I Had a Dream

... last night that the $700 billion bailout of Big Business had been converted to a lottery, and that I had been awarded the entire shooting match, lock, stock, and barrel. After pinching myself repeatedly upon waking, I immediately scribbled a to-do list. I'd like to share that list with you.

What to do with $700 billion:

1. Buy the NBA.

Not just one team, all of them. And since I will own everything from the arenas (including the chewing gum I left underneath seat 4, row H, section 21 at Staples Center during a game in 2005) to the team mascots to each player's shoestrings, I will decide what happens and when. That said, all games will be canceled and rearranged to fit into a more disruptive schedule. Rather than beginning each season in October and wrapping things up the following June with the celebrated NBA Finals, I'm going to schedule all regular-season games to coincide with Major League Baseball playoff games and the World Series. The new NBA Finals will consist of a single sudden-death match between the Eastern and Western Conference champions. Naturally this winner-take-all game will be broadcast simultaneous to the Super Bowl. I'll call the regular season "October Madness," and the Finals will be renamed "January Surprise."

If any TV networks cry "foul," I will buy them and convert their format to continuous commercial-free reruns of I Love Lucy and Get Smart.

2. Buy the moon and rename it.

3. Buy the presidency, first of this country and afterward any country that comes to mind.

4. Buy Australia. I've always wanted my own island-continent-nation, and I love to watch toilets flush backward. Plus, I'd get to learn a cool accent by hanging out with my favorite blokes and sheilas down at the pub.

5. If there's any money left over, buy the crappiest Major League Baseball franchise and fire all players, coaches, and the manager. This year's winner will be the San Diego Padres. While I realize Seattle and Washington were actually a wee bit crappier, I like having the Mariners around, and the poor Nationals just relocated from the dregs of baseball in Montreal, purely a hockey town. I've never found anything useful to do with the Padres anyway. They will be replaced by the prettiest, most buxom female college softball players I can find, and their new name will be the Madres. Wait. I hear you protesting this one. Listen, I guarantee my team will draw more than the previous occupants who were overpaid, fat, lazy cry babies. Though my new team will surely lose all one-hundred and sixty-two games, no one will care. The team's new home will be in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

5a. If Major League Baseball complains, buy them and replace all twenty-nine remaining teams with pretty, female buxom college softball players.

5b. I get to manage the team.

6. Hell is still free.

That Peaceful, Easy Feeling

Islam is a religion of peace.

If you're naive and believe this mistranslation in light of daily headlines that scream the contrary, then you may close this window now and pick up a copy of your favorite daily Dead Fish Wrapper (I'd recommend the NY Times, suitable for cat boxes, bird cages, and lighting camp fires). Or perhaps you'd feel more at home with the National Enquirer on your lap.

The correct translation, which President Bush miscommunicated to the American people in his nationally televised address on 9/11/01 (whether this was a deliberate act or not, I do not know), is submission, not peace. As long as you submit to Allah or Mohammed or some turbaned hate-spouting fool, you're alright in their book.

Peaceful Muslims might take me to task for saying theirs is not a religion of peace. I would remind them that the Quran states that true Muslims are to take jihad to the enemy in three increasing stages. We in the West are now in the crosshairs of their third and final stage, which is one of judgment and death, since we apparently have ignored the first two warnings. Those who stole airliners and slammed them into buildings, for example, killing thousands of innocents in the process, were the true Muslims according to the Quran.

No "good Muslim" is peace-loving. This is neither an exaggeration nor a misstatement.

Late last year (2007), for several days, a Jewish high holiday overlapped a Muslim high holiday. During this period of time, the crowd on the left "celebrated" with more than seventy-five deaths, most of whom were fellow peace-lovers. The infidel Jew on the right did nothing other than earned a Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Note how the gentlemen on the left are clearly experiencing the joy and love of Allah, while the lowly Jew is wasting every civilized human's time by expanding the horizons of knowledge. Had he had a brain, clearly he would have been destroying life rather than trying to save it.

Idiot.

Woolly Bear Watch 2008

In about two hours, autumn will return to earth's northern hemisphere. Here in the US Pacific Northwest, the dwindling sunlight spells Prozac for many people as Seasonal Affective Disorder rears its ugly head once more.


Rather than toying with my brain's delicate chemistry, I choose to hole myself up at a local coffee shop with my laptop and ride things out. The ride can easily last six or seven excruciating months, with a sunny day or two occasionally thrown in to break up the monotony.


At about the time once-green leaves turn to gold and then to red before littering the grounds with their own corpses, another head rears itself, this one belonging to the banded woolly bear caterpillar, the larval stage of the Isabella tiger moth.

I've never found moths to be of any particular interest, but this one, at least in its larval form , takes the proverbial cake. Legend has it that the relative size of the orange band will herald the severity -- or mildness -- of the upcoming winter. Although I have been woolly bear watching for a number of years now, I have yet to make any such correlation. Still, the critters are fun to see, and cuter than a -- well, than a moth.


Thus far this year, I have come across only two isolated caterpillars of unknown species, neither of which are the genuine woolly bear. In some ways, Mr. Bear's appearance is akin to that of the ground hog and all the attendant hoopla surrounding dubious prognostications regarding the remaining days of winter. Mr. Bear, who toils under the anonymity of having no official counterpart to Ground Hog Day, allegedly (in the minds of many) makes his yearly forecasts nonetheless.


With the use of high-speed computational monstrosities, the National Weather Service is calling for a nearly normal winter in every respect -- with slight possibilities of warmer-than-average temperatures, as well as a scant likelihood of less-than-average rainfall. Their ninety-day forecasts are currently running as committal as the Leaning Tower of Pisa.


We will have to wait for Woolly Bear Day to concur -- or rebut -- what the weather service has had to say on the matter. Until then, drink lots of coffee, bundle up, and throw an extra log on the fire.


Welcome to autumn.

The Joy of Insomnia

Saturday morning.

My neighbors, who live about 5 acres away, got a new puppy yesterday. I know you can't measure linear distance with squared units, but if you consider the parcels to be nearly squared-off rectangles, you'll get the idea that they're a comfortable distance away. I'd guess their house is 500 feet from where I lay me down to sleep.

Only I didn't.

My landlady, you see, is a sucker for a sob story, and has accumulated six cast-off dogs of her own, five of which love to bark. The sixth is senile and ready to kick the dog food can, so she's not much of a problem.

The five who bark did so nearly incessantly at the new puppy, which was a huge contributing factor to why I slept only a short while last night. And there's no way I can take a nap now since, well, you know how puppies can be. And barking dogs.

Injecting a little dark humor into my sleepless scenario, I call to your attention David Berkowitz, the legendary Son of Sam murderer of the 1970s. Sometime early this year, I watched a compelling interview with him (actually it was an interview and a documentary rolled up into a nice sixty-minute package). Granted, this man had underlying psychological issues (considering my insomnia, don't I as well?), and his problems may have included schizophrenia (I'll take a rain check on that one). But what I found nearly hilarious about the story was his account in which he explained what had driven him to the brink and made him snap.

His landlord's barking dogs.

*sigh*

It's the Border, Stupid

In the months preceding each presidential election cycle, it seems I hear cries of "It's the economy, stupid!" And this year is no exception: Unprecedented bailouts, bank failures, wild swings in the DOW Jones, billions of dollars flushed into oblivion in a single day, gold prices climbing. Yet oddly, as oil falls and gasoline prices finally recede, there is little apparent relief at the pump as we have tightened our financial belts. The economic slowdown, led by the collapsing housing market, leaves us with precious little to spend on fuel. (I suppose real relief might be realized if the price of a gallon of gas suddenly plummeted to, say, $2.)

The failing economy has shoved the discussion of illegal aliens right off the dinner table and into the trash can of yesterday's worries, much to the delight of those who crawled through a tunnel or over a busted fence along our southern border. Now we have them integrated, at least partially, into our economy.

Yeah, right.

Burgeoning hospital waiting rooms are alive with the foreign tongues of illegal aliens who speak and understand only their native language; they pay nothing for their services. Welfare roles have ballooned with these folks as well. They occupy a majority of many school districts, obtaining free education (at my expense), even reduced tuition rates at colleges and universities. Somehow they've managed to obtain driver's licenses, and many vote! My taxes (along with my blood pressure) continue to climb to give illegals by the millions a better way of life.

Since illegals pay little or no tax and consistently undercut the wages of legal working class Americans, and because they arrived here in a manner inconsistent with the method devised by our Founding Fathers and our Constitution, they are, by definition, law-breakers.

So what's a few million more law-breakers?

Some states, notably Oklahoma and Arizona, have enacted tough laws designed to restrict the employment of illegals. As hundreds of thousands of them have packed up and relocated to other states, a corresponding reduction in violent crime has been noted.

There are many who have escaped the tyranny of their own corrupt governments and found a home -- and a job and a life -- here in the US. Many of these indeed are hard-working, law-abiding folks. (Law-abiding except for their method of entry.) Being a compassionate Christian, I could not turn my back on such people. Nor could I send them away or refuse to feed or clothe them. Doing so would be against what Jesus has instructed me to do.

However, consider this: Remember that reduction in violent crime I mentioned a few paragraphs above? Many of the illegals who fled Arizona and Oklahoma have arrived in Texas. Immediately, violent crime in illegal-friendly Texas has skyrocketed.

So much for "they come here to work."

My grandparents emigrated from Italy the old-fashioned way: legally. They learned English and taught it to their sons and daughters. Italian was spoken in the home occasionally, but along with their newly Americanized names and citizenship came a new language and assimilation into the Great American Experiment.

Let's keep it that way. If they arrive illegally, and if they refuse to assimilate and conduct themselves legally, escort them back to wherever they came from and bill their own government of nationality for the service.

And build the damn fence.

Britain Paving the Way to Hell

In Islam's bloodthirsty quest to dominate the world, another domino fell right into place today when the least likely of nations, Britain, opted to honor Sharia Law.

For those of you not familiar with Sharia Law, look to such peace-loving nations as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria -- you know, where they cut your hand off if you dare steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family, and allow men to beat their wives for any reason whatsoever, and homosexuals are hanged for simply being homosexuals.

This might be a good time for the chaps in the UK to stock up on burqas while they're still competitively priced.

And now that jolly old England has fallen prey to the Muslims, who's next? Surely domino nations of the EU will follow suit. Even Canada has already spoken of adopting Sharia Law. But how far are we here in the US from such a barbaric system of justice?

It might depend on who is inaugurated on January 20th, 2009.

Lipstick on a Pig

Yes, I see the lipstick and I see the pig. Only the players are not as the media has portrayed.

The more I dig into John McCain's voting record, the less I like him. Consider the following:

• John McCain claims to be pro-life but has voted consistently not to overturn Roe v. Wade
• Just like President Bush, McCain has no problem keeping the US-Mexican border wide open
• He is in favor of amnesty for illegal aliens, which would allow several million of them to become US citizens. Over time, those millions will metastasize into fifty or perhaps a hundred million, given their accelerated birth rates
• He supported the most liberal Supreme Court justice on the bench, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, formerly a political director for the ACLU
• Sandra Day O'Connor would have been the swing vote in overturning Roe v. Wade, but Mr. McCain supported her in not overturning the 1973 decision
• He embraced ultra-liberal Ted Kennedy's ideas and formed the Gang of 14 which assisted in defeating some of Bush's best judicial nominees
• Twice, he voted against Bush's tax cuts
• He opposes ANWAR and offshore drilling
• He also led the fight against coercive interrogations of enemy combatants

Clearly, this man is a Democrat with an (R) after his name. And clearly, Sarah Palin is the lipstick, but regrettably, Mr. McCain is the pig.

Sarah Palin would be a wiser choice for president than John McCain, along with a conservative running mate of the likes of Mitt Romney or Fred Thompson or Mike Huckabee. If you're a true Republican or even a Constitutionalist as I am, this ticket would be the best we could hope for.

Unfortunately, we no longer have these options, and so I will hold my nose and cast my ballot for McCain-Palin on November 4. Electing Obama would be a disaster of unimaginable proportions.

However, one might harken back to the 1976 election in which President Ford lost to Jimmy Carter, who did such a terrible job in his four years that the voters wiped him off the map, ushering in the eight-year-long Reagan era. Following this line of thinking, four years of extreme leftist (a Muslim with communist policies) Barack Obama could set us up for eight years of President Palin beginning in 2012.

But I don't think I could suffer through four years of Obama with perhaps a house and senate under Democratic control. Hate crimes legislation and the Fairness Doctrine would certainly be enshrined into law during 2009.

However you slice it, Sarah Palin just might be a young, female Ronald Reagan.

When Churches Die

"Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall never pass away." -- Jesus Christ, Matthew 24:35.

If you subscribe to the teachings of Jesus, you've probably already accepted the fact that no one who dies without being reborn of the Spirit of God, through Christ, is getting off this merry-go-round alive. Even the atheists, agnostics, and New Agers know this to be true, though they may cling to some hope that there is someone, somewhere, in some distant galaxy, who will be alive in a trillion years. Or that, upon death, they will simply reappear in some mystical la-la land, sans a benevolent God.

For a church to die is no great revelation. The ways in which they close their doors for the last time is the subject of this post. Some fall victim to attrition -- members slowly stop attending, the demographics of the neighborhood change, and the church no longer fits in with the backdrop. While this is sad, it at least can be understood.

But a church is more than a mere building: a church is the people that comprise the congregation as well as the particular doctrine espoused therein. Ideally, since Jesus did not preach duplicitously, we should be able to heed His teachings and agree on the fundamentals, pointing to a single Christian church. In many cases, we do.

Pastors who deviate from God's word in order to keep attendance figures up and place the fiscal health of the church ahead of its spiritual health, do a great disservice to the name of Christ.
When clergy fall victim to the shifting sands of societal norms and capitulate to ideologies which clearly and blatantly run contrary to God's teachings (as is occurring in nations such as Canada and parts of Europe where pastors are silenced by vigorous hate crimes laws), an even larger threat looms.

In your wildest dreams, would you ever have regarded the Bible to be a book of hate?

Many will never learn of Jesus's words and will fall into error by way of false religions and false teachers, even perversions of the simplicity of the Gospel. The world is replete with such people. "You will know them by their fruit." -- Matthew 7:20, again the words of Jesus, in which He warns of false teachers.

But what does this have to do with dying churches?

The enemies of Christ take on many forms. In some countries -- most notably but by no means restricted to those under the tyranny of Islam -- Christians are denied employment, shunned, stoned, their homes and places of worship burned to the ground, and in countless cases, believers are routinely martyred -- simply for believing in Jesus. Oddly, in spite of such horrific adversity, Christians take their faith underground, where their churches and faith flourish.

Other forms taken by Christ's enemies are perhaps more subtle: acceptance of homosexuality, murdering of the unborn, political correctness, the hammer and sickle of communism, even look-alike gospels which fly in the face of Scripture. While one might smugly take the position that such issues are best kept out of the pulpit, it is essential that they be included and addressed.

The openly homosexual Reverend V. Gene Robinson should not be teaching God's word to anyone until he repents of his sin and forsakes his lifestyle. Why? Because he cannot teach what the Holy Spirit does not give him, and he will receive nothing from the Holy Spirit as long as he is practicing sin. (Has this man ever truly been saved?)

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who today apologized to Charles Darwin for having doubted the author of the most flagrant anti-Christian doctrine ever propounded, needs to recant such beliefs. How he can reconcile evolution with the book of Genesis is beyond my comprehension. God didn't need evolution, Creation did the job just fine.

Trinity Broadcasting Network of southern California continues to sell air time to charlatans of Scripture who bastardize God's word beyond recognition. Teachers of the "prosperity gospel" twist Scripture to fit their own misguided desires, believing that perfect health and abundant wealth should belong to every true believer in Christ, and that anyone who is lacking is doing so due to some secret sin. (I could go on for days about this lie.)

The Word of God is a beacon to all, and its teachers must be beyond reproach, not living in sin. False teachers dim the beacon, and congregants of these fallacious churches will leave in search of anything that will tickle their ears. More often than not, what tickles their ears will pave a highway straight to hell.

We in the land of plenty should take note. Hate crimes legislation, and all the freedoms it has to offer, might only be months beyond the horizon here in the United States. Further such chipping away at our free speech rights will hasten the death of the church. And when churches die, whole societies quickly follow.

Oligarchy in California, Insanity in Washington State

I left the Golden State in 2001 shortly after the passage of Prop 22, which I had supported. The measure, which had defined marriage as between one man and one woman, passed overwhelmingly. The people of California spoke!

With the stroke of the pen of a judge, the measure was ruled invalid, and homosexual marriage is now a part of the California lifestyle.

This November, Californians have a chance to vote again on a similar (identical?) measure, Prop 8, which will most likely pass. The people of California once again will speak.

But who will listen?

A single activist judge, unelected and accountable to no one, will doubtless strike down the measure once again -- proof that we no longer live in a republic but rather an oligarchy.

So, I ask: What's the point in voting?

Here in Washington state, the gubernatorial race of 2004 was mired in controversy and leftist antics. Republican candidate Dino Rossi won the election by a scant hundred or so votes. The Dems cried for a recount and it was granted. Again, Rossi won. The Dems cried louder, and an unprecedented second recount was ordered, and amazingly, Rossi lost the election by the slimmest conceiveable margin of 127 votes.

Benefitting "Governor" Gregoire was the sudden emergence of about a thousand ballots, naturally in ultra-liberal King County, which ran nearly 100% in favor of the person who has been acting as our governor for nearly four years (imagine that!). What the media didn't bother to report was that many of those thousand votes were cast by felons, who are ineligible to vote, illegal aliens, who have no Constitutional right to vote, or persons who are deceased. Apparently Democrats maintain the right to submit ballots from the world beyond.

In a little less than two months, Rossi will have his rematch against the fraud from Olympia. However, the atheist farm system (you know them as the public school system of systematic communist indoctrination, or public schools for short) has been busy cranking out four more years of liberal voters, so the upcoming election will likely be another sham, this time probably by a wider margin, one which will be simply too large for the Republicans to contest. What the Democrats can't win, they will steal. And as we say here in the Pacific Northwest, "count, count, and recount until you win."

So I ask: What's the point in voting?

Since I've grown accustomed to futilely banging my head against walls, I intend to vote anyway.

Marriage Quotas

I just read an article on World Net Daily (wnd.com) entitled California bans 'brides,' 'grooms.' It seems a marriage license in Placer County, California was rejected for having used the audacious, bigoted, and insensitive terms, inflaming the gods of political correctness.

What's next? Homosexual marriage quotas? Or maybe forced homosexuality, as in the perverted "tests" that grew out of the warped mind of Adolf Hitler?

Shortly before I departed the once-great Golden State in 2001, I voted in the 2000 election for, among other things, the famed Proposition 22. Prop 22 clearly defined marriage as between a man and a woman. Duh. And yes, it passed overwhelmingly. But leave it to the geniuses, those all-knowing souls at the Ninth Circus Court of Appeals, to water down the wording and circumvent the proposition's core meaning, thus negating its validity and allowing homosexual marriages to be recognized. Not by me, ever, in any way, shape, or form -- but by the powers that be.

Stop the world, I want to jump off. (Actually, please speed it up to several hundred times its current rotational rate so I'll just fly off without having to exert any effort.)

President McCain

With the addition of Sarah Palin on the (R) ticket, the election in November now appears to be McCain's to lose. The selection of the female bulldog governor of Alaska was nothing short of a stroke of genius by the Republican team, amounting to a pleasant digression as well as a decisive swing in the polls.

Voters on the right, who would otherwise have been inclined to sit this one out, are now nearly unanimous in their support for the revamped Republican ticket -- if not for McCain, then at least for his pretty running mate; and given McCain's age, Mrs. Palin might find herself seeking a presidential bid of her own in 2012. And she'll have four years of VP experience to add to her achievements as governor.

Certainly there are women of a moderate political persuasion who will cast their votes for a woman, now that Hillary has been vanquished at least for another four years. Governor Palin fits the bill nicely.

Painful as it is to acknowledge, there are white people who will not vote for a black man for president. While I do not hold to this line of thinking myself, I do understand it. However, note that Mr. Obama is not a Negro -- he is an Arab-American who happens to look like a black man. But he appears to be advertising himself as an African-American, so he will live or die (politically speaking) by that decision.

Here in the blue state of my current residence, Washington, as well as neighboring Oregon (which I sardonically refer to as San Francisco North, Camp Stalin, Portlandgrad, and others), insanity runs rampant. To wit, over last night's dinner, I had the opportunity to discuss the latest election developments with a confused Obama supporter, a Christian woman who is buying into the mainstream media's adoration of the Muslim candidate who calls himself a Christian whenever he finds it advantageous to do so. This poor woman has been thoroughly indoctrinated by the major media spin doctors, believing Osama -- er, Obama -- to be all about positive change, a man who will undo all of Bush's failed policies (I bristle at these words and will address them later). She recoiled sharply when I lectured her on Islam's bloodthirsty quest to take over the west, one square inch and one political office at a time, the crown jewel being the United States presidency; and she was indredulous at my suggestion that Barack Hussein would happily trump our Consitution and invoke Sharia Law at his earliest opportunity.

What better time to dupe the American public (not an especially difficult task) than in the months leading up to November? Osama (oops, there I go again) has slipped on a few key occasions, Freudian or otherwise. In a recent interview with George Stephanopoulos, Obama referred to his Muslim faith; the interviewer corrected him by suggesting, "You mean your Christian faith?" to which Obama quickly recanted. On another instance, the Prince of the Left referred to the fifty-seven United States. Oops, Barack, did you mean the fifty-seven states of Islam? Even a nine-year old wouldn't have made that blunder.

As far as "Bush's failed policies," this term is bandied about with great vigor and glee by the communist American ultra-left. To be sure, Bush has failed in some regard. But he has fought the war on terror well (not perfectly, but consider that we have not been attacked since 9/11), he has kept the oil spigot flowing uninterrupted (when did you last see cars line up to buy gas?), he has thwarted useless and bigoted hate crimes legislation from becoming law, he has kept taxes low, and he battled a fusillade of left-wing extremists in the Senate who illegally refused to allow an up-or-down vote on his court nominees, while still managing to appoint two staunchly conservative justices to the Supreme Court. Bravo!

Bush's legacy will be in these appointments to the highest court.

Among his failures: The war in Iraq could perhaps have been handled differently; we still have a gaping hole along the Rio Grande, allowing millions of undocumented illegal aliens to sneak through and assimilate into our culture as well as oil does with water; imported goods continue to flow too freely and without tariffs, while our exports are routinely tariffed to the point of non-competition. Free trade is a farce and always harms the United States.

As long as he can distance himself from the failures President Bush has made, thus avoiding the label of Bush's Third Term, John McCain is a certainty to be sworn into office on January 20th, 2009.