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.