow the torture of their Iraqi bretheren was somehow OK and in concordance with US military interests. Of course wikki-leaks was told to “expunge” their information but that won’t happen because people are downloading it even as we speak.

Sarcosi and the French senate have pushed through a bill that will raise the retirement age in France from sixty to 62. This is being done to help bail out the banks and to put the government on a sound fiscal footing. But there have been massive protests throughout the country by both union workers and college students. These students know that if older people occupy the factories longer there will not be room for then when they enter the work force. To me this is kind of a pickle. I see both sides of this and only wish that we in America could have a retirement age of 62. That would relieve our unemployment rate. The British source who reports this is not in strong sympathy with these spoiled Frenchmen. Clearly ripples from the economic recession that began in this country three years ago have echoed their way through Europe.

. Juan Williams is that Puerto Rican guy who was fired by N P R for making certain statements about Moslems on the O Riley factor show. He was pandering to a conservative audience offering them red meat about how if people in Arab dress were on an airplane he’d be uneasy. Apparently Juan Williams had prior left wing “credibility” because of civil rights books he had written. But now the guy is acting like a jerk and far as I am concerned he fully deserves to be fired. But the timing is bad because this guy just signed a two million dollar contract with FOX and now the conservatives can beat NPR and other liberals over the head with this.

Many people would love to be in a world where there was instant retribution, that is where if you did something either good or bad it would come right back upon the person. People speak of “The Universe repaying everybody back”. But if you think about it this is not the kind of a world we live in. If a person earns money he has more money to invest in himself and invest in capital gain and get more money. If a person does something bad like write grafitti on a wall, the mere presence of that grafitti invites other grafitti on that same wall. If a window is broken in a building the owner is "rewarded" with a loss in real estate value. In like manner if someone tells lies about you, they just might not get caught, but those lies could go on hurting you for some time to come. But what if in the afterlife- - -all that good or bad karma came back on you then. There are two schools of karmic thought. In one you have to die first, but in the other, you don't. Let's cover both of them. We have spoken as the hyper space after life as like a cosmic chess game in the sixth dimension. But suppose the pieces on the board were not contoled by you and some opponet movint the pieces, but the pieces were directly empowered by your own actions in your last life? The good karma would help you and the bad karma would oppose you right on the spot, right there to your face. There would be no hiding from it. People speak of the "war of good and bad natures" within a person. However here it's not the Creation of good and bad natures, but merely the karmic manifestations of good and bad natures. The best you could hope for is to become a "better player" given the pieces you've been dealt. Perhaps there is a "pass Go and get reembursed" rule. In order to change it you have to be reborn. People only pick up new engrams, good or bad, from being reincarnated. This "battle" you are in is not some mere game that you can just walk away from. "Giving up" is not an option. Not one you'll like anyhow. Perhaps a particularly wicked person might want to be reincarnated on ANY terms just to ESCAPE these “forces” they so dread, that are their own actions? Suppose anybody could negotiate and choose their next life as some psychics suggest. Your "negotiation chips" are determined by how you play in the sixth dimension. Would a person deliberately choose a life of misfortune? Some may hope for "random chance" to bail them out. But there is no randomness to take refuge in. They may think some avenue of escape of misfortune will open up despite what they agreed to. But they know ALL of that next life. They will be told in advance how it will all come out. (This is due to certain metaphysical laws) That would rob the life of its surprises, but of course your mind will be wiped clean at rebirth and you will remember nothing. But all the same I have postulated using Einstinian physics that there is indeed a “super self” that exists already in hyper-space and that super-self has already lived this life and is now looking back on it. If you could tap into this source maybe you could improve your lot. But actually all the “surprises” and “turns for the better” would be pre programmed in. Even suicides would be pre-programmed. But this is one view of karma. There is another “school of karma” that goes something like this. Beings in hyper-space or “overseers” for lack of a better word, have the ability to cast charms and hexes and the ability to put things on you. The Bible says “the curse without a cause does not come”, but how strongly do you believe that? These hex casters are merely directing souls in the “four thousand holes of Lankishire” into various fifth dimensional universes, like air traffic controllers. These beings have the ability to change your life for better or worse At Any Time. You don’t have to die first. Of course you will “switch fifth dimensional realities” but you may see little changed, at first. It’s like that Star Trek episode when Warf came in contact with Jordi’s visor, Warf would undergo a dimensional shift. So it’s like everything would be different. Everybody you thought you knew would all be different but instead people who resembled everybody you knew would take their place in this alternate parrellel universe. These are two schools of karmic thought for your consideration.

Proper "Messaging" is the Key to Success

One major problem the Obama administration has is that they are not doing proper “Messaging”. They aren’t getting the message out people want to hear, such as their taxes were cut last year and that they now have more spending money. It’s hard to imagine but many people don’t even apparently look at their pay checks. George W Bush when he cut taxes nine years ago decided to milk it for all the “political capital” it was worth. He sent out a personal letter to everybody announcing “Your income taxes have just been cut” along with a check for three hundred dollars right on the spot. Now it could be that some might now owe tax because they received this check, but still the message received is “George Bush is about putting money in your pocket”. Some will propagate the argument that the founding fathers favored rich people hanging on to their “hard earned money”. And yet the first millionaire in today’s dollars didn’t even exist as far as US citizens are concerned till 1793. That was the first millionaire. These people didn’t have all the “Old Money” that Europeans of the time had. And Thomas Jefferson wrote his cousin, James Madison, not the president but another, that while traveling in France he gave away a few coins to a pool peasant woman in the country and she was oh so grateful. Jefferson theorized that the rich who take land from the poor, should reimburse those poor people with a well paying job. Also Jefferson proposed something resembling a progressive tax to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. This is because Jefferson was basically an egalitarian. Contrast this with the “by the book” debating style we have from the tea baggers that KABC news commented on last night. The message is the same. Label yourself as “just a mother” or “just a working man” or whatever and label your opponent as a “carrier politician” and label all of his ideas as “risky and dangerous schemes” and always talk about the deficits the democrats mount up. Here’s a good line. Tell them that is the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire that our national deficit will be zero in five years. That’s what I’ve been told. We need to defuse this whole connection between democrats and deficits. Part of the problem is that Obama is an impulsive person. His decision to run in 2008 rather than to wait and mature a little was in itself an impulsive act. His passing of Health Care was an impulsive act. People perceive that their President is basically reading lines from a tele-prompter rather than exercising true, seasoned leadership, of the type that Lyndon Johnson, for example, might provide. The President has been derelict in addressing people’s basic economic fears.

Thom Hartman wrote a book called “The last hours of ancient sunlight”. Of course this is a book about oil. Back in the mid nineteenth century just before oil was discovered in 1859 in western Pennsylvania, there was talk then of an “energy crisis” and the reference here was a whale blubber people used for lighting fuel. Charles Dickens made reference to “dealing with the surplus population of England”. The earth had passed our first billion in population in 1830 and so it could be argued that without oil the planet could only support about a billion people comfortably. Of course oil is used not only for transportation but more importantly, for fertilizer to grow our food to feed all these people. Certainly oil is used in all of our modern plastics like MYLAR. Getting off of oil will be no easy feat. If we made hemp legal we could solve a lot of our problems, for instance, in paper production. But Thom Hartman points out that much of our oil is used in transportation. Today as long last we are finally seeing electric cars produced on a wide scale. The US can handle the power production with hydro-electric, and coal and other production. But if we didn’t have gasoline burning cars we could ease off of our oil addition. The planet has passed “peak oil production” and all of the new we find on the planet will be increasingly more expensive to retrieve. We should stop selling weapons to Saudi Arabia. It’s claimed that we sell them weapons so that the money we pay for their oil gets returned to us. But just think how many international problems would be solved tomorrow if we just had no use for their oil to begin with. You people know the drill. We adopt systems like in Europe with solar panels that cause our electric meters to run backwards so that we can sell out excess power back to the grid when it’s most in demand. This can be accomplished if we adjust our tax laws. The President hasn’t talked much on energy in terms that he actually intends to change the status quo. Nobody is expecting anything to be done in the next two years; that’s for sure. But there will come a time when we will need to address this growing long-term energy crisis. The population of the earth isn’t getting any smaller and it takes little imagination that a massive energy crisis is already upon us, and we are sticking our head in the sand.

They Paused to Comment

Virginia Thomas made that fateful phone call a few days ago trying to get a message to Anita Hill that she thinks Anita should apologize to her husband for making those sexual harassment charges in 1991. There are roomers that she made this phone call after a night of drinking and wasn’t entirely sober. At any rate Anita Hill told her there were absolutely no grounds for an apology. As you know Clarence Thomas said at the senate hearing that these sexual charges amounted to a “High Tech Lynching”, and people like Larry Elder bought into that even though Larry on other occasions has condemned people playing the race card. Virginia Thomas is the member of some ultra conservative group like the liberty lobby or something. There is serious question whether as a couple they aren’t violating the rule against judicial bias in handing down decisions. Others say there are severe conflicts of interest and that that many of the Bush justice appointees hang out with the Koch brothers and stuff and are in the back pocket of lobbyists anyhow. I don’t think Clarence Thomas in particular has ever had the “judicial temperament” to even be a high court justice, and I would not have voted to confirm him. He doesn’t ask questions during hearings, which to me seems really strange. He’s pretty much already made up his mind before even hearing the facts. Impeachment charges should be brought against several right wing justices for violations of interest where they should recuse themselves, or else for violating their pledge to uphold “settled law” in their rulings. Just because we've never impeached justices before for "bad behavior" doesn't mean we shouldn't start now. If you issue rulings like the Citizens United case, you have gone against a hundred years of settled law.

Tom Mc Clintock has made some interesting statements lately. He says that the Republicans really don’t deserve a chance to run the government any more than the democrats do. Mc Clintock ran for governor against Swartzenegger in 2003 as a conservative, and at the time I thought a lot of his ideas made sense. It’s interesting to hear him weigh in on these tea party people. He doesn’t believe most of them are qualified. He has said that Meg Whitman isn't a true conservative. Judy and my other right winger friends have also made this charge. Now we have this cleaver commercial about both Swartzenegger and Whitman saying "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results". The implication seems to be is that conservatives will find themselves disillusioned with Whitman just as they now are with Swartzenegger. Further he says that Republicans avoid the damage that George Bush did to our economy with their selective memory. And he is absolutely right.

John Mc Cain lashed out at Barbra Boxer a few days ago. He said that she was harder to deal with than any other senator he’s had the displeasure of serving with and that she runs up deficits and he made a bunch of other charges against her. Mc Cain has turned basically into a cranky old man.

Well it seems as of last night some court once again reinstated Don’t Ask; Don’t Tell, in the military. There may have been a few gays that tried to enlist openly in that small window that was created by the court ruling of last week. Now the question is once they have said they are gay, do we kick these people out of the military after they were accepted just days earlier? Obama says that “Don’t Ask; Don’t Tell” is going to end on his watch, but this may be just another in the stream of broken promises.

One person wrote a book in which he says he almost shot president Johnson just days after he assumed the office as President in November of 1963. This secret service agent says he saw a shadowy figure walking across a darkened front yard and he aimed his service revolver at him and almost fired. In another case of a Presidential crisis, it seems that not once but twice the Clinton administration lost the codes to the nuclear “football” to issue launch codes in case of a nuclear confrontation. They looked all around the white house and I think it was in a shirt pocked that was taken to the cleaners or something. Anyhow it’s a good thing that a nuclear crisis didn’t occur over this.

There is a lot of talk in the news about gay bullying in the schools and such that isn’t being addressed by the authorities. I’m sure these incidents have always gone on. But now Focus on the Family is saying that being gay ought to be exempted from anti bullying statutes lest the schools be on record as being pro homosexuality. In spite of this they say that being gay is generally accepted by the younger generation. I don’t know how children in Christian schools are conditioned to deal with gay youngsters they might meet on the outside. We older people of course will continue to feel uncomfortable about the whole topic of homosexuality being in any way NOT being considered an abnormality that needs to be addressed. Even though it may be biological, it still isn’t a good idea to expose young people to gay teachers and run the risk that their homosexual proclivities might rub off onto the students. That is my opinion, anyhow.

There seem to be a lot of reports of a democratic counter tide in the latest polling of various senate and house and gubernatorial races. The democrats still are clinging to a thin lead even here in California with Boxer and Brown, and proposition 19 seems to be leading just barely. Once again it is conjectured that proposition 19 will bring a lot of left leaning people to the polls who otherwise wouldn’t vote, and this will help Brown and Boxer. Other regions of the country have tried conservative initiatives to bring out their people to the polls. I guess what bothers me is that in 2004 people were saying the same thing about this time of year, how John Kerry was pulling ahead in the polls. But none of it showed up on election day. I am worried about that “red shift” and as far as I can see the basic problems with electronic balloting have not been resolved. Of course you know that “red shifted” light can also be called “retarded” light because the waves from the light are retarded in their arrival. (“Slowed down, for you people in Rio Linda”) I think “retarded” is a perfectly proper generic word to describe people who are otherwise “mentally challenged”. Indeed the use of the phrase “Mentally Retarded” was a replacement for other more descriptive terms like moron, idiot, and imbecile. But these words, too, are generic, in that they describe a specific severity of mental retardation. What I’m worried about is a “mental retarding” of the electoral tally on election day.

Panning For Your Own Gold

The trouble with Christian Evangelists is

Is that they want you to exchange something Real

For Something that is clearly Not

There’s loud Mexican radio playing through the PA system now. I don’t know what that’s about. It’s an overcast Sunday April 11, 2010. Portland brought their bad weather with them. Temperatures are dropping. It’s only 48 in Sunnyvale, with rain. The Portland Trail Blazers beat the Lakers 91 to 88 in a hard fought game. Portland was out to prove a point at the Staples center, where the Lakers almost never lose. They fouled a lot. The score as neck and neck late in the game but previously Portland had been up comfortably. I went out for coffee in the courtyard, and there was a wait.

They are demolishing Texas Stadium where the Dallas Cowboys played so many games from the 1970’s on. I’m not crazy about all these fine stadiums from the sixties and seventies being demolished. The shelf life of a major construction project just isn’t as long as it used to be. You could joke that really they’re just going to send in some Al Qaeda plains to get rid of it. You know of course that virtually all the evidence says that the Twin Towers were deliberately imploded with explosives. You see the video. Things fell not only at the speed of gravity but stuff was actually being blown outward. And people wonder why they had to clear the crime scene so quickly when they’ve built nothing there in ten years. The same person wondered how so small a hole in the pentagon could have swallowed up a whole jet. To me it seems there’s an awful lot of disappearing metal. They shipped all the steel from the 9 – 11 crash site to China. Out of sight, out of mind. That’s my second E mail notice.

I watched the Mc Laughlin report last night. I am reassessing my position on that Nuclear Posture Review lf last week. I plum forgot about chemical and biological weapons. Those are obviously also weapons of mass destruction. And I can well envision a situation where just hitting the enemy with Nukes would be the most expedient way of dealing with the problem. I agree with Pat Buckhannon now. We should not take any options off the table. We should not tie our President’s hands as to which options he chooses to exercise. And frankly, I don't believe we should pick a fight with the right-wingers on an issue that I agree with them on. Of course I saw that Santaurum video yesterday. The good senator very artfully responded to one question. He was asked by a woman why he campaigned for Arlen Specter seeing what a liberal he’s become. Santaurum’s answer was that Specter promised President Bush he would vote for whatever Supreme Court justices that Bush put before the Senate and Santaurum knew that Bush would appoint only pro Life candidates to the High Bench. So if you are pro Life yourself you will want to end abortion as quickly as possible and that was the fastest way to do it. I admire a man who will answer a difficult question honestly and forthrightly. We need more of that.

After this I watched Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. Then it was that movie about the San Diego TV news reporter. I slept rather restlessly. I went for coffee from the bakery in the morning. I was thinking of responding to Dr. Levy’s question about “What is your philosophy of life”. How do you sum up such a broad question in a few sentences? It would be like a property insurance form asking you “What is the total dollar valuable of your precious things”? It would be hard to come up with a number that would be really fair off the top of your head. But if I were to answer the question on a life philosophy I might say “I have a problem with people such as Christians and therapists wanting you to exchange something in your life that’s real, for something that is not”. Therapists and pastors have a lot of shit they are peddling. They make artful use of words. For instance on optimism, well- - I say that is putting a rosy slant on the facts - -seeing them in their best possible light. For instance in my mind I hope to move out of here some day and take my vinyl record collection with me that is being stored. If the truth be known I am far more hopeful about myself than other loved ones are about me. But in Dr. Levy’s mind I’m not an optimist because I don’t make up facts out of thin air and call it reality, or deny certain obvious realities that do exist. Let me throw in this little nugget: “It’s better to wonder just ‘how much you are really worth” then to join in one of these occupational programs Dr. Levy talks about- - and remove all doubt!” Because only then is your worth “quantified” as being worth about 35% of minimum wage when you are “given” a job that inferiors fight you for position (in) in even that.

We had oatmeal for the second day in a row. The menu was fried eggs and toast with butter and jelly. Two toasts but only one cup of coffee. We had to wait and wait to even get into the dining room and had to wait once in there. I didn’t get back here to watch “This Week” till just after eight. I had “Meet the Press” on briefly during commercials and also later on. I watched the Beatles shows. April 10^th was the fortieth anniversary of Paul Mc Cartney announcing in the press one Friday in 1970 that the Beatles were breaking up. As one person put it “They were already working out the terms of their Divorce”. Paul on the radio said “Once John met Yoco it was clear he was looking for greener pastures”. KLOS says Paul and not John wrote “Every Little Thing”. KOLA had the Beatles and the press. They pretty much got the better of the press every time. Their live segment was April 11^th 1965 in Wembly Stadium. KLOS did a mash-up of “Ticket to Ride” and “Here Comes the Sun” that was actually pretty ingenious. They signed off with this demented type record of a guy spoofing the “reunion” of the Beatles in 1993. I missed the coffee break in the courtyard in the morning.

I had Leo Le Port on, and I know I misspell his name all the time, except the thing is “Laport” gets red-lined, and I don’t like that. We had a tuna sandwich and potato chips for lunch and huge bananas. Again coffee was limited. Chris Marquardt today was talking about opening curtain flash and closing curtain flash, and how the latter produces more “natural” action lines in the photograph. He said flashes were only five thousandths of a second or something. If it’s that fast you should use a faster shutter anyway.

I did go out for coffee in the afternoon. They’re still using those big cups filled only one third full. If they filled them higher, people wouldn’t be so needful to go back for seconds. Now we’re on page seven. I really don’t have any good topical points to blog about. Since it’s going to be the lead posting for a while before we switch blogs, I would like it to be a half way meaty topic that I can delve into in detail a bit.

I wanted to mention this whole Mormon thing around here. That new lady at the table says she’s worshipped with Mormons. And Larry said that he found Mormons to be among the kindest people he’d ever met. You might rename this place Mormon Central. But this paints a rather contradictory picture. Because usually you associate Mormons with family life and also with people who neither smoke nor use caffeine products, and that rules out Bob Guyer and a lot of other people around here.

Conservatives wonder why Obama or other liberals are afraid to trust “our allies” such as Karzai. That’s a pretty silly question. Karzai has just recently said he admires the Talliban. And he’s met with the Iranians. There was that roomer last week I may not have reported that Iran is covertly sending aid to the Talliban in Afghanistan to shore up their positions against US drones. To me this is a pretty clear sign we just need to get the hell out of Afghanistan. Just think of all the money and manpower we’d have later when we really needed to put troops somewhere. Nobody thinks of that.

Justice Stevens to Retire from Supreme Court

Justice John Paul Stevens made it official this morning. He is retiring from the Supreme Court at the end of the term. His most likely successor is Elena Kagen, a lady solicitor general. Dianne Wood is another contender but she is liberal on abortion issues and would be the hardest to confirm. The third leading candidate is a guy, and the guy is the easiest to confirm but he had a conservative streak on criminal issues and so many of the civil libertarian left might object. Justice Stevens was appointed by President Ford as a right of center candidate, but he became the anchor of the liberal block of four. Stevens will be turning ninety in a couple of weeks. People had been expecting him to retire but Justice Stevens wasn’t sure whether or not it would be this year. He only hired one law clerk instead of the traditional four, and this was a tip off. Stevens broke with tradition in that he liked to put on his official black robe himself rather than have the usual assistance. People say Stevens has an “independent streak” in his rulings. He wrote in a dissent to the Bush verses Gore decision that “While we may never know who the winner of this year’s Presidential election, we know who the loser is and that is the American system of justice”. Stevens was confirmed in just nineteen days by a vote of 98 to nothing, and it’s highly doubtful whether that fear will be repeated. Back when Al Franken was on the radio they played that song “Hang on, Stevens, Stevens hang on” because liberals feared that he might die or something while President Bush was still in office. As I wrote a few postings back, I’d go hard left on this one to stem the rightward drift of the High Court. President Obama only needs eight republicans to break rank to get a confirmation. One cannot help but think Stevens took present party balance into consideration for retiring this year. It could be argued this is the round to get set for a major battle in congress. Justice Ruth Bater Ginsburg is expected to be the nest to retire.

Bart Stupac has decided not to run for reelection as congressman. This is the author of the famous Stupac amendment that outlawed abortion in the recently passed Health Bill. It is suspect that the barrage of pro life hysterical callers drove him from not seeking office due to their venomous remarks. This is a sad thing. I find it disturbing that, as the saying goes, “bad money drives good money out of circulation”. And so it is that the bad apples in the barrel are taking over congress, raising the threat that the next congress will be much less responsive to the American people and far more responsive to the intimidating tactics of the tea party political right. As it stands now about as many Republicans are not running as are Democrats. But I feat this will change. People like Chris Dodd are shoving aside their nobler instincts in favor of the easy bucks.

It could be said that A Sarah Palin – Michelle Bachman ticket would be the ticket from Hell. But they both were at some rally M C’d by Sean Hannity. Sarah Palin made the statement that this Nuclear treaty with Russia is like the school bully going around to people and saying “Hit me and I won’t hit back”. I had that happen when I was six and in the first grade. This third grader comes up to me while I was walking home and says to hit him because that’s the way you make friends with him. Well, I did it, and of course got clobbered. The President responded to Palin merely by saying “I don’t think Sarah Palin is very qualified to talk about Nuclear armlements. The least she should do is learn how to pronounce “Nuclear”. At the Vice Presidential debate of 2008, Sarah Palin was asked a question on Nukes. She just said that basically it would be better not to exchange missiles. Of course that’s only because her Republican tea bagger friends hadn’t told her how to come down on this issue yet. Republicans are really upset about this Nuclear Arms treaty because it cuts our warheads by one third. But the thing is there hero and professed mentor, Ronald Reagan, signed a Nuclear Arms treaty with the Soviets. But back then they weren’t bothered by that. But now Republicans want to keep all their options open as to who they kill and how they kill them in the next war. However this treaty does not affect defensive missile installations we may deploy in the future in Europe. However our side has been warned that should we try and put in any new missiles Russia will pull out of this treaty. Personally I don’t know I would sign this treaty if I were President. Frankly I don’t think I’d care. I’d just look at the poll numbers and make my decisions from those. Randy Rhodes says she would love a Palin – Bachman ticket because it would draw a clear line in the sand and provide a target easy to campaign against. Most of the people cheering at this rally appeared to be women. (It was radio) This treaty has to pass the Senate by a two thirds majority and once again, eight republicans will have to break ranks with their party for the treaty to be approved.

People in the old Reigellian Federation were making the “V” symbol for Villanova to win, when Villanova was in contention. Contrary to what I said, Villanova is championed by the “Portland” Reigellians or the dominant race of Reigellians who pretty much make all the laws for Reigel VI. The Romulan connection that I had made previously must have been a mistranslation or something because the “Portland” Reigellians have been sponsoring Villanova since at least 1985. Xavier is the team backed by the Romulans. In a related note, it seems the Sirius A natives make a distinction between Romulans that have been on their planet a long time, who are from either Toronto or Hamburg, as opposed to the refugees from Regelus V from the great disaster of 1989 on their home planet. There seems to be an increasing urge to return to their home planet now that ecological restorations are making progress - and the Sirius A people are basically saying “Don’t let the door hit you on your way out”.

The Perils of Early Adoption

They refer to people who wait in lines to buy the first I Phones and I Pads as "early adopters". They are seen as fools by many since most likely the price will come way down and the design will be streamlined and worked out in later incarnations. Of course some news people like to consider themselves "ahead of the learning curve". Take that episode with Homer Simpson last night. What he learned as "Mr. X" from gossip and imuendo turned out to be the gospel truth in almost all cases. With such a corrupt town as Springfield, it's kind of like shooting fish in a barrel. Even if you're a bad shot you'll most likely hit something. Of course then Homer upped the stakes and began making stuff up entirely. But now he had an early problem because some UFO alien creatures didn't like the truths he had unearthed. So they banished him to an island and put a double or "duffelganger" in his place. Some Romulans say the song "No Reply" by the Beatles is about a duffleganger". Of course sometimes knowing the future ahead of everyone else carried a curse. Do you remember that Star Trek episode where Bones went insane and "leaped back into the past" into the 1930's. And Spock was dispatched to track him down. And Spock was an early "adapter" adapting a vacuum tube age to building an electronic device, where they learn the future. It seems this do gooder woman who had befriended them later hooked up with President Roosevelt and due to her influence Roosevelt negotiated a peace treaty with Hitler, which he broke, and today we're all speaking German. Of course because of this Bones had to restrain himself and allow her to be run over by a car and killed. We've all heard about the Rapture. But in the Bible a lot of questions lie unanswered. For instance there is a line that one translator has "Two men will be in a bed. One will be taken, the other left behind". Does this mean perhaps that gay men could be Saved? Gene Scott would taunt you with this proposition. We don't know where the person "taken" is taken away to "gehena" and destroyed, as other parables, such as the wheat and tares imply, or are they taken to a better place, or perhaps somewhere intedermanate like an island alluded to on that Simpson's episode. Are aliens really watching our every move, monitoring our actions like a gardener overseeing his plants just looking for that first weed that is a threat to take over? What we also can't be clear about is whether a body will be left behind? Will that gay man wake up next to a corpse and figure that AIDS must have gotten his bed partner? And finally there is the duffelganger option where the people in society don't even suspect that something has happened. Like at twenty to five on October 9th. of this year perhaps millions of souls could be swapped out with duffelgangers and nobody suspects. Certainly there were enough movies made in decades gone by about space aliens placing things in people's necks that control them. Some would say, "Well if such a thing were to happen it would be instantly discovered". Not necessarily. Stephen King writes that when really weird things DO happen to a person he does everything he conceivably can with his mind to try and rationalize or explain away what is happening, assuring himself that he's not really going mad. The "early adopter" leads a perilous life in this world.

There was a 7.7 earthquake in Sumatra, Indonesia yesterday that might just be an aftershock of the December 2004 9.1 earthquake that set off that tidal wave. They had a tidal wave watch up for just two hours then cancled it. If you look in Wolframalpha.com for earthquakes, you see the three biggest ones this year occurred along the Pacific rim. There was the one in Chile, and the two that occurred just in the past few days. Bible freaks would tell you there is some kind of trend here. My feeling is perhaps our shaker on Sunday will be "It" for a while and we can relax.

Many people are becomming concerned about the progressive militarization of local Police departments. They buy all this surplus military gear like rocket launchers and granades and M 16's and according to Thom Hartman many of the recruits charged with using this cache of weapons don't have any experiance to draw on except for their experiance in the military. I can't imagine it's as bad as Hartmann says. But just remember, you early adopters, that today's jest and exaguration is tomorrow's reality. That's an unnearving thought. Also of course since they have suspended the posse comotadus law in place since after the Civil War, that now the military can turn its guns on its native citizens. Now they want Obama to sign a law that gives the military the right to arrest anybody and detain them indefinitely, for five reasons, but of the five the most frightful is "or any other reason the President deems proper". That all depends who the President is. In former times Christians on the right recoiled at such roomers. Now they just might welcome them. In the past few days they are apparently tightening regulations on when the United States can get into a nuclear exchange with another nation. Apparently is the other nation has no weapons, we won't attack them- - unless they happen to be Iran or North Korea, and in that case you're on your own.

Many ideas for postings I haven't pursued. I was intending to do a Flash Forward of October 9th. of this year where people black out (I had in mind on Easter) and they have visions of October 9th. and they realize these visions all have in common - and that is people missing. I also plan to do a posting on "What 1986 was really like" sometime before the next ice age. But don't expect that one any time soon. Some people whether I invision an extra terrestrial world where like on Star Trek there was a master race that "seeded" nineteen humanoid races that spread throughout the universe. Nothing in the ETI history of myself or Mark would suggest that such a comonality or "starting point for civilization" existed back in the past. Neither myself nor Mark would rule out the probability that MOST of the races "out there" are NOT humanoid but take other bizzare forms that haven't been talked about "by the guides" so to speak. Of course just earlier today I thought I'd review the racial origens and mixes of various peoples. Suffice it to say that it's all based on halves, quarters, and eighths and the like. This is because the divisions as we discuss them are (apparently) dissimilar enough that mixes of races have to be specially genetically bred in a test tube. Also I've thought of describing "Life in the sixth dimension" otherwise known as hyper-space or the psychic dimension. I'd like to do this one. Unfortunately I'm just lacking in information in this department. OK. Tread carefully.