I Am No Longer Non-Partisan

When I registered to vote, I registered as an independent. I think that this was largely because my parents were independent. Looking back on it, I consider myself a liberal republican. For most of my adult life, I have considered myself an utterly non-partisan independent.

This has changed.

With the blockage of the health care bill for 9/11 first providers, the republicans have gone from being a good party to being a bought-and-paid for party to being an EVIL party.

They blocked this health care bill simply to muscle through the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

Even if they pass this when they come back into session, it will be too late. People will suffer because of their blockage of this bill. People will crumble financially because of their blockage of this bill. People will DIE because of their blockage of this bill.

I will never again support the republican party or a republican candidate until I start hearing some sincere repentance for this, and I urge all of my brothers and sisters of conscience to do the same.

The republican party should be ashamed of itself. Republican politicians should be ashamed of themselves for associating with this diseased party. Anyone who voted republican in the last election should be ashamed of themselves for voting for this diseased party.

I usually end these things with "peace", but I… I just CAN'T this time. Republican candidates have been using 9/11 to scare people into voting for them since 2002… George W. Bush even used images from the 9/11 attacks in his 2004 reelection ads. This is pathetic enough. But now that they had the opportunity to do something positive for 9/11, they refused so that they could enrich themselves and their rich rat-bastard friends.

It's time to kill the American republican party until it gets it's head out of Phil Knight's ass.

Randal

The More Things Change....

Found myself in a conversation yesterday with a woman about a garment made in Mexico. Her comment was that maybe that would keep THEM there instead of coming here. (THEM, presumably, being Mexicans.) My first problem with this is that if we don't figure out that there is no THEM, but only US, and right quick, our world is going to become a more unpleasant place to live pretty damned soon.

I told her that since my father's people had immigrated here that I couldn't say that immigration is a bad thing. She responded that America NEEDED immigrants when my father's people came here.

I hate to burst her bubble, and yours if you believe that, but there has ALWAYS been an anti-immigration sentiment in the US. At least, let's say, since the time of the founding fathers. What changes is the group that is suffering the bias. For instance, at the time of the founding fathers, it was Eastern Europeans and Germans that Americans wanted to keep out. This can also be read as "Jews". Up until probably fifty or seventy-five years ago, if you said that someone was a "Russian" or "Polish", what you meant was "Jewish".

What really pissed her off, though, was my observation that, when my father's people came here a century and a half or so, the bias was against the Irish. Anti-Irish laws, similar to later Jim Crow laws, or the anti-Mexican law that Arizona tried to pass recently, were being passed in several cities. This was during "Black 47". I don't know if you know this or not, but Ireland is actually the only country in the world whose population has decreased. This is because the British were forcing the Irish to ship out all of the food that they grew to England except for the potatoes, which the English hadn't really developed a taste for at that time. So the Irish had potatoes and a few scraps of other foods. In 1847 (Black 47), a blight attacked the potato crop, wiping out more than 75% of the Irish potato crop. This is what we now incorrectly call the "Potato Famine". As a result, a huge percent of Ireland's population left the country, many of them coming to America.

And again, the backlash against the Irish was largely religious. Many of the Irish who came to America were both poor and Catholic, and so the good Protestant Americans didn't want the "Shanty Papist Irish" here.

She coldly responded that SHE was Irish and stalked off. So the truth is that 150 years ago, her ancestors were in the same position that the Mexicans are now, and I think that didn't sit very well with her.

Think about it.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

It's Still Wrong...

It really bothers me that not doing anything wrong has become associated with not getting caught in America today. With all of the talk since the Clinton administration about America's "morals" it really bothers me that we've lost our moral center so badly that we've turned into a nation of Bart Simpsons. "I didn't do it, nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything."

Wrong… is STILL wrong. Regardless if anyone saw you doing it. It's still wrong. What the hell ever happened to doing right simply BECAUSE IT IS RIGHT?

I write this, because I saw a film clip the other day of Kathy Lee Gifford when she "discovered" (yeah… right…) that her branded line of clothes at K-mart was being manufactured by children in Chinese sweatshops for pennies a day. The nation was outraged… so she was sorry. Boo fucking hoo. It is my belief that she was NOT sorry that children were being enslaved to line her pockets…. I'm pretty sure that she KNEW about that and was okay with it. It is my belief that she is sorry that she GOT CAUGHT.

And now, think about us. Think about the buying American public. We were collectively outraged that Kathy Lee Gifford's clothes were being made by child slaves. How dare they. You can't buy Kathy Lee Gifford clothes anymore, because that wicked witch was profiting from the enslavement of children.

So why do we tolerate all of the other junk that's made by Chinese slave children? BECAUSE THE COMPANIES HAVEN'T GOTTEN CAUGHT. We willingly close our eyes to this so that we can have our cheap shit. Which means, as near as I can tell, that we are economically willing to smilingly slit our own throats en masse to insure that a few Americans remain very, very rich while the rest of us struggle to get paycheck to paycheck and live off the sweat of enslaved Chinese children.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

DVD Review: Superman/Shazam: The Return of Black Adam

I was REALLY looking forward to this DVD. I mean REALLY. Like I'm looking forward to Harry Potter and Green Lantern really.

Imagine my disappointment, then, when I was finally able to watch this train wreck.

Let me start by talking about Captain Marvel. (And yes - the hero's name is Captain Marvel - NOT Shazam.) Cap first appeared in Fawcett Publications "Whiz Comics # 2" in February, 1940. In 1953, DC forced Fawcett to stop publishing Captain Marvel, claiming that it was a copyright infringement - they claimed that the character was an infringement of Superman. Personally, I think that has always been a miscarriage of justice, because aside from some surface and power similarities, the two characters are almost nothing alike. In 1972, DC was able to gain the rights to the Marvel family, and has tried several times to revive them, including the unfortunate way that most people know Captain Marvel - from the campy, 1970's TV series.

DC Showcase was a (now-defunct) comic book series that DC used to spotlight new and minor characters starting in 1956. Probably best known for introducing the most famous incarnation of The Flash in issue # 4 and ushering in the "silver age" of comics, the title was cancelled in 1970, and then enjoyed another brief run from 1977 to 1978. DC is now reviving this as a series of shorts on their DVD's. Each episode focuses on one DC hero (except for this one which features both Cap and Superman). Each is around 20 minutes long, about the same length as any given episode of one of their animated series. The first four have focused on Jonah Hex, Green Arrow, The Specter and now Cap and Superman. All four of these are featured on this DVD.

I have always been a DC guy. Batman and Superman are my boys. Lately, Captain Marvel has joined them as they have allowed the character to become a little darker and more complex. Let's just say that this short DOESN'T highlight the new depth for the character, although he's not quite as goofy as he was in the 1970's TV show.

One terrific thing that DC is doing with all of its animated features on DVD is to include selected episodes from their TV series that are related in some way to the feature. This one includes an episode from the Batman animated series featuring Jonah Hex, an episode from Batman: The Brave and the Bold featuring The Specter, and two episodes of Justice League Unlimited focusing on Green Arrow and Captain Marvel. (The last of these, by the way, is a vastly superior Superman/Cap story to the feature.)

THE GOOD: Seeing Black Adam. Adam is a rich, complex character who was used to terrific effect in the DC comics miniseries 52. This series featured a year without Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. The series focused about equally on Booster Gold, The Question and Black Adam.

Adam is another to whom the wizard Shazam gave the powers of the gods to be protector of the Earth. The powers went to his head, however, and he decided that rather than just be ruler of his little nation of Khandak, he should be ruler of the world. Because of this, Shazam sent him to the far side of the galaxy, from which it took Adam five thousand years to return to Earth. For some reason that I've never been able to figure out, the artists always show him with pointed ears like Spock.

My one real problem with the way that the character is portrayed here is that several times he is seen standing on the ground, which Adam, in his arrogance, never does. He's always shown flying or hovering a few inches above the ground.

THE BAD: The story. It sucks. It's basically Superman and Captain Marvel beating the crap out of Black Adam for twenty minutes. Also, the physics are wonky, but I'm used to that in superhero films. About the only one to get them even half-right was Hancock.

THE UGLY: The animation in this short isn't great, but the biggest problem is Fawcett city. It's empty. In the aerial shots of the city, there are no cars and no pedestrians. Aside from some empty cars that Black Adam chucks at Captain Marvel, we don't see a car until about 3/4 of the way through the film.

Also, I wish that they hadn't revived Talky Tawney, Captain Marvel's talking tiger sidekick. At least they had the good taste to simply call him "Tawney" and have him be a REAL tiger instead of walking on two legs and wearing clothes.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

Election Post-Mortem

Okay, so we gave the republicans the wheel back. So where do we go from here?

I've got to tell you quite honestly, I don't really give that much of a crap about which party is in control. I think that they're both corrupt… with the dems maybe having proven themselves slightly less corrupted than the republicans.

I do have to tell you, though… anyone who think that putting the republicans in power is going to do anything about our budget mess is in for a somewhat rude awakening. We've been sinking between one and one and a quarter trillion dollars in the hole since 2003, and I'll bet my whole allowance that it'll continue for the next two years. Especially since it seems almost a given that the tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans will continue unabated. You know why I say that the debt problem will continue? Because we haven't done anything to address the core issues. We blindly replaced one party with the other without bothering to think about WHY we're digging ourselves deeper and deeper into a hole, let alone trying to fix it. In this respect, Americans kind of remind me of Alaskans. Alaskans get this thing called a "Permanent Fund Dividend Check". Every Alaskan gets one based on the state's oil revenue. You know… Sarah Palin took credit for it, even though it's been going on since she and I were trying to figure out high school (her in Wasilla, me in Chugiak just up the street). After we had received these checks for several years, Alaska (which has no income tax) found itself in something of a budget crunch. So two proposals went before the Alaska legislature: kill the Permanent Fund Dividend, or institute an income tax. One of the local news agencies did a man-on-the-street type segment on this, and the answer of one woman really stuck with me. She said "I don't really want an income tax… but I don't really want to lose my Permanent Fund check either." No. She just wants things to get better all by themselves.

I'm not even saying that things are that bad nationally. We just have to be more involved in what our government is doing to help cut the fat. Giving the president a line-item veto or eliminating earmarks altogether would be good. Calling our troops home from Germany, Japan and Korea and closing the bases in those countries would help. Legalizing and taxing pot. Not only would that give us additional revenue, but how much would that save us in incarceration costs? Instituting all of John Boehner's Social Security reforms (except privatization) would help.

I do have a fear with the republicans back in power, though. I am afraid that we're going to return to the late nineties. You remember the late nineties? When the republicans spent 700 million of our money persecuting the president for no reason and to no end? I think that's going to happen again.

Why?

Because Darrell Issa, whom I usually like, said that he wants to see a hearing every day on the actions of the Obama administration. How much is THAT going to cost? And lets face it, you may not like what Obama's done, but, just like President Clinton, he hasn't committed an impeachable offense.

And Mitch McConnell, speaking to the Heritage Foundation, said that he wanted the republican's primary focus over the next two years to be to insure that the president doesn't have a second term.

Really, folks. Honest to God. Don't we have more important things to worry about right now?

Peace.

Rev. Randal

Veteran's Day 2010

Is it just me, or do people intentionally misunderstand each other simply for the purpose of being pissed off about something?

I saw a cake yesterday that said "Happy Veterans Day!" and asked the person buying the cake if it wouldn't be better to honor veterans EVERY day, instead of picking one day out of the year that most people really don't give much of a crap about. She got all huffed off, of course. I mean, what fun would life be if you couldn't be someone's victim? But let's face it… to most Americans that work in places that are closed on federal holidays, it's an extra day off… to most of the rest of America, it's a day without mail.

Veteran's Day is, to me, like Valentine's day. It's a day that we pick out of the year to treat an important person as if they really WERE important, so that we don't have to be bothered with it through the rest of the year. Like with Valentine's day… if you don't treat your lover like that all year, then you don't really deserve them.

So I wanted to take a look at Veteran's day, starting with this idiotic "Happy Veteran's Day!" cake. Way to reduce national service to a greeting card sentiment. A lot of vets that I know AREN'T happy, and there are reasons for that. We generally don't treat them very well. Of course, that's one of the reasons for "Happy Veteran's Day!" So that we don't have to address the very serious problems with the ways that we treat our vets. Kind of like the Bush administration shrilling "SUPPORT THE TROOPS!" every time that they opened their mouths, while at the same time cutting veteran health care at every turn, throwing them into a pointless, unnecessary war and significantly undersupplying them in the field.

That's another problem that I have with this… using our veterans and service people as a shield to cover the wrong-doings of the previous administration. Questioning the war or questioning Bush's motivation was equated with questioning or not supporting the troops. This went to the point where, when Viet Nam Veterans for Peace was formed, right-wing mouthpiece and Bush apologist Rush Limbaugh referred to the vets in the organization as "phony" vets. (For the record, Mr. Limbaugh did not serve. He was listed 4-F because of a "pilonidal cyst"… a cyst on his ass.)

Also, for the record, I did not serve in the military. I was in R. O. T. C. for four years and then denied military service for health issues. When I tried to join, the military doctor listened to my heart four separate times (everyone else only once). He finally denied me service, claiming it was because I sometimes walked in my sleep as a child. Years later, a sonogram was done on my heart revealing a leaking ventricle. I realized then that the military doctor had heard something that he didn't like in my heart, but didn't have the proper tools at his disposal to diagnose it.

Also in the interest of full discosure, here is my family's military pedigree, as far as I know…

My grandfather was in the Pacific with the Navy in WWII.

An uncle was in Korea.

My father was in the Air Force between Korea and Viet Nam. He was in Bermuda during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Two uncles were in Viet Nam, one didn't return. (Another uncle, who is a gung-ho Bush and Iraq war supporter, didn't serve. Why does this seem to be such a common thread?)

My older brother was in the Army.

A nephew was stationed in Kuwait during the current Iraq operation.

I, as a said, was in Naval R. O. T. C. for four years and then denied military service.

Support the troops, people. Yeah, they're not all heroes. They're not even all worthwhile human beings. Some of them are complete shits. But honor their SERVICE. Honor the fact that they had the guts to join the military, where their lives may have been put in danger, whether they actually WERE or not.

That means don't make them go die for oil. Give them housing and health care. Some areas give vets tax exemptions. What a great idea. Instead of giving tax cuts to men and women who inherited wealth, how about we give them to the men and women who served their country instead?

And most importantly, if you meet someone who served, shake their hand and thank them for their service. Regardless of how you feel about any particular campaign that the government threw them in to, let them know how much you appreciate the fact that they served and protected you.

Let EVERY day be Veteran's day.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

Democrats are Going to Lose

I keep hearing it. From the democrats, from the republicans, from Faux news, The Daily Show and Real Time With Bill Maher.

Why? Why are the democrats going to lose?

Personally, I think that they stand a pretty good chance, especially in areas where crazies are on the republican ticket, like Delaware. I think that sane republican voters are either going to have to go democrat or go home.

And I'm not saying this out of any great love of the democrats. They've proven over the last two years what craven pussies they are when it comes to pushing their agenda. And the way that they're backing away from the few good things that they've managed to do over the last two years in order to pander to crazy voters really bothers me.

But.

Because Americans are so brainwashed into thinking that they have let a political party do their thinking for them, the so-called "third party movement" (there are really about a hundred political parties in the US) is, at the moment, dead in the water. So really, as much as I hate to say it, it really does come down to a "lesser of two evils" situation.

But you've really gotta admire the audacity of what the fuck that the republicans are pulling. With ad campaigns like "What? You guys haven't managed to fix in less than two years what it took us six to eight years to fuck up? Let us back in. After all, we broke it… who know better how to fix it?" Hand to God, America, if you put these pinheads back in office, I'm losing what little faith I have in you.

I'm going to the polls Tuesday and, as much as it pains me to admit it, simply voting a straight democratic ticket. I hate to do that, but the republicans have lost their way so badly that I feel I have no other choice. The dems at least TALK a good liberal game, even if they are unable or unwilling to back it up. Not one democrat out there is talking about legalizing pot, legalizing gay marriage, aggressively going after "don't ask, don't tell", or strengthening women's abortion rights.

Oh, and on another note. About the deficit. It has gone up a trillion dollars per year since 2003 roughly. Guess what? Next year it's expected to go up about another trillion dollars. You know why? BECAUSE ONCE YOU START A BOULDER ROLLING, IT'S HARD TO STOP, LET ALONE REVERSE. If we had president Sarah Palin and every seat in both chambers filled with wig-wearing tea party crazies, it would STILL go up about a trillion dollars next year. IT'S GOING TO TAKE TIME TO CHANGE IT! And I hate to get on the bandwagon of "anyone who doesn't support Obama is a racist", but why else are you guys suddenly pissed about this when it's been going on for eight years? The only other reason that I can think of is because he's a democrat and honestly… I'd prefer to think that you're racist. At least THAT requires some individual thought.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

Buy My E-Book!

Probably the most exciting thing in my life right now is that one of my books has been published by Barnes and Noble at www.bn.com as an e-book. It is the first of my young adult novels called "Strange Middle School # 1: The New Kids" and can be purchased here http://search.barnesandnoble.com/books/e/2940011813344/?itm=60&USRI=new+kids
to be read on your Ipod Touch, Ipad, Android device, e-reader or PC. Hopefully this will help my goal of making my living with my writing.

Peace

Rev. Randal

Movie Review: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Let me start this review by saying that i am against remakes and sequels in general. With few exceptions, there are few or no reasons to do this. There are exceptions, such as Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong and Tron: Legacy. With the Jackson film, he had the opportunity to bring the Kong story to life in a way that those of us who grew up loving the original film could only imagine, and with the leaps in computer technology over the last thirty years, a sequel to Tron was inevitable.

So when i heard about a remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, a horror film that i love and that legitimately gave me nightmares after the first time that i saw it, i shuddered... and not in a good way. Especially after the terrible remakes of House of Wax and Friday the Thirteenth.

THEN i heard that Jackie Earle Hayley, who played Rorschak to perfection in Watchmen, was going to play Freddy Krueger. I thought that if anyone could pull it off, Hayley could. And did.

THE GOOD: Hayley's performance, to start. He's probably the only actor who could have picked Freddy Krueger up and run with him, given his own performance without consciously or unconsciously aping Robert Englund.

They also stayed amazingly true to the original story. This time around Freddy is a child molester instead of a child murderer, which, if anything, makes the story even creepier. But they were smart enough not to mess with a good thing too much. Some of the lines from the original film ("I'm your boyfriend now...") made it through.

THE BAD: I don't usually use sports metaphors because i don't like sports or watch a lot of them, but i'm going to do it here. Imagine watching a football game where one team was comprised of Peyton Manning and a really good high school football team. That's kind of what it was like watching this. Hayley's performance as Freddy was so above and beyond any of the supporting performances that it overshadowed them. When Freddy's off the screen, you are just dying for him to get back on. Although the kids' performances are okay, you kind of start feeling like they're whining after a while, and honestly can't wait for Freddy to off them.

THE UGLY: Or, really, the potential ugly. The sequels. As the original franchise makers discovered, there's really only so much that you can do with this story. The sequels got progressively worse until the last film of the original franchise, The New Nightmare. In that one, Freddy started killing people on the set of a new Nightmare movie, and he was eight feet tall and scary as hell. If you haven't seen that one, watch it. It's really good. And i fear the same for this franchise. A movie makes a gajillion dollars and sequels are inevitable. I only hope that the filmmakers here are smart enough to do MAYBE two and then end it well, before they are reduced to Freddy doing knock-knock jokes like the first franchise.

Speaking of sequels, the cinematic genius/whore who made the first film, Wes Craven, is in the process of releasing Scream 4. I wonder if they're ever going to get tired of beating money out of that particular dead horse.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

Waste

I think that we can all agree that we want our government to stop wasting money, right? Agreed?

Here's the problem...

What YOU consider waste, I may not consider waste. What I consider waste, YOU may not consider waste.

For instance, when Bill Clinton closed military bases that were redundant or useless, all that i heard from the right was how Clinton was weak on defense. Same refrain when someone talks about taking our troops out of Germany and Korea and Japan. I considered that cutting waste.

When i hear "universal health care for Americans", i hear an idea that will strengthen America. The right wing hears "waste" and "giving to those who won't work" and "welfare".

Look at it another way. Let's say that you hear about a government program that costs 2 million dollars per year, the objective of which is to set a clock in a government office. It gets off by one second per year, and it costs us two million dollars per year to have someone reset that clock by one second per year. Waste, right? Except then you discover that this program provides fifty jobs to your community. Is it still waste?

I think that what we need to do is to depoliticize this idea of waste before we can start cutting it.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

2010 Vacation Day Three: Bozeman, MT to Rapid City, SD

Okay, so the Rainbow Motel's continental breakfast turned out to be donuts and coffee.

Not a bad little place, all in all. Beds are pretty comfortable, and it's quiet.

On the road again.

Let me tell you a quick something about me and this truck. I am six feet two inches tall and around 200 lbs, depending on what day you weigh me on. Lately I've pretty consistently been between 200 and 205. Mostly legs.

The truck that I rented from budget has a seat that is scooted almost all the way forward and cannot be scooted back, because if you do scoot it back, it runs into the front wall of the cargo unit. The upshot? Cramped legs.

After a couple of hours on the road today, the combination of cramped legs, squinting into the sun for several hours and a long road with no change of scenery or of speed limit or even any CURVES for hours on end started taking its toll and I started nodding off.

I HATE when that happens.

So finally, when I reached a rest stop, I got out and did a couple laps around the truck. This seems to have done the trick, and made the rest of the drive okay.

We made it to Rapid City, SD and got checked into our hotel by about six. Debated going to Wall Drug or one of the monuments tonight, but decided to just eat and rest and do them tomorrow.

My plan is to do that stuff tomorrow, then drive for five or six hours before getting off the road for the night. Then, on Thursday, home after about nine and a half hour's driving time (really ten hours or so on the road).

Our hotel tonight is the Foothills Inn for the amazing price of $39 for one night. Seems pretty nice. They have the standard continental breakfast, but they also gave us coupons for free sausage egg and cheese sandwiches for breakfast, so that'll be cool.

Tomorrow – Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse, and possibly Wall Drug.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

2010 Vacation, Day two: Cle Elum, WA to Bozeman, MT via Tokio, Moscow and Amsterdam

Tokio (WA), Moscow (ID) and Amsterdam (MT) that is.

Got up this morning feeling much more well-rested than I went to bed. Since i'm an insomniac, this is not always the case.

Stayed at Stewart Lodge in Cle Elum. Nice, older little motel. Help was friendly, Wifi had a good strong signal. The continental breakfast included donuts, muffins, biscuits, cereal and waffles. They also had coffee, cocoa, tea or two types of juice to choose from.

Had a little trouble finding the entrance to the eastbound freeway (it was about two miles from the westbound freeway), but once we got on the road all was well.

The biggest problem that I had on this journey was discovering how much it's going to cost to keep this beast of a truck rolling. $75 per tank! So today I put $150 in the tank.

Saw the aftermath of an accident in the westbound lanes of the freeway today involving at least three passenger vehicles and a semi. From the looks of one of the vehicles, i'm betting that it was a fatality accident.

Spending the night tonight at the Rainbow Motel in Bozeman. So far, the upside is that it's an old motel with cinder block walls, so no noise penetrates at all. The downsides include a miserably weak wi-fi connection, and a heater that doesn't really so much HEAT as WARM. It's more of a warmer.

Okay, going to bed.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

2010 Vacation, Day One: Fort Smith, AR to Seattle, WA; Seattle, WA to Cle Elum, WA

So, here's vacation...

Fly from Arkansas to Seatac, drive Budget rent a truck from Seattle to Arkansas via Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse. For those who don't know, my dad died from Emphysema last April. My mom has always wanted to see these two things, so I figured that I'd bring her with and she could see them for the first time in her life.

So... my younger brother was bringing me to the airport this morning. We had to be there at ten to five to get our six twenty flight. Problem? Getting up at 3:30. Didn't get to bed until about 11 last night, and then slept badly all night... unfamiliar room, unfamiliar bed and the neighbor's pet WOLF howling on and off all night (I am not kidding).

So, after a good solid two hours or so of sleep, my alarm went off, and I got up more or less bright eyed and kind of bushy tailed. Excited to fly again (first time in nine years), excited to be back in Washington. My kid brother... not so much. He slept until a little after four and still looked like he could use another several hours. I also realized that I had forgotten to write down the address of the rent-a-car place. No prob, I thought. I'll Google them on my cell phone at the airport and get the address.

So we get to the airport, brother drops us off, we go in and I scope out the check-in procedure. Went back to my mom and discovered that she had forgotten the letter from her doc that would allow her to carry medicine and oxygen concentrator on the plane. So my poor, tired bro had to turn around and come back. Fortunately, he hadn't gotten far. He brings it back, obviously anxious to get back to bed.

Check-in goes smoothly, 35 minute flight to Memphis goes smoothly. Guy meets us at the gate at Memphis airport with a wheelchair and takes us straight to the gate for our connecting flight. Check in goes smoothly, flight was... simply amazing, for someone who loves to fly but hates what the government has done to it. We flew so close to Mount Rainier (highest peak in contiguous United States) that it pretty much filled my window.

When I was a kid, and I tried to smile, I would wrinkle up my eyes. Felt like a smile, but apprently didn't LOOK like a smile to anyone else, who would always ask why I never smiled. So I watched other people smile and practiced it in the mirror until I developed one that didn't creep people out. Not too much, anyway. So I smile my good fake smile when I'm happy so people know that I am.

I realized, as I saw Mount Rainier and knew that I was home again... I was smiling for real. And I couldn't stop.

When we got on the ground in Washington, things went a little wonky for a bit.

All was going smoothly until my mom ran out of air when we tried to walk from luggage to the cab stand. It took them about a half an hour to find a wheelchair and someone to push it for us. Then, I found not one but THREE Budget rent-a-trucks in Renton. The telephone numbers for all three turned out to be disconnected. So as we're in the cab on our way to none of us really knew where, I finally got Budget's 800 number and got the address.

Then things went smoothly again. Went to the Costco location that I worked at locally before moving to Missouri, and was heartened by how many people not only remembered me, but expressed warm affection. Got to introduce my mom to some of the guys that love and consider some of my best friends there. My mom got comments ranging from “Randal's a good guy” to my favorite, from my friend Sean, who said “You've raised an interesting man there.” Backatcha, Sean. I miss talking to you. Got a case of water so we don't have to worry about finding any on the road, and Cattle Drive Chili con Carne, which we don't sell in the midwest. Delicious stuff. If your local Costco doesn't carry it, request it. It rocks.

Took my mom past the last apartment that I lived in here to show to her, and then headed for the storage unit. Only took me about 30 minutes to load up the truck, but, I'm sad to say, I lost a treasured possession. About nine years ago my friend Tami gave a neon sculpture of the Space Needle to me. Over the years, and through many moves, I struggled to keep it in one piece and succeeded. Today, as I moved a box, my neon Space Needle crashed to the concrete floor. It will be missed.

So we got on the road, me still feeling full of piss and vinegar. I figured four or five hours on the road and we'd be in Spokane, where we'd spend the night.

That was, of course, until the lack of sleep and long day caught up with me. So as I type this, we are at the Stewart Lodge in Cle Elum, Washington.

Peace.

Rev Randal

Strengthening America

The right wing gets pissed amazingly off when one of the left-leaning pundits dares to suggest that Americans are dumb. I personally tend to believe that we are not dumb, but rather breathtakingly, staggeringly ignorant and apathetic.

But, by the same token, with each generation being more pampered and privileged than the last, we are becoming intellectually weaker. With that comes in a drop in consideration for others that is amazingly dangerous for us as a society. I'm not proud of the fact that my generation is less intelligent and wise than my parent's generation, but I will admit. And the generation that now rules the world, the young people in their twenties and thirties, is even LESS intelligent and less wise. This is a troubling trend.

Think of it this way... and I don't apply this simply to my children's generation, but to my generation as well. A lot of this applies.

When it comes to food, we want the best and the healthiest and we want to pay as close to nothing as possible for it, and lose weight while we're eating it without doing any exercise.

We want the best schools, the best libraries, the best police force and firefighters and the best military on the planet, and we want it without paying any taxes.

We want to be able to text or talk on our cellphones wherever we want, including while driving, at the library, at the movies, in public restrooms, at restaurants and during sex, without anyone else getting pissed off about it or commenting on our conversation, which has also become (against their will) THEIR conversation.

We want America to be a strong nation, but want to do it without adequately educating our kids or providing food, housing or medical care to the less fortunate among us.

We have to change this trend, brothers and sisters. Mr. Bush, in one of his state of the union addresses, posed the question “Will we end well...?” Personally, I hope that we WON'T end, but we also can't survive and continue in the direction that we're going.

My parents worked hard to insure that I didn't inherit the prejudices that burdened them. I struggled not to pass on any bad attitudes that I had to my kids.

Educate yourselves. Educate your kids. Open your hearts, your minds and your wallets to help strengthen America, politically, physically, intellectually and emotionally.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

Book Review: Dirty Sexy Politics by Meghan McCain

This is Meghan McCain's account of what it was to follow her father John on the campaign trail in 2008. The majority of it takes place between the time that Sarah Palin is picked as his running mate and a few days after the election. It's not very dirty. It's also not very sexy.

THE GOOD: I like Meghan McCain, and, up until Karl Rove stole her father's brain in 2008, I liked him. I realize that, as a liberal, I'm not supposed to admit to liking conservatives, but I do. (For the record, I also like Ben Stein and P J O'Rourke.) I like to watch her interviews. I think that she's intelligent, forthright and cute as a bug. Not to mention a little sexy.

She also takes the republican party to task for its changes. Here are a couple of quotes from late in the book, when she addresses the changes in the party of both she and her father.

“The bedrock of the republican party is freedom of the individual. Not groupthink. Not hatred. Not moral codes that we are supposed to live up to.”

She talks about the republican party's belief that each individual should be able to decide for themselves. Not, as she puts it, “... not their party, not their government, not a religious movement or an angry radio host.”

On the last page of the book, she says “... when a political party starts to put itself in a box, it's not a box... it's a coffin.”

THE BAD: I like Meghan McCain, but she doesn't use the tools of the writer's trade very well. Her sentence structure is sometimes odd, and her turns of phrase are sometimes off.

Her biggest struggle seems to be with commas. God knows I have my own issues with commas, but can usually overcome them with a careful edit. Meghan seems to have aimed a fully-loaded comma gun at her book and pulled the trigger. So you wind up with sentences like “Just seeing him, like that, made me cry”, or “He is a grill master, and loves feeding people”.

I would recommend to Meghan that she either take a little more care with her tools if she rights another book, or pay a professional editor to do it for her. I enjoyed her book, but found it a little frustrating to read for this reason.

THE UGLY: I like Meghan McCain, but she seems to (perhaps understandably) be incapable of viewing her father as a man, rather than an icon. She points out how narrow the republican party has become without acknowledging the narrow stances that her father took in 2008 in order to gain their support. She talks about how badly Sarah Palin disrupted things, but refuses to give her father any blame for Palin's presence or for allowing her to take center stage from the time she joined the race onward.

I like you, Meghan. But your dad fucked things up in 2008. As Arianna Huffington put it during the presidential race, “We all have to come to the realization that the John McCain that we all loved in 2000 is dead.” Your dad SHOULD have been the republican nominee in 2000. Were he, I would have voted for him, he would have become president and, I think, the world would be a better place. Especially our little corner of it, America. If he had stuck by his moderate roots in 2008, been the same candidate that he was in 2000, instead of taking that weird, disturbing lurch to the right, had picked a moderate running mate, I think that he would have given Barack Obama a run for his money.

Sadly, he didn't.

Overall, I recommend the book. It's an easy, short read (less than 200 pages) and a lot of fun. Hopefully, republicans will read this book and return to its traditional values of individual freedom and limited government before it lets the narrowness of the religious right and tea party movement tear it apart.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

Negative Campaigning and Attacks

With yet another election upon us, I wanted to take a second to talk about negative campaigning.

In the 2008 presidential election, my mom said that one of the reasons that she didn't like either McCain or Obama was because they both used negative campaigning against their opponents. I was never clear on what she meant, and she was never able to articulate it beyond a “feeling” that Obama was going negative.

I think, in reviewing campaign ads and such, that I've figured out what she's interpreting as negative.

Obama did run ads saying that John McCain wanted to keep us in Iraq for a hundred years. He also ran ads saying that McCain was endorsed by Bush and voted with Bush 80% of the time.

These are not negative, although someone who dislikes Bush like my mom does would probably view them as such. These are simply making McCain run on his record.

When McCain called Obama a socialist, or questioned his birth in Hawaii... THIS is negative advertising.

Personally, I like an ad that's being run locally by one of our democratic senators seeking reelection. She's using a largely unedited piece from Faux News of all places, to show that her opponent takes money from lobbyists and was called (I think it was) the “Bail-out king” during the Bush bail-outs. Again, not negative advertising, just using his own honest record against him.

I'm also hearing a lot of noise from the right about how the media is “smearing” Christine O'Donnell, making her look stupid. You know how they're doing this? BY USING HER OWN WORDS. If you said it on the record then yes, it's going to come back to haunt you. If you say that masturbation equals adultery, but admit to “dabbling” in Satanism, then yes, that can be held against you. If you are campaigning for high office in a country that already has a SERIOUS science deficit, and are on the record saying that if evolution is true, you can't figure out why MONKEYS AREN'T STILL EVOLVING INTO HUMANS, that can be held against you.

(For the record... monkeys NEVER evolved “into” humans. Humans and monkeys share common ancestors. Also, you cannot observe this type of evolution. It takes at least thousands of years. We can observe the evolution of certain types of plants, viruses and animals because they have a much shorter life span than human beings, so we can see generations of these things. Including, but not limited to, the repeated evolution of the flu virus so that it can continue kicking our asses.)

Also, I just finished watching last week's episode of Bill Maher. Usually, he tries to have one liberal, one conservative, and one moderate. For some reason, last week he had one liberal and two conservatives. They repeatedly attacked the health care initiative and several other things, and he just sat there and took it like a bullied little girl, except for the occasional “that must be bullshit”. All that I can figure is that he must be sick or something because he's usually a fighter. So, for the record, let me fight back on his behalf.

To begin with, several weeks ago, he agreed to stop using the term “tea-baggers” and started using the more respectful “members of the tea party movement” or “tea partiers”. And yet, he just sat there while the conservatives referred to the health care initiative as “Obamacare”, without demanding the same respect.

Also, one of the conservatives brought up the case of one town hall meeting where a right-winger was physically assaulted. You know what? There are bad apples in every group. What about the video that shows a guy with MS in a wheelchair who supported the health care bill getting the shit kicked out of him by a bunch of right-wingers?

They also kept talking about supporters of the health care bill “shutting down” debate about the health care initiative. What about the right-wingers who CONSISTANTLY shut down town hall meetings by insisting on talking about non-existent “death panels”? Or by accusing Barney Frank and Obama of supporting “nazi” policies? I'm not going to say that it DIDN'T happen, only that this is a little like the pot calling the kettle a pot.

They also fell back on Faux news polls that show that seventy percent of “Americans” oppose health care. Funny how, when they were confronted with polls that showed that seventy percent of “Americans” opposed the mess in Iraq, their comment was that “polls don't matter”. Isn't it funny that when there's a republican president polls don't matter, but when there's a democratic president they suddenly do?

Peace.

Rev. Randal

Capitalism - Problems and Praise

I think that anyone who thinks that unfettered capitalism is a good thing has a very short memory and/or knowledge of history.

NO unfettered financial system works. We saw Russia fall to unfettered communism fifteen years ago, and now we're seeing America fall to unfettered capitalism.

You see, up until about 1980, capitalism was good for both American business and the American people. It worked well. The American dream was alive and well, people could make a living, even if one of them decided to be a house-spouse, and people got rich. Of course, at the time, “millionaire” was still something to brag about.

And yes... we had regulation.

Up until the first twenty years of this century, we tried our first experiment with unfettered capitalism, and it failed miserably for everyone but a few. We had child labor, sweatshops and unsafe working conditions. A few people got very, very rich and everyone else was plunged into a depression.

Over the years between the twenties and the mid seventies, we started seeing the government regulate business. Child labor laws, health and safety regulations, reasonable working hours and overtime laws. Under President Nixon, we saw anti-pollution laws enacted to protect the environment from corporate robber-barons. Under Ford and Carter, we saw a slew of anti-monopoly laws that broke up, among many others, A T & T, who we called “ma bell”. It was the only phone service available, so they could basically charge anything that they wanted.

For the men that valued money above all else, these was apparently the last straws.

Some believe that the election of Ronald Reagan was engineered by big business. I won't say one way or the other, because I don't know. But I will say that big business profited from the Reagan years while almost no one else did. They started overturning the anti-monopoly laws and the environmental laws. Because Joe Lunchbox had little real knowledge of these things, and couldn't see an immediate effect on THEM, there was no uproar. When they tried to change the labor laws that DID effect these people directly, there WAS an uproar, and the labor laws were barely scratched. So instead, behind our backs, laws were passed that made it profitable for companies to outsource jobs more than they ever had before.

Since then, we have seen one corporate-sponsored president after another trample our economy like Godzilla did Tokyo. In less than thirty years, we watched the results of this capitalism Godzilla completely destroy everything that we had built over the previous fifty.

Don't get me wrong on any of this. I'm not a communist and don't have more than a little leaning toward socialism. Again, just like capitalism, it really only works if it is tightly regulated and allows people to make money.

I like money. I have two books that I'm shopping around to agents right now and I hope that they sell and sell well, so that I can quit my day job and still live comfortably. Part of what I want to do with that money is buy apartment complexes and start some manufacturing businesses that will employ Americans fairly, so that they have THEIR shot at resurrecting the American dream. And yes, I will want a fair profit from these.

But that's part of the problem in modern-day America... a fair profit is no longer enough. Millionaire or even billionaires are no longer considered REALLY rich... we now heap our praise only on trillionaires. We oooh and aah over someone with a solid gold toilet or a ski-slope in their Arizona home, while many of us struggle to make it from week to week. We consider a politician with ten homes and God only knows how many cars a “regular joe” while we deride a college teacher and community organizer who made his first million two years before he was elected president as a snobbish elitist. And these mega-rich people have no compunction about putting a couple of million dollars into political campaigns to convince us that it's bad for America if we do anything that might reduce their annual income from eight billion dollars a year to (God forbid) five or even four billion. We're still struggling with health care reform which largely benefits the poor in our society. We're now, for some insane reason, debating whether or not we should extend Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy, or allow them to go back to a maximum cap of 39%. (For the record... during the period that many conservatives consider our “golden era”, the 1950's, the maximum tax rate was 91%.)

Brothers and sisters, we have to stop this. Stop buying items that are made in China unless it's something that you really need. Learn to live with less, unless you're willing to spend more to get these luxuries made in America and supporting our economy. This Christmas, for instance, live with the Christmas decorations that you have or buy only American-made decorations. You can find some every year at madeinusaforever.com.

After all, what would Jesus do? (He IS the reason for the season, remember.) I kind of think that I know what he WOULDN'T. He wouldn't support the mass enslavement of a culture in order to fulfill our own fetish for the gaudy.

Peace.

D69

TV Review: Bored to Death

Bored to Death is a self-indulgent and occasionally humorous comedy show on HBO. Jonathan Schwartzman plays Jonathan Ames (named after the show's creator, producer and co-writer), who's girlfriend dumps him prior to the show's beginning. So he does what every guy does in this situation: he takes out an ad on Craigslist... offering his services as a private eye. Theoretical hilarity ensues. I say “self-indulgent” because Ames is obviously the fantasy version of the show's creator. For instance, every woman he meets wants to sleep with him (despite being kind of a nebisshy, irritating little New Yorker.

THE GOOD: When the show is funny, it is very funny. It's exactly the kind of wry, dry humor that Schwartzman does so well. Zack Galifanakis as his unhappy, whiny cartoonist friend and Ted Danson as his perpetually stoned, up for anything boss also shine.

The real stand-out here, though is Olivia Thirlby as Ames' ex-girlfriend, Suzanne. She is beautiful and believable, and you really feel for her wanting to get back with Ames, who perpetually fucks it up.

THE BAD: Monologuing by Ames. When he's talking to someone, he comes up with these almost random monologues that have little or nothing to do with the plot at hand. This got much better toward the end of the first season, but I fear its recurrence. Imagine a detective novel written by Woody Allen on an off-day.

There are also plot elements that come in to play and then simply disappear with never another mention. For instance, in the first episode, a detective acquainted with Ames warns him that he'd better not hear of Ames doing this detective stuff anymore, and then simply vanishes, despite Ames being arrested in a later episode. Also, the next-to-the-last episode of the season concerns him trying to track down two lesbians who took his friend's sperm under the pretense of having a baby, and then selling the sperm to other lesbian couples. The episode ends with a "to be continued", but the story ISN'T continued. Instead, the final episode focuses on a fight between the magazine that he works for and representatives of the magazine GQ.

THE UGLY: Utterly unbelievable plots. Ames constantly gets himself in ridiculous situations that he wouldn't survive in real life. Yes, I know that it's “just” a TV show, but for my money, the believability of a TV show isn't based on how the plot would work in real life, but rather how the plot works within the context of the show. And the context of this show is apparently New York City in our world. And in that context, the plots on this show simply don't work.

Compared to most of the rest of the fare of pay-cable series, this is definitely near the bottom of the barrell. If Dexter or True Blood or The United States of Tara are Seinfeld, then Bored to Death is 1000 Ways to Die. Not bad, occasionally amusing, but not something that you really miss if you don't see an episode.

The second season of Bored To Death premiers on Sunday the 26th of September on HBO.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

Video Game Add-on Review: Resident Evil 5: Lost in Nightmare

For those unfamiliar, the first Resident Evil game came out in 1996 for the Playstation, and created a phenomenon among gamers, both for it's complex (if occasionally incomprehensible) story line and its graphic violence. It was followed by what I consider to be the best game of the series, Resident Evil 2. Then came Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, Resident Evil: Survivor (adapted from a Japenese Arcade game), Resident Evil: Dead Aim, and Resident Evil: Code Veronica. In 2002, the series went to the GameCube, with a prequel called Resident Evil 0 and a graphically-intensive remake of the original game.

For my money, that was the end of the series. At that point, it pretty much jumped from survival horror to action/adventure with Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 5, followed by the Wii rail-shooters Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles and Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles.

There have also been a series of (so far) four movies, with the first one being okay, the second being excellent, the third being pretty good and the fourth sucking rocks.

The basic plot of both the games and the movies is the battle of a handful of freedom fighters opposing the multi-national conglomerate The Umbrella Corporation. Gotta love that name for a conglomerate. While doing experiments in bio-weaponry for the US government, the corporation discovered the T virus which, among other things, turns people into flesh-craving zombies.

Lost In Nightmare is add-on content for Resident Evil 5. It can be downloaded from Xbox live for $4 or the Playstation 3 for $4.99. Because Playstation uses Blu-ray as its disc format, which has a storage capacity of 60 gigs, the “Gold” edition of Resident Evil 5 includes this add-on, as well as one other on the disc. Since Xbox uses standard DVD, with a storage capacity of less than 10 gigs, they can't do that.

It takes the original pair from Resident Evil, Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine, and puts them in a spooky mansion inhabited by monsters and filled with puzzles.

THE GOOD: For fans of survival horror, this is a breath of fresh air, returning the series to its survival horror roots. It is scary, and filled with spooky locations and situations.

THE BAD: A severe monster drought. There are a handful of zombies, several new monsters called “Guardians” from the main Resident Evil 5, who made it into the fourth Resident Evil movie for about five minutes, and the consistent villain from both the games and the movies, Albert Wesker.

Also, the game is SHORT. I played through it in about 50 minutes, with a total of about two and a half hours of play time, including dying and restarting from checkpoints.

THE UGLY: No saves. Although if you die, you restart from a checkpoint, of which there are many in the game, you cannot save and come back later. Once you start the game, you are committed to finishing it, unless you want to restart the game from the beginning. Trust me, after I had been killed for the third or forth time by the same monster in the same place, I started to really think that this sucked.

All in all, well worth the four or five dollars that it costs, especially for fans of the survival horror genre.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

Taking the Wheel

Democrats are worried. Republicans are worried? Why? Because the new American TEA PARTY is coming for you. GRRRRRRRR!

Frankly, I'm not worried. You know why? Because we have worked so hard over the last thirty years to fuck up our political system that I have absolutely no doubt that, if we DO put these people into office, they will be every bit as much a waste of expensive office furniture as the people that they're replacing.

Who are the most important cogs in our political machine? The president and vice president? The Congress? The Senate? Nope. It's WE THE PEOPLE, people. We drive this car. If it goes into the ditch (as it clearly did in 2008), it's our stewardship that did it. Or lack thereof.

So I, as a centrist, would like to address some things here for my fellow frustrated centrists, and to the people who are finally waking up to the fact that our political process is broken and are trying to act on that new knowledge by running right out and joining their neighborhood tea party.

First off, I want to call bullshit on some statements that I've heard over the years.

“I don't vote because it doesn't matter WHO I vote for.” Bullshit. I've said it before, I feel doomed to say it again... in the 2000 presidential fiasco, only 52% of eligible Americans voted in the presidential race, and that vote split pretty evenly between Bush and Gore (Gore actually got about half a million more votes than Bush did in the end). If the other 48% of Americans... or hell, even 60% of that number had gone to the polls and voted for Ralph Nader, he would have beaten the other two guys to a pulp in the polls.

“I don't have the time to follow politics.” Bullshit. If you have ANY leisure time at all (and most Americans have at least SOME leisure time now), then dedicate an hour a day... hell, an hour every OTHER day to keeping up with what's happening in our government. An easy way to do this (for me anyway, being a liberal) is to watch Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher. I'm not saying that I accept what these guys say at face value... I tend not to accept anything that ANYONE says at face value... but it does entertain me and keep me abreast of what's going on politically. Of course it helps that I recognize that these men are biased, and am able to take that into account when I go out and research this stuff.

“I don't follow politics because it's too depressing.” Bullshit. How depressing would it be if your doctor told you that you had terminal cancer with less than a year to live? Pretty depressing, huh? Would you rather your doctor NOT tell you that if it's true? Sometimes the truth isn't simply a hard pill to swallow... sometimes it's a three-inch horse pill lined with salt-covered spikes. But even then, sometimes we have to swallow it. It sucks. It hurts. But we have to do it.

“I don't follow politics because it's boring.” Bullshit. And so what? I mean, it's not that politics ISN'T boring... a lot of times it is... the excuse is bullshit. Politics, like the news and the stuff that you have to learn to do your job, and sometimes actually LISTENING when someone else is talking instead of just waiting for your turn while you tune them out isn't MEANT to be entertaining. It's meant to be informative. And many times, trying to add entertainment value serves no purpose except to dilute the message. If the president gave the state of the union address while riding a unicycle and juggling chainsaws, it would be more entertaining, but the information in the message would be lost.

I hear a lot of bitching right now, especially from people on the right, about how our government is bankrupting us. You know what? That's absolutely, positively correct. My problem with it? This didn't start with the Obama administration, and it won't end by replacing the democrats with tea partiers. This problem started a long, long time ago. In my opinion, it really started in the mid-fifties when the government started “borrowing” (read as “stealing” from social security for other programs. There was a surplus there because there's SUPPOSED to be a surplus there, and they swiped it for their pet programs.

This organized bankrupting of our country REALLY started with a vengeance in the 1980's, the so-called “greed” decade. Almost everything bad that's happening to our country now can be traced to the Reagan administration.

You had changes in the trade and labor laws that allowed American companies to start outsourcing our jobs wholesale, basically devastating the midwest and the south.

You have subsidies started, like those to the corn and oil industries, costing us millions of tax dollars per year.

You have a wrong-headed tax revolt begun to keep rich people rich and prevent the rest of us from ever getting rich, except by a fluke.

And you have the real birth of political apathy among the American people.

So how do we fix it? It's hard, guys. For starters, stop voting AGAINST and start voting FOR. The tea partiers are happy to point out the problems in our system without suggesting anything REAL that we might do to fix these problems. Start researching candidates... ALL of the candidates, not just the Dems and Repubs... instead of voting for whomever had enough money to buy the most compelling or the prettiest campaign ads.

It's our car, folks and it's time for us to take the wheel, instead of letting someone else drive and then bitching about what a lousy job they're doing.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

Movie Review: Batman: Under the Red Hood

First off, get this cast: Bruce Greenwood (Capt. Pike in the new Star Trek film) as the voice of Batman; Jensen Ackles (Smallville) as Red Hood; John DiMaggio (Futurama) as the Joker; Jason Isaacs (Lucius Malfoy from the Harry Potter films) as Ra's Al Ghul; and Neil Patrick Harris (the voice of Spiderman in the newest animated series and video games.... oh, who am I kidding? It's Doogie Houser) as Nightwing.

The movie opens with the brutal murder of Jason Todd, the second Robin, at the hands of the Joker.

In reality, it was the readers of the Batman comics who determined that Jason Todd must die in 1988, via 50 cent per call 900 numbers. Out of ten thousand votes cast, less than a hundred more cast votes for his death than for his continued survival.

It then picks up five years later when a violent new vigilante, calling himself The Red Hood (the name used by the Joker before his chemical bath) appears on the scene, and Batman must solve the mystery of who is “Under the Red Hood”.

Normally, I try to list the good, the bad and the ugly in a film, but I'm abandoning that for this review because this was a genuinely excellent film.

For years, DC devotees like myself have watched as Marvel rolled out one excellent direct-to-DVD animated features, while DC wallowed in crap like Superman: Doomsday. This changed with the outstanding Superman/Batman: Public Enemies and Batman: Gotham Knight. Now ALL of the DC Universe animated films are outstanding.

The animation here is probably the best that I've ever seen on a direct-to-DVD release. The story and the voice acting are outstanding.

On the Blu-ray release, which is the one that I watched, there are a TON of special features, including two 25 minute long documentaries dedicated to the histories of the first and second Robins, a sneak peek of the new animated film Batman/Superman: Apocolypse, and four episodes of Batman animated TV series.

If you're a fan of excellent animation, or of Batman, watch this film. You won't regret it.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

Self Check

I don't usually talk about where I work at my day job on this blog, at least not by name, because the views that I express here are MY views and do not, as far as I know, represent them.

Today I'm naming names.

For the last nineteen years I have worked in various capacities for Costco. Why do I work for Costco? Because they're the good guys. They treat us well, they are as environmentally friendly as such a big-footprint company can be, and they value their customers.

So... why am I naming names today? Here's why...

In the last couple of years (and about five years behind other retailers,) Costco introduced the self-check out lane. The reason, I think, that it took so long is that Mr. Sinegal (our CEO, for those not in the know) wanted to make sure that they could come up with a way to do this without negatively impacting either his employees or his customers.

So what's my beef? Well, when I talk to our customers about using self-check, I hear one thing above all others. “I don't want to take away anyone's job.” Thanks for looking out for me. But I've been with the company for nineteen years. IF THIS THREATENED MY JOB, DO YOU THINK THAT I'D BE PROMOTING IT? Do you people think that I have NO sense of self-preservation at all?

So let's look at the varying level of error here.

First off, anyone familiar with how Costco does business will know that Mr. Sinegal is not your typical CEO. Last year, for instance, we had to close stores that we called “Costco Home”. These were high-end furniture stores that simply weren't profitable anymore after the economic crash of 2008. To most CEO's, this would be an opportunity to close the stores, “down-size” the payroll, and put more money in his pocket. Mr. Sinegal's mandate? Find a spot for every one of those people at area stores. NO jobs were lost in the closing of those stores. Mr. Sinegal is the same as other CEO's in the same way that a kangaroo rat is the same as an African elephant. They have certain things in common... but not much.

Another thing to realize that is Costco doesn't have express lanes. We tried it, didn't work, as far as I know we'll never do it again. There simply aren't enough people that come to Costco for a handful of items. But we still get the question quite frequently.... “Why don't you have express lanes?” So this was Mr. Sinegal's answer. If you're coming in to the store for a few items and you're paying with debit or Amex, here's your express lane. Rock it.

The other thing that these people need to realize is that EVERY innovation will ultimately result in a job loss somewhere, from the invention of the hammer on. Everything. Whether that's the intention or not. It happens. It has happened. It will continue happening.

Here's probably the most important thing. If you're really concerned about Americans losing their jobs, THEN STOP BUYING CHINESE SHIT THAT YOU DON'T NEED! I joke with people that I am absolutely the worst person to be in retail during the holidays? Why? Because I don't understand rampant consumerism. It makes me angry. It makes me sick. But do yourself a favor this holiday season, if you're really concerned about American jobs. DON'T BUY ANYTHING MADE IN CHINA THAT YOU DON'T NEED. No lights. No artificial tree. No tons of Chinese-made toys that your kids are probably just going to lose interest in in a week anyway. No Ipods, please God, no Ipods. If you really want an insight into the working and living conditions of these people who make our Ipods, go to Google and search Ipod Foxconn Suicide. Foxconn, the company that manufactures Apple products in China had 11 suicides in the first four months of this year. If we had a company in America where two employees per month were killing themselves, what kind of outrage do you think that there'd be? But because it's in China, we don't even hear about it.

That's the kind of thing that makes me sick.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

Percentage of American Idiots

I hate how the media is breathlessly reporting that EIGHTEEN PERCENT of Americans now believe that the president is a Muslim.

First off, I realize that the same eighteen percent... plus about eighty per cent more... don't know what's in our Constitution and can't be forced to read it, but it says that NO office holder shall be subjected to a religious test. In other words, even if the president WERE a Muslim, which he's clearly not, it wouldn't matter.

Second off...

Eight percent of Americans... or almost half as many as believe the president's a Muslim... believe that Elvis is alive.

Twenty-two percent of Americans believe in Ghosts.

As many as thirty-six percent believe that Mr. Bush orchestrated 9/11. Seriously overestimating the man, in my opinion.

Thirty-four percent of Americans “believe” in UFO's. I qualify that because the term “UFO” has lost all of it's real meaning. If you see something flying that you can't identify, it is, BY DEFINITION, a UFO. They clearly exist. That's like asking if people believe in rocks. I interpret this as meaning that thirty-four percent of Americans believe that the Earth is routinely being visited by extra-terrestrial craft.

Six percent of Americans believe that the moon landing was faked. Bear in mind, as you read that statistic, that, if you have a powerful enough telescope, you can actually SEE the crap that we left up there.

Thirty-nine percent of Americans “believe” in evolution. I qualify that again, this time because you cannot believe or disbelieve a scientific theory – you can either accept or reject the proofs. So I have to assume that correct wording for this would be “thirty-nine percent of Americans reject the proofs of Darwinian evolution”.

A whopping forty-four percent of Americans believe that the Biblical creation story... as impossible as it is... is literally true.

Twenty percent of Americans... can't locate America on a map. How sad is that. (I remember a related poll that I saw while living in Alaska taken among graduates of some college... eight percent of them thought that Alaska was another planet.)

Twenty percent of Americans don't know WHO we declared independence from in 1776.

The same percentage... probably the same PEOPLE... think that Bush was a “great” president.

Twenty percent of Americans believe that the sun revolves around the Earth.

Twenty percent of Americans... probably twenty percent of human beings in any age... believe that “the apocalypse” will happen in their lifetime. Also note that the definition of “the apocalypse” has changed over the ages. Currently it is the apocalypse as spelled out in the last book of the Bible, the Revelation to Saint John the Divine.

Twenty percent of Americans believe that marijuana is more harmful than alcohol. I can't help but wonder how many of these people actually KNOW someone who has been harmed by pot? I know a handful... versus hundreds that I know or THOUSANDS that I know OF who have been harmed by alcohol or its effects.

Twenty percent of Americans believe that the lottery, despite its odds of one in MILLIONS, is a sound financial “investment”.

Do you get what I'm saying here? One in five Americans will believe any idiotic thing that you tell them. That doesn't make it true, and it DEFINITELY doesn't make it NEWS.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

Stop Beating Up My Language!

I just need to rant here for a second, okay? This isn't political, and is only tangentially about society. If you want to skip it, my feelings won't be hurt.

I've encountered what I consider to be some rather egregious misuses of the language lately and wanted to address them here.

If you work in food service, your smallest size is a small, okay? Regardless of WHAT your marketing department tells you to call them, you DO have a small – it is your smallest size. Years ago, marketing departments decided that “small” had negative connotations, so they started to tell their people to call their sizes something like “large, extra-large and jumbo”. It's still small, medium and large. Even if they say “call them jumbo, huge and GIGANTASAUR”, it's still small... medium... and large.

I also think that it's idiotic, and says something bad about us as a culture that our smallest size soda at most fountains is now enough soda to float a supertanker in.

If you have a really bad headache, you do NOT have a migraine unless you frequently get headaches so bad that they prevent you from functioning. You DO have a really bad headache. Take an aspirin.

If you have trouble sleeping sometimes, you do not necessarily have insomnia. You probably drink too much caffeine. Insomnia is a very specific syndrome that prevents you from getting restful sleep.

Use the language correctly, please.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

Mosque Madness

Okay, there are so many facets to this particular issue, let me just tackle them one at a time.

First off, the first amendment to our Constitution guarantees religious freedom. The first LINE of the first amendment. And that includes, as our founders knew them, Mohamatans. If the owner of a private lot wants to sell or lease it to a group of Muslims for a community center and mosque, WHO CARES?

As far as “ground zero” being hallowed ground goes, that's something that SERIOUSLY needs to be evaluated in this country. It's kind of like the word “terrorism”... we don't really want to TREAT ground zero as hallowed ground, we just want to SAY that it is so that when we can use it for political ends, we can. I mean, we've now had nine years to do SOMETHING with that spot, and what we have today is what we've had for at least eight... a big fucking hole in the middle of lower Manhattan. So if it's going to be a grave, let's treat it as a grave. Let's put a big marker on the spot that no one is allowed to walk on (last time I checked it was considered bad form to walk on a grave), and leave it at that. If we're NOT going to treat it as a grave, then put up a new building there, one that people can use, with maybe a nice atrium with a small, tasteful memorial to the men and women who died there.

And exactly who is this “hallowed ground” hallowed for? Christians? I'm betting that since it was New York, there were probably about as many Jews at work in thos buildings as Christians. So is it hallowed for the Jews? What about our Atheistic and Agnostic brothers and sisters? There had to be a fair number of them working there. Hindus? This is NEW YORK, people. The very crucible of the American melting pot. You could almost name a modern religious credo at random, and I bet that there was an adherent working in WTC... including Muslims. So why not let them honor this “hallowed”, hollowed ground by putting up a community center someplace near where they can mourn their dead?

But, speaking of Muslims, let me address my Mohamatan brothers and sisters for a second here. Guys... is this really the best battle that you can choose to fight right now? I know that it's been tough for you guys. You've been prevented from building Mosques... well... pretty much everywhere in America since 9/11, and I agree that it sucks. As evidenced from the above, I'll fight for your right to put your Mosque anywhere you want. But seriously... is there no room for compromise here? You had to know that the fundamentalists were going to throw their usual fit over this. So is there no room for you to meet with these people and find out if there's an acceptable ratio for them? If there's not... then fuck 'em. But if there is, then you can avoid a huge fight and ultimate black eye over this, win or lose.

One final point. One that I would like to deliver to President Obama. Mr. President... FOCUS. You don't need to put a dog in this particular fight. It's the Skip Gates beer party thing all over again. FOCUS. There are more important things for you to spend your time on. I agree with what you said, both that the Muslims are guaranteed their right to worship when and where they want like everyone else, and that you weren't going to comment on the “wisdom” of building a Mosque there, but for God's own sweet sake. There are still a lot of leaks in our ship of state left by the previous “Captain”. I mean, let's face it... if Bush was captain of our ship of state, he was pretty much Joseph Hazelwood. Even before gays in the military (an issue that I support you on), I would work on patching some of those holes. Like Bush's decree that presidential papers be sealed IN PERPETUITY. That's some shit that happens in a third-world communist banana republic. NOT the United States of America. FIX IT! Get together with the other democrats and ram a jobs bill down the throats of the republicans. (I took that turn of phrase from the republicans when they were speaking of the health care bill – isn't it amazing how often their metaphors have homosexual overtones?) Mr. President, I voted for you because I thought that you were going to be the kind of radical politician that America needs right now, and you've let me down on that. But for God's sake, quit letting yourself get distracted by the pretty sideshows and get on the with main event, would you please?

Thanks.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

Let Them Go

Let me start this by defining two terms that some people use interchangably, and, I think, that average American doesn't know the difference between: debt and deficit.

The debt is how much we owe as a country. The total of the money that we've borrowed plus the interest, as well as outstanding liabilities such as medicade and medicare. Just like if you were to figure your personal debt load, you'd add the amount that you owe on your car to the amount that you owe on your house to the amount that you owe on your credit cards, etc.

The deficit, on the other hand, is the difference between what we will owe this year (our annual debt, as opposed to the total debt) minus what we'll be taking in this year, largely through taxation.

The other term that I'd like to define is Gross Domestic Product, GDP. The GDP is the total monetary value of all goods and services produced domestically by a country. It includes income earned domestically by foreigners, but does not include income earned by domestic residents on foreign ground.

The reason that I'm providing these definitions is because I'm about to talk about letting the Bush tax cuts expire, and there's a lot of bad information out there about these things.

To start with, let's see where we started.

The top tax rate... the absolute MOST that the government could take from anyone for their income was 50%. This was through the so-called “golden years” of the fifties, up until 1986. In 1986, President Reagan lowered the top tax rate from 50% to 28%, the largest tax cut in history. What was the effect of this? In 1980, our federal debt was around 900 billion. By 1990, we owed over three TRILLION, while the budget deficit remained between 3 and 5 percent of our gross domestic product. Over the next decade and a half, the top tax rate slowly rose again, but only to about 39%. In 2001, Mr. Bush reduced the top tax rate to 35%, and the capital gains tax (taxes on interest and dividends received... where most of the wealthy make most of their money) to 15%, down from about 25%. During the subsequent decade, our debt went from around 6 trillion to over 12 trillion, more than doubled in other words. At the same time, the federal deficit increased from around -2 percent of our GDP (a budget surplus) to almost 10 percent of our GDP, a twelve percent increase.

If we allow these tax cuts to expire at the end of 2010, the top income tax rate goes back up to 39%, and the capital gains tax goes to 20%. At the same time, the amended bill will allow people under $25000 per year to stay at the same tax rates.

There is a lot of rather pointless debate over how letting these tax cuts expire will effect the deficit, but the fact is that somewhere around 50% of the rise in our deficit between 2000 and 2010 was due to these tax cuts. Isn't it a funny coincidence that around 50% of our tax income comes from the richest Americans?

Look, I think that it's fair that the higher your income is, the more you pay. I pay more in taxes than someone who makes Big Macs for a living, and less than someone who manages a bank and I think that's fair.

The biggest argument FOR these tax cuts is the same as it has been since the Reagan administration: it will allow these people to reinvest that money in the United States and reduce unemployment. Good for them, good for everyone, in other words.

The problem with that argument is fairly simple to understand. Between 2000 and 2010, our unemployment rate went from about 5% to about 9%.

So it's time to let these tax cuts go. It's abvious that they haven't helped our unemployment numbers, and it would probably help to reduce the federal deficit. If my taxes have to go up 3% as part of that, I'm okay with that.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

"I Don't Keep Up With The News..."

It always disturbs me when I hear people say this. Partly, I think, it's because I'm a recovering news junkie, and know how depressing it can be, so can kind of understand it. Funny thing... I noticed that when I started to moderate my news watching, my suicidal tendencies went away completely.

This kind of reached a head yesterday when I was at my day job. Headline News was on in the breakroom, and they were talking about the terrible flooding in Pakistan, and none of my co-workers seemed to know that it was happening until that moment. This flooding has been going on for over a WEEK. There are 1500 known to be dead, and it is affecting millions. And they hadn't heard. This was followed by a “news story” about a girl who lost her cool at a McDonald's drive-through because she couldn't get McNuggets, and broke the window and attacked the window girl. They ALL seemed to know about this. Old news to them.

Which of these stories is the more important, you think? Personally, I think that only one of these stories BELONGED on the national news, and here's a hint as to which one... no McNuggets were involved.

I understand that the news is depressing, people, but it's important to remain INFORMED. If you don't know what the hell is going on, and you pass a group of teabaggers carrying signs about how Obama is putting our children and grandchildren in debt, you think “Oh my God, that's terrible.” But if you're informed, you realize that the vast majority of our debt problem came from the Bush administration, and that, in 2003, when Bush wanted to pass this massive package of tax cuts for the wealthy, Cheney said “Deficits don't matter.” I agree that this deficit mess is a problem, but blindly replacing one party with the other won't help... they're BOTH corrupt. But I will give you that Obama isn't doing a lot of the things that I hoped he would.

GET INFORMED, PEOPLE!

So how do you do this without watching news basically 24 hours per day, like I used to?

One way is to use the internet. Check to see what the top news stories of the moment are, and then look to see what several news sources are saying about them. And allow yourself to go out of the sphere of American, corporate-driven news. Check the BBC. Check the Swiss News Agency. Check Al Jazeera. Get a variety of viewpoints, even and ESPECIALLY those that disagree with you.

My main source for news is the PBS Newshour. There are no pretty, exciting graphics and they aren't afraid to air negative stories about their corporate underwriters. They focus on four or five big stories, and then spend about ten minutes in the middle of their show hitting other news stories.

For the sake of our country, people, get informed.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

Why lie?

I will never understand, to my dying day, why parents allow... let alone ENCOURAGE their kids to lie.

Let me say that I don't consider myself a naif, either. I understand that in 21st century America, “Ethical Behavior” has been replaced with “Situationally Ethical Behavior”, and the truth has become whatever people believe. But still, what can I say? I have this thing for the truth, and still find myself a little shocked when people don't tell it.

Case in point... this will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me, but I go to the library once per week. Same library. At about the same time. Taking the same route. EVERY WEEK. Okay?

So, day before yesterday, I'm on my weekly pilgrimage to the library. I am headed north on a road with two lanes in each direction, and a center turn lane. I need to turn west. A car goes by in the turn lane, so I slip into the turn lane behind it. There's a break in the southbound traffic. I will confess that I didn't see the young man who's about to smash in my car door because, frankly, I have the right of way. I don't HAVE to look out for him... HE has to look out for ME. So I turn into the library. And he turns out, northbound, looking solidly left. I start honking and yelling (even though I know that the yelling won't do me any good) and he smacks into my driver's side door.

I pull into the library parking lot. Obviously the kid's first accident, because he just sits there, where he backed up at the stop sign, functionally blocking the intersection. I wait for him for a moment, to see if he's going to clear the intersection so that we can exchange information, and when he doesn't, I walk to his car and tell him to pull into the library parking lot so that he's not blocking traffic.

When he got there, he told me that he didn't see me. No shit. HE WASN'T LOOKING. Okay, no prob. He screwed up. It happens. I call the cops.

Shortly after that, his mommy arrives. So I figure that he must have spent the time sitting there to call her. “Oh no, mommy! I cwashed a car! Help me!”

So, mommy arrives and the first words out of her mouth are “See? You should be driving a bigger car like mom.” Mom drives an SUV. I explained to her that if he HAD been driving a larger car or (God forbid) an SUV, he may have seriously injured or killed me. No answer. Ah, I thought... mom is scheming. Trying to figure out a way to prevent this from being her widdle baby boy's fault.

So the cops arrive, we give our statements, I go about my business. My car still runs okay, I just can't open the driver's side door, and my front end is fairly seriously knocked out of alignment.

Sitting in my car waiting for someone that I wanted to see, I call Allstate, his insurance agency. The person who answers the phone, once I explain the situation to her, seems ready to wrap the whole thing up. She's talking about setting me up with one of their preferred body shops to get the repair done and oh, Mr. Schaffer, let's get you a rental car for while your car is in the shop. I tell her that I'd rather set all that up with their adjuster, so that I can check my schedule and the nearness of the body shops to my apartment. So I get the name and phone number of their adjuster.

Then everything stops.

When I get home that day, as I'm pulling into my parking space, MY insurance company, Geico, calls me. Apparently, HE'S filing a claim against ME. So then everything's on hold while they get recorded statements from both of us, blah blah blah.

I call Allstate's adjuster yesterday and give her my recorded statement. I call Geico's adjuster this morning and give her my statement. Then she drops the bombshell... the little brat is telling the insurance companies that I turned not from the turn lane, but from the traffic lane!

Is it just me or does that sound like something that mommy came up with to protect her widdle boy?

Let me make a suggestion to you, lady. If you EVER want your little boy to be a man and a productive member of society, instead of encouraging him to lie and pass the buck, why not just thank God that neither of us were seriously hurt, and use this as an object lesson to him about paying attention to his driving? It's what my parents would have done. Hell, it's what they DID do when I caused an accident as a teenager.

The biggest problem with lying is that it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The obnoxious thing about the truth is that, no matter how much you examine it, or pick at it, it remains whole. Lies start to come apart immediately under scrutiny. For instance, let's look at this lie. They boy says that he saw me turning from the traffic lane. That begs the question why didn't he STOP? If you someone doing something stupid, you stop to protect your own car, right? Failing that, if he saw me turning and didn't stop, then he rammed me intentionally, and it's STILL his fault. AND he's on the hook for reckless endangerment.

Now that I've started picking this lie apart, let's finish dismantling it with evidence. In police work, there are three types of evidence.

The first is physical evidence. In this case, the condition of the cars is the only physical evidence, and it's a wash. It supports both stories.

The second is direct evidence. This is eyewitness testimony, video tapes, pictures, etc. There is none of this as far as I know. So another wash.

The third is circumstantial. Although this is, by and large, the least reliable, being made entirely out of deduction and supposition, but it's also what most cases are built on. So let's look at the circumstantial evidence.

1) He's a young driver with two... maybe three years of driving experience. I'm a former cab driver with almost thirty years of driving experience and a clean driving record. So which one of us is more likely to make this kind of catastrophic fuck-up?
2) Every month, I drive seven hours each way to Arkansas and back, and either six hours each way to Kansas and back, or fourteen hours each way to Houston, TX and back. If I were this careless of a driver, how can I drive that much and still have a clean record and no accidents?
3) By lying, he profits. He gets out of a ticket and his mommy avoids having her insurance rates raised. By lying, I gain NO profit. I didn't get a ticket, and the worst that can happen to my insurance is that it comes out a wash – he collects from his, I collect from mine. They may raise my rates based on that, but they may raise my rates anyway, simply BECAUSE I was in an accident. Insurance companies are capricious.
4) Logic argues AGAINST his lie. Occam's Razor applies here, I think. Occam's Razor says that, all things being equal, the simplest explanation is often the correct one. If you hear about this accident, with no statements from either of us, your first thought is that he turned in to me. This is the simplest explanation and, thank you Occam, the correct one.
So parents, don't teach your kids to lie, okay? It sucks.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

Republican Crybabies

Honestly, I don't know what bug got up my butt that prompted me to write this right now.

I will say this... I rarely sleep deeply enough to have any kind of coherent dreams that I can actually remember, but last night I did. I dreamed that I was at some kind of function featuring George W. Bush. For some dream-reason, this event was being held at a huge ice rink. When the function broke up for lunch, I suddenly found myself alone in the lounge area with Mr. Bush. So I did what I've wanted to do since the 2000 election... I demanded some answers from him. I won't relate his answers here, because they weren't “his”, they came from my own subconscious.

When I woke up, an hour before my alarm went off, this piece was in my mind. All of it. And I tend not to question my muse when she wants me to write something down, I tend to just do it. So here it is.

I'm tired of listening to republicans whine. TIRED of it. So I'm going to list four of, in my opinion, the whiniest and address their crybabyness.

SARAH PALIN

The queen of the crybabies. I get so tired of the fact that her followers take everything that she says as gospel, using the media as her platform, while all the while whining that she can't get a fair break from the media.

First off, Sarah, are you really God-rottedly STUPID enough that you didn't realize that as soon as you stepped onto that stage at the republican national convention you would become a celebrity? Or have you somehow missed the fact that our media treats celebrities (at best) like freak-shows or (at worst) like dog shit? That it treats celebrities as a commodity to get ratings, and makes them look however they it needs to in order to feed its own never-sated wallet?

Also, I hate to break it to you, but compared to how the media treated Hillary Clinton when she was first lady or Condoleeza Rice, you're getting a freaking pass. These two women, who are each worth five of you got ROASTED by the media. And they both handled it much better than you are. When Ms. Clinton saw that whining wasn't going to help, she just quit it and started letting all the media crap roll off her back. And Ms. Rice did the really sane thing – she got the hell out of the public spotlight. You could do the same, you know, and then “the media” would leave you alone.

Oh, and one other thing? The deep-water oil drilling ISN'T the result of environmentalists refusing to let oil companies drill in ANWR. If we opened ANWR, they would have been drilling there AND on the ocean floor. But I'll make you a deal. You get the oil companies to agree to closing all of their deep-water wells if I can get the government to agree to let them drill in ANWR, and we'll make it happen. Frankly, I don't think that it'll even be that hard to get that deal, because even though we environmentalists would miss the natural beauty of ANWR, we'd ultimately get the better part of that deal.

JOHN MCCAIN

John, I used to have huge admiration for you. Back when the 2008 primary season first started, I used a site called Unity America to make a bumper sticker that said “Obama/McCain 2008: my dream ticket”. But over the course of that election, and the years following, I lost all admiration and respect for you.

This loss of respect reached a nadir when, after the health care bill passed, you got on national TV and said “We're not gonna play with youse guys no mores!” You know what, you big crybaby? YOU WEREN'T PLAYING BEFORE! You and your republican cronies have been doing everything that you can to obstruct EVERYTHING!

John, please... instead of spending the rest of your life demanding respect for the hero that you WERE in Viet Nam, how about you get your head out of Rush Limbaugh's fat ass and be a hero NOW?

FOX NEWS

I listened to you crybabies demand that we respect the president for eight years. Of course, now that a president that you DON'T like is in office, all bets are off, right? You vilified the fringe left for comparing Bush to Hitler, but now you're perfectly okay with the fringe right comparing Obama to Hitler or Marx. That makes you not only crybabies, but hypocrites.

And Bill O'Reilly – as far as your nasty, barely-veiled threats against Al Franken go, I think that you're just jealous that he as an entertainer, got elected to the senate while you, as an “entertainer” couldn't get elected to the sewage commission.

THE TEA-PARTIERS

First off, learn your damned history. The tea parties were about taxation without representation. If you take a good hard look at your tax returns for the last ten years, you'll discover that most of you paid less in taxes last year than you have in a long, long time. You don't like paying taxes? Fine. I don't either. But if we're going to have things like a military, they're a necessary evil.

You guys claim to be non-partisan, but where the hell were you during the Bush years, when all of these fires that Obama has failed to put out were lit. As a matter of fact, I'd be willing to bet that most of you were right there calling those of us who were trying to prevent them from being lit to begin with “traitors”.

The hard part is that we need to sacrifice here to get our country back on track. I saw John Boehner, king of the republican crybabies on TV about a week ago, and, God help me, I agreed with what he said. He proposed raising social security taxes ON ME and cutting MY future social security benefits to try to help our country out, and I thought that they sounded like great ideas.

So how about it, you republican crybabies? Are you ready to shut the hell up and quit trying to move our country right and start moving it forward instead?

Seriously.

Rev. Randal