glocks out

I just went to iTunes and selected "Party Shuffle" (because I'm too busy and lazy to make playlists). These are the first 5 songs it played:

New Year's Day - U2 - War
Consume - Scars of Tomorrow - Demo
The Levee's Gonna Break - Bob Dylan - Modern Times
Three Times a Lady - Cloud Cult - They Live On the Sun
Break The Curse - xDisciplex A.D. - The Revelation

Governors of Illinois have a great track record.

1921-1929: Len Small - Indicted for embezzlement. Acquitted (four of the jurors got state jobs after the trial)
1961-1968: Otto Kerner, Jr. - Three years in prison for bribery, conspiracy and perjury
1973-1977: Daniel Walker - Eighteen months served of a seven year sentence for fraud
1999-2003: George Ryan - Six and a half years for racketeering and fraud
2003-Present: Rod Blagojevich - Indicted on fraud and bribery charges. Hasn't been convicted, but damn is it funny as hell listening to what he says on the tapes.

"I’ve got this thing and it’s f--king golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for f--kin' nothing. I’m not gonna do it. And, and I can always use it. I can parachute me there."

I went to the Tamale Festival today. I had a traditional pork tamale; a blue corn with grilled chicken and habaneros tamale; a beef with roasted garlic tamale; a shrimp tamale; and, an apple tamale. O so good.

I now have a head ache and I don't know why.

I had my wisdom teeth taken out this morning. I haven't been myself all day. So I wrote a lot about the issues in the Presidential campaign and ended up not voting for any candidate in any race (except one seat on the school board). I did vote on the ballot initiatives.

I was just reading an article in a magazine of the 50 best albums of all time. I also have the Rolling Stone 500 best albums book. Basically I'm an expert on" top album" lists.

I think they're all very subjective. Of course this is the only way to judge music, but I think they're out of touch with my generation. They all talk about albums nostalgically. An album was the first album to introduce them to psychedelia, drugs, sex, or whatever. They spent long nights wearing the grooves out on their LPs. It was exciting.

Thing is, everything is exciting to the young. When you hear the kids these days talking about movies they think Transformers is a work of creative genius. Have you heard the popular bands these days?

40 years from now when today's kids write their 50 best albums of all time, I can only imagine American Idiot ending up on that list. I can't image any American Idol will ever be on that list.

It amuses me, but it also makes me depressed. The fact that two grown, mature men and their intelligent cronies, are acting like children. What's worse is they're both vying for the most powerful position in the world.

John McCain and his side are using this silly inference about someone Barack Obama met a few times to call into question ... I'm not sure what they're inferring. They say, "Nobody cares about an old, washed up terrorist." If nobody cares, why bring it up!? Because, "We know there is more to their relationship than Senator Obama is claiming." So they're calling him a liar? Yes. "It's about time Barack Obama came clean with the American public about his relationship with William Ayers."

So they're subtly inferring that Barack Obama is a terrorist sympathizer, and claiming he's not truthful about it. An outrageous claim because they don't have evidence there is more, they're just claiming there is and Barack is lying about it. But if there was more, wouldn't it be in the public interest for McCain to explain what's it is? No, he'd rather just throw it out there claiming it's about Barack's transparency.

One politician calling another one a liar. Amazing! You don't do that because then it opens yourself up to criticism for your lies. Like when McCain said he was going to run a respectable campaign, they would not run a negative campaign, and negativity would not come from their side at all. Lie! When he "suspended" his campaign to solve the credit crisis. Lie. And that's just the last few months.

And then out comes Senator Obama calling McCain, in essence, a "chicken." Really? He said Senator McCain made claims about him but didn't have the guts to "say it to my face." What is this, high school? Senator Biden took his jacket off while saying, "In my neighborhood, if you have something to say to a man you say it to his face." Was he threatening John McCain with that gesture? Maybe it was just hot, but it sure looked like you wanted to beat him up.

So the stock market lost $2.5-trillion in the last seven days, and these gentlemen are talking about lies and cowardice. You know who's not a coward? Hugo Chavez. He came to New York and stood in the same podium George W. Bush did and said he still smelled the sulfur. Now that's balls! He doesn't lie either, he said he would boot the US ambassador from Venezuela - and he did. The point I'm making is that it's the policies that matter, not the personality.

Maybe voters in America are stupid. Maybe that's why Presidential candidates can't use language higher than a 5th-grade level without being accused of elitism. I have hope that voters take this more seriously, but more than likely they'll vote for the guy who "looks presidential." That means you can have a beer with him, and he makes tough choices. Sounds like most of the guys I know.

Good ol' Woody Guthrie.

Christ for President lyrics

Let's have Christ our President
Let us have him for our king
Cast your vote for the Carpenter
That you call the Nazarene

The only way we can ever beat
These crooked politician men
Is to run the money changers out of the temple
Put the Carpenter in

O It's Jesus Christ our President
God above our king
With a job and a pension for young and old
We will make hallelujah ring

Every year we waste enough
To feed the ones who starve
We build our civilization up
And we shoot it down with wars

But with the Carpenter on the seat
Way up in the Capital town
The USA would be on the way
Prosperity Bound!

I seem to have skipped this over before. I've read Romans 1 a bunch of times, and I've heard it taught on over and over. Romans 2 is the point Paul is getting to by bringing up the sins in the first chapter. He says, "for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things." (v1) But then I hit verse 4. This hit me.

"Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God's kindness leads you toward repentance?"

Contempt for God's character when we judge others. Ouch.

A lot of Republicans have been deflecting the criticism of McCain's comment, "fundamentals of our economy are strong." They have been blaming the people who bought mortgages without the ability to pay. But this is not the cause of this thing. I'm not trying to make this a partisan issue though, I'm trying to find out who really is at fault.

Here is a brief explanation of the problem: The banks have used predatory lending practices to create money out of thin air. Because money is not tangible anymore but simply credit, they spent credit on mortgages. They were bought by investment firms on credit. They were insured by the insurance companies on credit, and then resold over and over again on money market speculation to make more and more money. When the housing prices fell, so did the value of this credit and investors saw these investments were worth nothing.

The biggest problem here is speculation. The same problem that caused oil to go up. Not only did they spend credit, they were spending future credit based on speculation of what their credit would be worth in the future. When the future becomes today and the credit is not worth that much, they are now in debt to themselves.

The other fork is they were giving out loans to create more speculation to earn more money when they shouldn't have. While some conservatives are blaming the people who bought the houses, these people couldn't have bought them if the banks were marketing and selling the idea of getting into a home with no money down. They gave misleading loans with adjustable rates because they got even more greedy. And then they bundled these at-risk into securities and annuities which should have very little risk.

So the problem we're facing now is the bankers had speculated their debt would have so much worth today when it doesn't have any worth at all. This "bail out" is a misnomer, it is really price fixing, or price protection. They want to dump money into the market to make these useless security's value actually worth what was speculated.

This is a problem. Speculating on the money markets is essentially inflation (creating more credit than there is money in the market). The Fed wants to basically print $700-billion out and flood the market. This is inflation again. You don't solve inflation with more inflation. We're going to make the dollar very weak, and the purchasing power of the USD will drop once again. Canada's dollar is going to be worth more than ours!

We don't have to print this money out, we could borrow it. But who will lend us the money? China?

Foreign banks are buying our weakened banks, I say let them continue. If a bank has any future value whatsoever another bank with money should capitalize by buying them up. Barclay's bought Lehman Brothers. Banc of America bought Meryll Lynch. The market will correct itself. The deregulation crowd should stick to their guns on this issue and not socialize debt and privatize profits. But they should concede and fix the market so it works with real dollars and not speculative dollars. The gold standard maybe?

I don't think I have the solutions, please I'm not that full of myself. I'm not an expert on economics. But what I know is it is the fault of Wall Street, and they should suffer for their own mistakes instead of sucking money out of taxpayers to maintain their decadent lifestyles until they can find a new job. When a small business owner makes a bad investment, they live with it, they take the hit and rebuild. We need to let them fail, but we also need to make sure they don't take everyone else down with them.

Imagine what would happen if the Church didn't just tithe their money. Perhaps they wouldn't see their tithe as a buffer between them and actual service.

What would happen if every parishioner tithed their time to the Lord's work? We work 40-hour weeks. Give a tithe of 4 hours in service. Clean up the building grounds, mow the lawn, volunteer at the crisis birth center. Imagine putting just 4 hours a week into something like cutting hair or doing nails at a hospice, signing songs with homeless, or working to help the field laborers earn fair wages.

A congregation of just 100 would have 400 hours of labor at their disposal every week. And a church of 1500 would have a whopping 6000 hours of labor!

Perhaps we should motivate pastors to preach this kind of tithing instead of the money-centered tithe they teach now.

Give gladly out of your needs! Give joyously, not begrudgingly! Rejoice in your deeds!