We are reminded this is
the fiftieth anniversary of Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty”. This was a major program that cut poverty
from 23 percent to 12 percent in the six years this war was “waged”. Marco Rubio in artful use of words states
“There are still a lot of Americans who are in poverty”. These are not contradictory statements. Republicans are good at inferential
statements where no actual effort is made to actually link Cause with Effect. It’s all smoke and mirrors for them. Now all they can say is “If that person down
the street receives food stamps it’s coming right out of your pocket”
forgetting the fact that food stamps and higher wages actually help the
economy. People like Bill Handel are
probably all for immigration, as long as those new arrivals stay as part of a
permanent under-class and drive the wage base down. But I’m not really sure who is left-
- for these people to appeal to.
Apparently it’s mostly uneducated straight Protestant white men from red
states over forty. But that voter
analisis guy says that “these days the Republicans are getting a smaller slice
out of a smaller pie” when it comes to getting votes. It is said computers do a more efficient job
of gerrymandering house districts now then they used to with mere pad and
pencil. To me however, it seems that if
there were actually some major shift in political opinion as people in mass
“grew tired of the tea party” that people might be ready to try something else
in 2014. Also it was about this time
fifty years ago that the Surgeon General’s report concluded that “Cigarettes
give you lung cancer”. So OK then, we’ve
been warned. Now that we have- - they’ve
done their job and let us decide.
In terms of that caller attacking my generation on Randy Rhodes' show, I can't dispute anything he says. Frankly "I don't know this generation any more". It sure doesn't seem to be the one I grew up in- - with the values of the mid and late sixties and the early seventies. But I think the caller's wrath might be even more focused on the generation right behind ours- - the borderline Generation X.. Those who were born between 1964 and 1979 and hence would be between 35 and 50 years of age. I call them "The children of the Jesus generation". I can't get this Christianity brainwashing image out of my mind. The caller does well to say that people, even in my generation, are just too damn self obsessed and Selfish. And I don't know how they got that way. It's like the cosmos did a massive brain transplant on the whole lot of them somewhere along the line. But on the plus side Liz Chaney has announced she is quitting her run for the Wyoming Senate.
I had C-Span on earlier
in the morning. I never did see the
White House briefing. It was always “in
the future”. There was a Mark Levin
interview on at length and I listened to a lot of that. He’s a thoughtful Jewish intellectual in some
ways. OK, I’ll believe John Locke had a strong sway
among the Founding Fathers. I’ve never
thought “Utopia” books were very realistic, either. They are good fiction but not for reality. I told you I saw "Leviathan" on Dad's book shelf after he died, and it dawned on me his view of human nature was fundamentally opposed to Mine. But these people can be evasive. For instance I don’t know even now whether
Mark Levin is for or against the senate filibuster. Make no mistake- - I am against it. But he had a way of artfully framing his
words to make you ‘hear” whatever you wanted to. He did say that the constitution had to be "sold" or marketed in such a way that the States would ratify it. He wants a new constitutional convention but says "But I'm not calling it that". He says he loves the constitution but he wants to as it were put it up for grabs on the auction block. He wants it able to be amended with only three fifths of the state legislatures. After the whole bit with counting blacks as three-fifths of a person, I think I'd steer clear of that number. I mean, I have a chinchilla farm in Deluth, and personally I think each of my chinchillas are like members of the family and deserve to get to vote, which is a right Slaves didn't have. Gee, and I thought people were afraid of unsex restrooms because of the passage of the 27th Women's Rights Amendment. But he was right about the Supreme Court. These nine men wield far much too Power over all our lives, and his point on this issue is Well Taken. I think it would be groovy to give Supreme
Court Justices the boot after twelve years.
We’d have to get rid of Thomas, Scelia, and Kennedy right off the bat,
and Ginsburg was thinking of retiring for health reasons anyhow. But the idea of repealing the Seventeenth
amendment to the constitution is a new one.
This is because Democrats control the US Senate and the state
legislatures are ruled by Republicans.
It’s just that simple. The idea
is a simple one. People rubber stamp
their state legislatures whereas they scrutinize their man running for US
Senate. And most legislative districts
are gerrymandered. The idea of term
limits for congressmen is rather pointless.
Why don’t we “term limit” lobbyists like Grover Norquist and Sheldon
Adelson, because that’s where the real power is. Elsewhere I looked up “this upcoming week in
congress”. There was another guy who
discussed Congressional races in 2014 and which party would come out on
top. It used to be a good percentage of
the house districts were wide open and competitive. Now only four percent are. So while you used to see regularly swings or
thirty or forty house members in elections- - from one party to the other, now
it seems just picking up eighteen congressmen for the democrats is darned near
impossible.
Maybe Gabriel and Elvis
aren’t sleeping together but Elvis and Abigail are on the verge or some sort of
romantic interlude. I guess it’s better
than being kidnapped and shipped off to some Caribean island and not seen again
by family members for five years. Brady
Black said he didn’t think he would ever be able to forgive Father Eric because
he “can’t get those images out of his mind”, and I don’t blame him. How do you stop THAT mental tape from
playing? I was going to say this anyhow when I thought of it this morning, but sometimes you may "I should forgive so and so" and maybe even "I think God expects me to forgive so and so, and I don't want to let God down'. But you CAN'T forgive them. Not if they have done something so traumatic it literally redefines the whole relation between the two of you, and what you think of every time you think of the. (Selah) God may be many things but God isn't stupid. If I wouldn't want someone insulting MY intelligence, therefore I won't insult God's intelligence by trying to "put something over on him" that isn't so, like I've forgiven someone when I haven't. But I’m puzzled how everyone
could think Hope is on Smith Island when she never was. Somehow Elvis "worked it' so that Abigail would drop Everything and rush off to an isolated Island, where bad things always happen on Soap Operas. Of course what I find a little scarey about Gabriel is that is Abigail HAD disappeared off the face of the earth, it would be like what happened with Melanie. I am not confident that Gabriel would open her mouth and speak the Truth on the matter, but would rather sacrifice someone elses's physical welfare to avoid personal shame. Oh- - that reminds me. Some people are intimidated by the notion that Al Qaeda will sacrifice their lives to a cause of Jihad. Like this or not- - they are on a higher moral plane on this issue of "sacrifice' than someone like Mitt Romney, would sacrifice the welfare of OTHERS, not for any religious cause or the "calling of God" but merely to line his own pockets with yet more money he'll never be able to spend. (Selah)
Both Bill Handel
on the matter of race and those pesky
minorities- - and Rush Limbaugh on the subject of global warming quote people
you never heard of and go really sarcastic, and think they are brilliant. Perhaps Bill Handel and Rush should just one
time say what they actually think. Say
it straight without this elaborate mask of sarcasm. I caught Glen Beck and his show literally put
me to sleep. However he did say there
would be a major stock market crash very soon, and that common stocks would
lose in excess of fifty percent of their value. Sometimes being highly educated can be a liability. And I'll tell you how. Many will garner a defense for their actions by "playing dumb". I've seen it done with me more often than I care to relate. But someone like a Mark Levin who is highly educated and got straight A's or whatever, it they try to spew any of this tea party crap about the economy and what will and won't fix it, I'm going to be all over them like white on rice and call them a LIAR to their face. And they'll have nowhere to hide. I will remind them 'You learned all of this basic stuff in College. YOU CANT HIDE. You know better. Now you have to account for yourself".
Arthur Goldberg’s time
on the Supreme Court was brief indeed.
He was appointed in 1962 by Kennedy replacing Felix Frankfurter. Johnson persuaded Goldberg to resign in 1965
to replace Adale Stevenson who died in a plane crash as UN ambassador, and then
Johnson put Abe Fortas on the Court, and we know that his tenure on the Court
was also quite brief. I’ve always
wondered about Arthur Goldberg. He was
the Justice that didn’t seem to ‘fit in’ anywhere.
If a psychological
therapist were trying to sum up for me my own thoughts about Jesus Christ it
would be something like “It seems to me your chief complaint about Jesus of
Nazareth is that he never faced a problem bigger than HE was, and in this way
he fails to share in common a situation common to virtually every other human
being who has walked the planet”. That’s
about it. He was never faced with a
physical limitation, he seemed to exhibit a complete lack of intellectual
curiosity (sharing a common trait with the Far Right) and he was never in an “uncomfortable
situation” where he didn’t know what to do, for instance, being in a trench in
a war area. There is no record of
anyone ever giving Jesus an order or “pulling rank” on him and Jesus having to
bend to their authority. He was never in
a situation which, frankly, he even NEEDED to pray about anything. According to Neil Savedra “Jesus knew all of
the secrets of the Universe from infancy”.
Yet he shared this knowledge with no one, assuming that he actually had
it. (I thought “sharing’ was a cardinal
trait of Christianity) Any problem he
had, which were few, were of his own deliberate instigation. How many Blacks who have been beaten up by
Police would love to “be in control” and not have to submit perhaps innocently to
some sicko officer who “has it in for them”.
Jesus and his apologists would be the first to tell you that ‘He was
never a victim of anything”. Jesus
never had to “live up to anyone’s standards” and he wasn’t that keen on showing
any overt “honor’ to either his father or his mother. And again he was “the center of every scene”
and “everything was about him”. We have
names for people like that, and they usually aren’t flattering. Indeed the one thing Jesus said he prized
above all else he didn’t have - - humility, which Neil Savedra himself comes “from
being humbled”. Perhaps none of this
would not be a problem except for one thing.
One big dispute that the “Orthodox Church” so called had with the
Marcionites, was that the Marcionites denied that Jesus was one hundred percent
human. But this “one hundred percent
doctrine’ is not my own conjecture, but a longstanding part of Catholic
theology. Were Jesus to be judged by the
same yardstick as other “one hundred percent humans’ are judged, I wonder how
he’d stack up? “But hey, Jesus, feel
free to exorcise a demon or two”.
