He Who Would Be Obstructionist

Conservatives love to tell the story of a guy with a big pot full of live crabs and the kid asks "What is to prevent the crabs from escaping" and the dad says, "Oh, that won't happen. If one crab looks like he's going to manage to escape, the other crabs will pull him back down into the pot". I've experanced my share of "crabs" at Calvary Chapel, Anaheim. There are a lot of crabs there, ready to pull you back down into the hole that they're in. My mother once wanted this one job (she's in some kind of social work. I'll leave it at that) But for years this one guy named Maloney obstructed her from getting the job she wanted, until one day he retired. Before this I myself inquired about this guy Maloney, and was only told that everybody regarded him as a great guy. In the movie "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", Sidney Portier says some horrible things to his father, who was a mail man. He said "Till the dead weight of you is off of us, our generation will never get ahead". In the Bible there was a guy named Tobias, who obstructed the building of the "Walls of Jerusalem" in Neiamiah's day, first by mocker, then by appealing to the government to stop them, and finally by armed conflict. I think you get the point. Now the Bush Adminestrarion is trying to ramrod through a bunch of de-regulation measures in a lot of areas, such as banks and finance, and a lot of stuff on the environment, and stuff on abortion. For a de-regulation to stick it has to be in force sixty days before the new President takes office, which means that Bush has to get passed by executive order or whatever- - everything he wants done by November 22nd. which is just a couple of weeks away. I heard about all this on Pacific Radio pod casts. It's an issue that's very relavant to our times, because if the new rules take effect before January 20th. 2009, it will be a whole lot harder for President Obama to undo them. This is why I'm not exactly conforted by the notion of a "smoothe transition".

Obama has been meeting with Hillary Clinton in Chicago with the idea of appointing her to the Office of Secretary of State. Hillary would make a good Secretary of State because she could use all her tallents of outspokenness and stridency advocating the best interests of the United States. We need a strong leader in that office. Meanwhile Jesse Jackson Jr. may be picked to fill Obama's old senate seat, because Obama will officially be resigning his seat this Sunday. If Hillary turns down the Cabinet post, Obama may offer the position to John Kerry.

We've been saying for a while now that Christianity with the course of time, will wither on the vine as the public gradually begins to assimilate all the information about the "hostorical Jesus (if there was one) on the internet. Just two days ago I was reviewing "The God who Wasn't There" and there's a whole DVD movie you can buy and show to your friends. As you know in my own writings I have talked about "The Four Jesuses" who lived during the first century, and each contributes a bit to the overall portrate we have of Jesus. Back in the "Age of Reason" three centuries ago man decided it would only conclude something was true if it was in accord with Reason. But the religious fundamentalists and others have made Reason a dirty word. One must keep in mind the old axiom "Once the impossible has been ruled out, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth". I say this because people say Evolution is "unlikely". When it comes to reason I'll take "unlikely" over Impossible any day of the week. Some would say to just "try Christianity". This is like a little kid telling his father, "Why don't we paint the house lavender. We don't have to keep it lavender forever, let's just try it that way for one week".

I checked in on Rachael Maddau and she had Naomi Klein on as a guest, who wrote the book, “The Shock Doctrine and Disaster Capitalism”. The topic of discussion was the 700 Billion dollar bail out rammed through congress. Now they are renigging on their deal to buy out bad mortgages and renegotiate them with the customers as Obama wanted. Never have a “verbal understanding”; put it in writing. It’s all bank guys on the government payroll these days and they know that, but congress let itself be conned by these ex bankers. Of course what’s going on is the Bush Adminestration is going to loot all they can from the American taxpayer and then they’ll all go get jobs from the very banks they are bailing out now. I told you that these banks with the money they’ve already received are NOT extending the courtesy of extending a nice low interest loan to the customers. No, no! These people bet their 22% and higher on credit card costs, which of loan shark perportions. Even student loans are 14% now. Now government officials are saying that bailing out the Mortgage instruments, for which the money from congress was approved and I initially rationalized- - will in fact not happen now. The banks weren’t doing this anyhow but with that money were thinking up other shady investment schemes and buy outs rather than use it for loans. So since we need to “get money in circulation” now other corporations such as the auto companies will receive some of that 700 Billion. There is an article about it in this week’s Rolling Stone I intend to look at if it’s available on line. Obama says he wants a smoothe transition with Bush but were I the President elect I would be up front in calling the President out on this massive financial deception. Judy is wrong. Obama is the farthest thing from being a tool of the “socialists”. This 700 Billion bail out isn’t socialism but rather the opposite. It’s the government turning over massive amounts of money without strings to private, corporate CEO’s. Obama hasn’t even chosen members of his cabinet yet, and we have no idea what kind of administration he’ll have. I only pray that it’s distinguishable from the current one. So far I have seen no indication of any sort that Obama intends to “clean house” economically speaking. I just hope he hasn’t somehow been bought off.