The economy has showing amazing signs of a rebound in the past week or so. First of all Black Friday retail sales were up 16% and Cyber Monday on line sales are up twenty percent. Traffic at LA international airport is up 16% and home sales are up 1.5% in the last month. I would imagine we’ll see a significant drop in the unemployment rate nationwide in a few days. All that figure has to do is to drop .2% per month from now to the election and it will be at seven percent by election day. Of course a gloomy economy was the last hope of the Republican right. Just today they said that the consumer confidence index rose from 40 to 56 in one Month. This is an amazing achievement. This side shows campaign circus they’ve been conducting the past few months will be seen as laughable in a couple years. Of course the right is kind of out of lies. They can’t used all the dirty stuff they used four years ago. They can’t say that Bill Ayres is secretly running the administration or that the President is a Communist or even a Socialist. They can’t say he’s a Moslem or a Kenyan or that he can’t produce his birth certificate. They can’t use the threat oft repeated that soon we are going to have hyper inflation like the Wymar republic. They can’t even accuse the fed chairman is being hand picked by Obama since he is an appointee of President Bush. They can’t say that Obama has lost two & a half million jobs. In terms of Christian morality- - the President was the member of one church for twenty years and was married there and his children were baptized there. Only one US President has ever been divorced, let alone twice, and it was not a Democrat. About the best the tea party can hope to do is when they see this economy continuing to recover is to say that “well it’s only because the President began to adopt our ideas”. If you are looking to astrological indicators, the cycle of the planet Venus is very bullish. That alone would cause me to predict a Down Jones Industrials 500 points higher than today. The Dow Jones Industrials were up 291 points today. They say that Greece is getting over its debt crisis and Europe in general may well have rounded the corner. Clearly people are now spending, which in time will create the demand for taking on new employees. This whole “Republican fall” will then just be a bad dream.
Dr. Conrad Murray was sentenced today to four years by a Judge who did not attempt to conceal his opinion on the matter of whether Murray committed medical mal practice. Four years was all the law would allow. You know if you are going to blame other people for your own guilt consciousness and start hurling accusations at others and lack not the vaguest hint of remourse, you better not do so before a person who has power over you, like a District Court Judge. But we all know people like that. They know they are guilty but will move heaven and earth to keep from admitting it. I wanted to comment on today’s Days of our Lives episode and the strange behavior of Samantha Brady. She claims she feels ashamed of the affair she just had with E J Di Mira. If she is so ashamed, why is she over at his mansion now, without letting her husband know she is there and why is she so loud and vocal about it and making all these statements “I can’t get the affair out of my mind” and it’s almost as though she wants his wife to walk in on them having this little conversation. She claims she loves her family but leaves them at the hour of maximum need. You know as Christians we should try to put ourselves in the shoes of people with whom we have issues. But there are just times when you can’t get the shoes to fit. Thom Hartman has stated that only two groups of the population test out to be “sociopaths”. These are you average mass rapists and murderers - - and also Investment Bankers. Maybe you should try to “relate to their circumstances” but it’s impossible to relate to their morally depraved minds. How do relate to a tea party Christian see nothing wrong in any of the lax commodities investment regulations we have now thanks to a “reform bill” Phil Graham got through a dozen years ago for instance? They will attack Michelle Obama for being “fat”, but see nothing wrong with Gingrich’s morality. These sociopathic people have gone so far as to say there is some “suspicious” that women haven’t come out of the woodwork to accuse President Obama of affairs the way that Atlanta business woman did today with Herman Cain. And now of course there is this issue of “robo signing” by the Banks. In order to evict home owners faster they will hire people to come in and actually break the law and forge signatures- - that lead to foreclosure. I guess this is all in accord with that “efficiency” thing we were discussing. We can’t “slow walk” the foreclosure process, as Romney might say. Of course sometimes people will admit there is some wrong, like Samantha did today. You hear the words coming out of her mouth. You see her lips flapping- - but you know her mind is a million miles away. Who but a sociopathic personality, as Hartman might say- - would say the Real Estate crisis was caused by “too MUCH regulation of the real estate industry”, and would lobby for the repeal of what weak regulatory laws we do have. But they wouldn’t say their morals were weak, they’d just say “Well you know it’s all a part of the common human sinful condition” and somehow bring Christ into it. I think if I were Jesus there are certain conversations I’d almost pay to keep my name Out of.
Scott Walker’s people are nervous about people merely standing on the sidewalk getting people to sign recall petitions. People were made afraid to sign them. Right now they are over half the way to the needed 550,000 (plus many to space) or whatever needed signatures to get the recall petition on the ballot. Governor Walker now has only 38% of the people, meaning that this recall election is practically a done deal. The way for the people is to express power through the voting booth. This whole idea of “there is wisdom in a multitude of counselors” needs to be revived. There seems to be a world wide “awakening” of the human spirit as far as people taking control over their own lives and destiny. Christians have taught that democracy is a concept of the Devil, notably the Antichrist. They also believe it’s their divine calling to hate “the world” and this may explain some of their anti environmentalist positions. Others of them are just generally afraid of forward progress in general. In Egypt they held the first free election in sixty years in that country. I don’t know the result. Judy a tea party Christian, of course has said “The mideast will never be ready for democracy because they are not Christian, but Islamic”. I suspect people like Pat Buchannon and Michelle Bachman echo similar sentiments, as far as trusting the vote of any non American. So they are being beaten up by the Army one day and presumably voting them out of power the next. I guess they are beginning to say that the only difference between a clash with the Police in this country as opposed to in Egypt, is that in that country the rioters throw rocks back.
In Syria pressure continues for the United States to weigh in in a significant way on the whole liberty issue. It is ironic that Iraq is one of the few dissenters from the Arab League vote that will not go along with the uprising in Syria. In Pakistan the situation is worsening apparently because we accidentally bombed the wrong people. It would seem to me the sooner we get out of Afghanistan- - the less of an immediate problem Pakistan will be. It seems to me we should just get away from that whole situation and come back to it later perhaps after we have lined up a few allies in the region. In India they are abandoning all the laws they have had for decades, since the very inception of India as a nation, to the extent that local businesses should be protected. As Thom Hartman says, we used to have mostly independent shops in malls in this country but now it’s all controlled by a few giant monopolies. The people of India may be rebelling against their own parliament, who wants to see these Neo Con “pro business” laws passed. As Hartman says “sometimes, inefficiency is a good thing”. Personally I think “inefficiency” in religion is a good thing. I liken it to getting drunk. You can drink red table wine or you can drink 110 proof vodka and achieve a state of drunkenness more efficiently. Life is not always about “being the most efficient”. Since so much of religion is corrupt- - distilling and concentrating that corruptness is no gain.
I guess the question is whether we are moving into an armed police state. This morning the US Senate was debating a bill which would enable any governmental authority to pick up any American citizen for any reason- - if they are suspected as an “enemy combatant”, which is a Newt Gingrich fictional term for some category that is not covered by either by the Constitution or the Geneva convention on treatment of prisoners of war. Under the Patriot Act theoretically an economic boycott can be viewed as an act of “terrorism”, for instance if you picket your Mac Donald’s for selling products that will clog arteries and give you a heart attack. This particular bill has already been passed by the House as of last May. The consensus is that the Senate will sign off on the bill today because key people like John Mc Cain and Karl Levin are for the bill. Under this bill the constitution as we know it will be done away with. You don’t have to be told what you are being charged with. Presumably your fifth amendment protections are gone so that you can be compelled by torture or other means to be a witness against yourself. You do not have the right to attorney or to make one phone call. There is no 48 hour charging limit. My guess if that if the American people knew that most all of the Republican candidates, or at least six of them, are all for such provision, it would impact on whether the American people vote for these candidates. Now of course the Police in this country want to militarize beyond all law enforcement needs. Now they want flash bombs and M 16’s and rocket powered grenades and military style helicopters, and heavy riot gear and night vision capability. Rather than target the occupy wall street movement perhaps they could target the shopping malls of America. The American people have become more agitated and anxious and certain undesirable traits in their personalities are no longer as easy to conceal as before. Now days women are pepper spraying other customers to get to an X Box. Since the police seem to have abandoned verbal skills is coping with a situation, the people themselves feel OK in reaching for force as a first resort. One grandfather was with his grandson and the grandson hid the merchandise under his shirt to keep other customers from getting it. So now the grandfather was beaten and bloodied by the cops and left on the floor in hand cuffs and bleeding and medical aid was not forthcoming. Another older man felt ill and then died of a heart attack, and the stampede of shoppers just ran over his dead body. It would seem that we are becoming altogether less civil as a people. Some on the left have said that President Obama has been working with the FBI who have worked with the cops nation-wide to quell all the occupy protests. Obama has been very hesitant to comment at all on violations of civil liberties in this country and I can’t feel comfortable where he stands on these vital, constitutional issues. Were the political situation not so dire in this coming year of 2012, I would strongly advocate that a third party candidate run on a civil liberties platform. This whole addition to war we have had since the days of President Bush is becoming pathological. We have been in this state of perpetual war to the extent that people are talking about electrified barbed wire fences at the border and declaring that the Iraq War was a failure- - as Mitt Romney did- - seemingly for the simple reason that it is now coming to an end, which always seems to be a bad thing to these people. Tea party Christians seem to have as a measuring rod- - that any candidate who advocates peace must be a forerunner to the Antichrist or something. These Republicans regard it as a disaster that defense sill be cut along with everything else, but not till the year 2013, when presumably both of our foreign wars will be winding down and we won’t need to spend as much. The expression “peace dividend” seems to have departed from our vocabulary. But right now what I find the most troubling of all is that this Senate bill does not even seem to be making the news. I checked C-Span I and C-Span II and neither was covering the Senate hearings, which presumably were going on right them. And this isn’t the first time I have suspected C-Span of being asleep on the job. There is some Udall amendment that would strip the offending language from this military appropriations bill, but what is most troubling of all (among so many troubling things these days) is that the President himself has not declared the offending language a “deal breaker”. Threatening to veto a bill is not the same as giving an ultimatum, which is what I would have done as President. Under no circumstances would I sign a bill with these provisions- - I wouldn’t care if it were a bill to give needed medical care to old people or whatever. Certain issues have preeminent priorities, like civil liberties. If we do not preserve our civil liberties, than America as we have known it is gone.
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