Urination: Protected Speech?

The other night, on a nationally televised airing of HBO's, "Curb Your Enthusiasm," actor Larry David urinated on a painting of Jesus Christ. Up until this week, I had believed Hollywood only did this figuratively.

The questions that well up in my mind are not why urinate on anyone's likeness? or how could he do such a thing? Neither answer would surprise me. Rather, I would ask Mr. David -- and do so now, though he'll surely be among the billions of people who do not read this blog -- why he chose to carry out this reprehensible act on a portrait of the icon, indeed the essence, of one of the world's largest religions, if not the largest: Christianity.

I have some suggestions as to why Mr. David chose to mock Jesus.

1. By doing so, David is merely acting out the whims of his father, Satan;
2. Urinating on a picture of, say, Barack Obama, would be met with calls of racism and a visit from "Reverends" Jackson and his sidekick, Sharpton;
3. Urinating on the Koran or the likeness of Mohammed could possibly result in the obliteration of HBO's offices by terror organizations; a bounty being placed on David's head by these same congenial folks; and CAIR beating their drums of intolerance, vehemently demanding anything from penance to David's head on a platter.

In light of these facts, it is quite clear that David chose the benevolent, all forgiving Savior as the object of his public mockery. Aside from a few legal organizations, e.g. The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), and The Heritage Foundation, Christians have only ourselves to call upon. We don't benefit from the tides of political correctness, we don't run to the ACLU or the NAACP, we are not represented by any sympathetic LGBT group, and we look upon hate crimes legislation with disgust as they do not regard us in a positive light. The political party which once stood for us has wandered leftward into the political center and away from its religious conservative roots. Basically we are a loosely bound group of a billion or so people, a hundred million of which reside in the United States.

I let my voice be heard by e-mailing HBO directly, and I would suggest you do the same. Unfortunately I cannot cancel HBO as I do not subscribe to them, nor have I in a dozen years. My TV watching habits are too scant to register on anyone's Richter scale. But I have a voice, an opinion, and a modicum of free speech (until Obama guts the Constitution).

I am awaiting the announcement of a boycott against HBO by various Christian groups such as American Family Association and the like; however, since HBO does not advertise, such action likely would be ineffective against them. Also, since Christians largely are not among the network's demographic profile as we simply tend not to watch HBO, any boycott would likely lack the teeth to have the desired effect.

Chalk the urinating actor up to more of Hollywood's great sewer pipe, and refuse to watch anything featuring Larry David except a sincere, heartfelt apology. Don't hold your breath in expectation.

Only 134 Shopping Days Left!

While stopped at a traffic light earlier today, I scrolled through my mp3 player in search of some fresh music. Something fresh and vibrant, anything but the same tired stuff I've been listening to for the last several months. You know how uninspiring music can be when it's played beyond the point of "ad nauseum."

The last time I updated my mp3 player was sometime last summer (2008), so none of its two gigabytes of tunes are terribly fresh, vibrant, or inspiring. Thumbing the main control button, I scrolled through the genres and landed on an old and familiar one. Old and familiar, yet fresh and vibrant.

Christmas music.

To my recollection, I've never asserted my sanity to anyone, and doing so now would only diminish what little credibility I might have remaining. But in case you didn't read it correctly, I'll repeat it. Christmas music. I pressed the button to make my selection final, and my library of Christmas songs began playing in random order.

I rolled up the driver side window and glanced at the passenger glass to make certain it was up as well. No one listens to this stuff in August -- not even elves or reindeer -- and I couldn't bear to be on the receiving end of scornful glares and pairs of eyes narrowed in doubt, imaginary heads shaking in disgust, fingers wagging dubiously in my direction. No, I'd just as soon keep this dark little secret to myself. The light turned green and off I drove to the stylings of Jim Brickman and "O Holy Night."

With my mood buoyed better than any SSRI anti-depressant pill could manage, I found myself considering the intervening holidays. While most other people are enjoying the remaining weeks of summer with their BBQs and pool parties, I was mentally carving out pumpkins and imagining Thanksgiving football on TV, an icy yet oddly pleasant crispness in the air, clouds of discarded breath suspended before being swallowed back into the atmosphere, strings of lights adorning rain gutters and eaves and hedges.

Inevitably, I began to regard my Christmas shopping list. This year it will be pitifully curtailed to match my pitifully subdued income. Alas, no one remains bleak to "O Holy Night," and I was no exception. I ticked the volume control up a couple of notches, and Jim gave way to David Lanz. I cruised through a green light, sure to put a dose of cheer into any man's heart, and returned to the notion of buying Christmas presents. Perhaps a couple of intact neurons conspired to cause me to question further this holiday spree before it actually broke away from the drawing board and I steered the car into the nearest mall. I couldn't be serious about this! Even I still recognize lunacy when I see it. Moreover, it's sacrilegious to actually buy Christmas presents without all the hoopla normally attendant with the season, and this was one part of the tradition I was not about to forsake.

Besides, I have no wrapping paper or bows.

Still a few miles west of home, a fierce battle was raging inside my skull. While it was undeniably true that it might be considered by some to be mildly eccentric (I'm known for this) doing one's Christmas shopping four months early, there was a prudent side to it (I'm not known for being especially prudent -- calculatedly reckless, maybe). I reasoned that retail prices are lower in August than during December, remaining "normal" through September so they can be raised in October or November to assure maximum seasonal profit, only to be lowered again the day after Christmas. They magnanimously refer to this sudden illusory price drop as an after-Christmas sale.

Nobody said retail sales managers were stupid.

I've just pulled onto my street and have my driveway in sight. Windham Hill serenades me with "Deck the Halls." I've made it home without being lured to the mall. I still have at least six weeks until I suspect the price hikes to sneak through, so I'm not in any hurry. Not yet, anyway.

This may sound a little cockeyed, but let me be the first this Christmas season to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy 2010!

Tea for 2 (thousand)?

This morning, I attended my first-ever Tea (Taxed Enough Already) Party on the steps of the County Courthouse building in Clark County, WA.

We began by signing an initiative designed to enforce the existing state law regarding hiring of illegals (an Oklahoma-style law which has had fabulous results in sending illegals scrambling to neighboring states in search of work and free health care). Then we moved over to the main staging area where we listened to perhaps a dozen speakers voice their disgust with the current administration's policies.




The crowd was very well-behaved, definitely of one accord, and as fed-up as I've ever seen a group of people within the first three months of a president taking office. With nearly two-hundred posters of varying sizes, colors, and content, rally-goers voiced their support of the US Military, denying giving illegal aliens driver's licenses, cutting taxes, returning to small government; many took shots at the bailout and the trillion dollar Obama stimulus plan, among others.

No screaming, no AIDS-tainted blood-throwing, no profanity, no mock fetuses strewn about. Just a respectful gathering of respectable, law-abiding citizens, clinging to their Constitutional rights before the American Communist Party (you know them as Democrats) revoke and rewrite the Constitution into oblivion.

Last month in my home town of Battle Ground (population 16,000), a half-dozen mailboxes were smashed by vandals, presumably with a hammer or baseball bat. This drew two news vans from television stations from neighboring Portland, Oregon, some thirty-five miles away. Today, two-thousand folks gathered on the courthouse steps less than ten miles from Portland, and the event went completely unnoticed by the liberal government media complex, aka TV stations KGW, KATU, KPTV, et al. Odd, isn't it? Had twenty-five AIDS activists joined hands to protest dirty needles or a ban on same-sex marriage, a half-dozen vans would have beamed a live stream back to Portland TV towers which would have interrupted regular programming. Had a hundred leftists piled into a local park to bash President Bush's policies on the war in Iraq, news trucks from nearby radio stations would have gridlocked traffic for miles. Since today's event was conservative in nature and ran counter to the Faux Administration, nary a single newsperson showed (ostensibly, that is, since they probably had their spies reporting back to Portland advising that this tea party was unnewsworthy); only a solitary Sheriff's patrol car made a single pass, never slowing to below the posted speed limit.

Nobody cared.

Wrong. We got our point across, we showed our solidarity for over an hour, many made their own films, and certainly some, such as I, are blogging about it. We made certain the day's activities were not buried beneath the hoopla of NBA playoff action and the second week of Major League Baseball's 2009 season.

Mr. Obama and his minions already know about the growing disgust aimed in his direction. As he scrambles to shore up support lost on American soil, he shakes hands and makes nice with our enemies (Hugo Football-head Chavez is his latest chum as of yesterday). It's good for a man without a country to have a friend he can call on -- another America-hating fool, this one from communist Venezuela.

For once, Barry O. (President Faux) made sense: birds of a feather need a place to roost and a common place from which to crap on the United States.

American Dream 2.0

My father's parents immigrated from Italy in the early 1900s with the intention of making a better life for themselves here in the United States. How many millions of us can make the same claim about our grandparents? I'm sure the number is staggering. As many immigrants did, my ancestors came with a dream, a foreign tongue, and very little money.

Somewhere around here, I have a .gif image of their signatures at Ellis Island. It's chilling to see their names penned on the registry from nearly a hundred years ago. It gives me great pride to pull up that image, whether on my computer screen or in my mind's eye.

Within a short time, they settled in Chicago as many Italians did, and began pursuing the American Dream. They learned English and taught it to their children, worked hard, went to church, obeyed the law, honored the flag, and accepted no handouts. They proudly called themselves Americans, not Italian-Americans.

My grandfather worked at the railroad while his wife raised two boys and two girls. In 1938, at the age of eighteen, my father enlisted in the army and served his country with honor. My aunts, proud to be called housewives, also married men who served in the armed forces. A decade or so before my grandfather's death in 1966, he retired from the railroad, a job he had held for forty years. With his savings and pension, he provided support for my grandmother after his passing.

To my knowledge, my father's parents lived in their nimble home from the time they arrived until the time Grandpa passed away. Afterward, my grandmother went to live with one of my aunts until her death six years later. The family took care of their own.

My father spoke of his ethnically mixed neighborhood with pride. Italian kids played in the streets with Poles, Greeks, Irish. This was Chicago, and this was America in the 20s and 30s. They required no legislation to co-exist; they simply did it because it was the right thing to do. If a black kid socked a white kid in the face, it wasn't called a hate crime. They didn't settle their squabble with guns or knives or baseball bats. A bloody nose was what it was, and more often than not, the boys shook hands afterward and went on their merry way.

A gun was kept in the house in case of burglars, and everyone was shown how to use it. It remained tucked away for that dreaded emergency that, at least in my family's home, never materialized, thank God.

This is the old version of the American Dream, version 1.0.

Barack Obama, though not directly responsible for revising the Dream, is putting version 2.0 on a fast track. Welfare, bloated federal programs, entitlements, free lunches, taxpayer-subsidized abortions, refusing to acknowledge English as the language of the land, homosexuals infiltrating the military, a trampling of the Constitution -- these are some of the components of American Dream 2.0.

The new dream will shut our mouths in violation of the First Amendment as it invokes hate crimes laws, repeals our rights to own the means to protect ourselves, and maintains hiring quotas, a dire form of the same discrimination it was designed to squelch.

I read an article yesterday in which an illegal alien woman in Bakersfield is living off a hefty bi-monthly disability check. Her disability? Heroin addiction.

How did we come so far, so fast? Who pulled the handle on the toilet and sent the original dream into the sewer? Will we ever recover, or are we doomed to living a life with a Big Brother we don't want, don't need, and can't afford?

My parents and grandparents would roll over in their graves if they could see this day. I wish I had lived in their time. They had it rough, but they managed. They survived. And they did it without government meddling, all during the era of the late great American Dream 1.0.

Changing of the Guard

In a few short hours, the torch will pass from President George W. Bush to a liberal madman with absolutely no clue of how to run anything more complex than his mouth.

The outgoing president has frustrated me many times, and overall he fell short of my conservative expectations. I knew he was a globalist when I twice cast my vote for him, but I was still under the impression that he would lead the nation out of the darkness brought by the Clinton gang.

Mr. Bush scored highly with his opposition to stem cell research, partial birth abortion, hate crimes legislation, tax hikes, and the assault weapons ban inked by his predecessor. After 9/11, the US was not attacked, so I am left to assume that he did something -- covertly or otherwise -- which averted an encore. (In the deepest, darkest recesses of my mind, a phone call echoes in which W spoke directly to Muslim leaders, assuring them the US military would vaporize Mecca should we be struck again, a tactic that might have bought our safety until Inauguration Day, 2009.)

Officially beginning tomorrow morning, all three branches of government will be controlled by lunatics from the far left. Many of these people belong behind bars or on heavy medication. Rather, they will be at the helm of this once-proud ship and its 300 million inhabitants for at least the next two years -- unless, of course, the last bastion of pseudo-conservatism, those we know as the Supreme Court, vacate November's election for lack of eligibility of the man who will very shortly be transformed from President-elect to President-faux.

This man of change is a virtual Jimmy Carter on political steroids, unrestrained by the House or Senate, a thought which simultaneously gives me a cold chill and scalding nausea unfazed by Xanax and Tums. Obama will surely make all America's enemies proud. Televised throughout the world, he will be inaugurated before the adoring eyes of Putin, Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il, Osama bin Laden, and every cutthroat and every leader of every drug cartel and poppy field from Colombia to Afghanistan to Nigeria.

Mr. Obama refers to himself as a devout man, a deeply religious man. Charles Manson's followers were devout people, and Osama bin Laden is deeply religious. Should these revelations bring me peace or to my knees in prayer that I may be spared long suffering and die quickly following a blinding flash?

It's nice to know that our new devout leader will be cheered on by the Gay Men's Chorus, led by a homosexual priest (oxymoron of the millenium). Planned Parenthood and the ACLU will have front row seats to the gala which will be carried live on everything from my TV to my palm pilot to my toaster oven -- though I refuse to watch any of it as I register a tiny whimper of protest in the only way I know how.

Beginning 1/20/09, the rights of the death culture will trump those of the moral minority, something we've seen blowing in the wind for at least twenty-five years. If you doubt that our constitutional rights have been shredded, try standing on a public sidewalk and handing out Christian literature while homosexuals march in a gay pride parade, committing blatant acts of indecency as they stroll through public streets in the nude. You will quickly find yourself in the back seat of a Ford Crown Victoria, heading to the local police precinct to be fingerprinted, booked, and jailed on some ludicrous non-charge.

So if you think the last eight years were a bumpy ride, hang on.

Countdown to Hell

In a few short days, the demented leftists in the US, along with Muslims throughout the world, will revel at the inauguration of Barack Obama.

Communists (leftists, liberals, socialists -- whatever you like to call them, they're one in the same) will have achieved their long-sought goal of bringing the United States from the pinnacle of power to the abyss of irrelevance. Decades-old policies of appeasement toward our sworn enemies, the relentless attacks against Christian principles by the ACLU, the rise of the abortion and homosexual mafias which have contributed to continued and rapid moral decline, and Middle Eastern petrodollars (along with all the influence they have purchased by investing those dollars back into our economy) have conspired to relegate America to the brink of third world status.

To the glee of many, President Bush will soon leave office, and the swearing in of his replacement will reduce the Constitution to a meaningless parchment of antiquity. At stake are everything from our right to free speech, to the right to own a firearm, to the right of peaceful assembly, to the right of freely worshiping God. Voting has proven itself to mean nothing, and the demise of the Constitution, once Mr. Obama illegally assumes office next Tuesday, will quickly follow.

I hope to carve out a single state -- Montana, Oklahoma, Arizona, I'm not picky; let the other forty-nine do as they please -- where I can live with the God-given freedoms handed down to us by our beloved Constitution, without fear of tyranny or reprisal by psychopathic ultra-left-wing hoodlums. You know them by the names of Obama, Biden, Pelosi, Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy, Tom Daschle, the Clinton thugs. Even our own conservative Supreme Court seems to have abandoned defending the Constitution by not taking up the cases of the proof of Obama's birthplace and citizenship, refusing to vacate his November victory.

The Constitution means nothing, our votes mean nothing, our borders mean nothing, and now our dollar means nothing. As a lone private citizen, I will fight to whatever extent I am able. Ultimately, they will pry my Bible from my cold, dead hands.

Hiatus

I've taken a two-month vacation from blogging as my mind has not yet come to grips with the November catastrophe and subsequent looming disaster that lies ahead. Additionally, I've had some personal issues which I have needed to tend to, and for the time being, I will once again post my opinions to both of my beloved readers as I am able.