The Reason For The Season

I know what you're thinking. "Here comes another one of those 'feel-good', motivational lectures about how Christmas is the celebration of Jesus' birth and everyone else should realize that and let us Christians have our Holiday." But that's not what I'm going to say.

Although this is the traditional celebration of our Savior's birth, He, most likely, was not born this time of year and the reasons we celebrate it on December 25th have little or nothing do do with Him. I personally believe that replacing a pagan celebration, the central focus of which seemed to be drunkenness and immorality, with a celebration of the miraculous birth of the Son of God was a good idea. The tradition has evolved into a world-wide season of good will, peace, and love for all people. It certainly gives us a few weeks of actually living out the angels proclamation of the shepherds.

It's just that the whole "War on Christmas" seems to be overdone. I think I hear nearly as many spiteful versions of "Merry Christmas" as I do the genuine variety. I have received numerous emails telling me to send the ACLU Christmas emails with the intent of bogging down their email server and annoying them. Not that I mind annoying the ACLU or the CTA or any other left-wing organization that seems bent on removing God from our schools and our government, but using the Lord's Name as a tool to annoy someone seems to be a misguided idea, to use a favorite term of the great 49er coach Bill Walsh, it is ill advised.

People, as a whole, seem inclined to latch onto symbols and we treat holidays the same way. Not that there is anything wrong with holidays, I wholly support them as a time of special celebration, reconnecting with family and friends, and a necessary break from our daily routines. However, the holidays often seem to take on a greater importance than the event and/or person the holiday is commemorating. Hanukkah, for example, is a minor Jewish festival, but it is now huge because it has to compete with Christmas this time of year. Kwanzaa is the most "made-up" holiday since grand-parents' day, providing an artificial festival for those who are neither Jewish nor Christian but do not wish to be left out of all the festivities. If those who started Kwanzaa had realized that Christmas is a secular celebration, as well as a religious holiday, they could have celebrated their own version of Christmas without isolating themselves. Maybe isolation is what they wanted.

Christians often fall into the same trap. Thousands of people make the trek to visit the Church of the Nativity and touch the very soil where the Christ-child was first lain, while thousands of others trek across town to the Church of The Manger for the same purpose. The problem (besides that He couldn't have been corn in both places) is that Christ taught us to seek Him, not his birth place. He wants us to follow Him in loving others and He wants us to do it all the time, not just at Christmas.

Celebrate and have fun. Enjoy the light in a child's eyes when they see Santa. Put out a tree and a Nativity set. Sing carols, give gifts and wish each other well. But please remember, Jesus is the reason for all the seasons.

After two weeks off...

I took the last two weeks off. Hopefully, you noticed. Honestly, I would love to do this for a living, but no one is paying me and, when work and family get busy, this is what takes a back seat. Who knows, maybe someday I will get syndicated and you could be reading a fledgling Stephen Frank or Sean Hannity, or even Bill O'Reilly (dare I dream). Until then, I appreciate my 70+ loyal readers and the occasional comments that they contribute to my ramblings. If you like what you read, please include a link in your web page or email the letter on to your friends.

If any of you watch Hannity and Colmes on even a semi-regular basis, you have probably noticed that Alan Colmes seems to be on the show for the express purpose of making Sean Hannity look smarter. Not that he needs the help, but Colmes is the only news personality I have ever seen who will misquote someone and show the actual clip that he is misquoting, and he does it regularly. However, if you saw the show last Friday, you may have noticed that Mitch Lowry (sitting in for Hannity) makes Alan Colmes look smart. Seriously, Lowry is an embarrassment to conservatives. He can't maintain a line of questioning. He tries to "impersonate" Hannity, but he only copies the speech a mannerisms; he just isn't able to keep up. They were discussing the recent police shooting of an unarmed Black man in New York and he kept asking about all the other murders. What he should have asked about was the other police shootings. How many of those are of Blacks? How many are by White officers? What is the percentage of violent crime committed by Blacks in New Your? What is the racial breakdown of the city? According to the 2000 census, New York City is roughly 27% African-American. Statistics record that somewhere near 38% of those arrested for violent crime are black. In fact, those of poverty and victims of violent crime are disproportionately black. Although there are racially motivated hate crimes, for the most part, blacks and whites are assaulting others of their own race. I still hold that this has much more to do with money than color. The question remains, however; what is the percentage of wrongful shootings of blacks by police in New York? If it were as disproportionate as some would portray, than are the police scared, or are they in fact racist?

Meanwhile we have our own "hating" going on here in California. Assemblyman Mark Leno won't rest until he has constructed a gay marriage law that will pass. In fact, there are two new pieces of legislation aimed at destroying marriage. One is Leno's re-worded attempt at the gay marriage law he proposed last year. The other would enact domestic partnership rights for any two people sharing an address. There are two problems with these (actually three). First, we already passed a law: marriage = one man + one woman. Two, the result of these laws is to promote immorality. Three, and this is the answer to the "how does it hurt you" question, anything that demeans marriage hurts our society. It's something like giving amnesty to illegal immigrants demeans those who came into our country legally.

Speaking of immigration. Senators John McCain and Ted Kennedy are working together on a new "open border policy." I swear, between the open border and the weakness many would have us show in Iraq, we might as well just stop being a country. We are completely surrendering our identity as a nation, if we go the way liberals would have us. They keep saying that Iraq is this generation's Viet Nam. If we leave before the job is done it will be. I agree that we need to alter our strategy, but abandoning the region and leaving it to terrorist rule and under the guidance of Iran is not the way to go. Come on! Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad believes the Holocaust to be a myth! I am not for world domination by any nation, including the US, but that whole region needs to be cleaned up and we have to do it. Why us, you ask? Because no one else will!

Too many Republicans have jumped from the Bush crusade to the anti-Bush bandwagon. I know they are getting ready for their own nomination bids for the next election, but can't they figure out that it is possible to create your own identity with out giving up everything you believe in? It's beginning to look like everyone's strategy for 2008 is to look as much the same shade of gray as possible. As Bullworth said (I can't believe I am quoting a Warren Beaty character) "we no longer have two parties, we have one party with two names." Somebody has to rise up as a choice. Someone who will fight for world peace through freedom not artificial peace through comprimise and weakness. Someone who believes morality is a foundational truth that must be preserved.

There are some absolutes left. Morality. Freedom. These are not opposing ideas. In fact, it is impossible to have true freedom without morality.

Some Observations...

Democrat Congressman Charles Rangel has vowed to introduce a bill reinstating the draft as soon as Congress reconvenes. His proposal includes all, that's right, all people between the ages of 18 and 42. Notwithstanding the economic effects of making the majority of the work force eligible to be drafted, this also creates the possibility of both parents in a family going to war. My belief is that they don't really want the draft (at least not to this extreme), but want to make the thought of staffing the war effort so ludicrous that people will favor bringing troops home over creating parentless children, at the expense of the safety of our nation and the world. I suppose there would be a loophole to prevent that, but who decides who will go and who will stay home with the kids. This isn't a weekend shopping trip.

Speaking of shopping; Christmas is back. Last year, major retailers decided to forgo the "Merry Christmas" greeting for fear of offending people. This year, K-Mart, Wal-Mart and Target stores seem to be making a point of using the phrase in the stores and in their ads. Perhaps the efforts of Christians actually hurt the retailers last year. Maybe they just realized that the number of people offended by them saying "Merry Christmas" is so small that, even if they are all in the ACLU, it just makes more sense to irritate the smaller number of buyers.

Wal-Mart wants to make sure they are "fair," however. The nation's largest retailer is reportedly giving 5% of all on-line sales to a homosexual activist group. The greatest concern I have about this is that it creates an exaggerated impression of a "gays vs. Christians" battle. This is really the result of liberal democrats. I don't blame them for everything, but this is exactly the conflict they are trying to propagate. Conservatives support family values and morality while liberals promote immorality as a statement of "freedom." The "battle" is not between homosexuals and Christians, this is simply the "battle ground" upon which liberals have chosen to wage their war on the American people.

What Is The Meaning Of This?

What the election really means:

Clearly, the American public is not satisfied with the results (or lack thereof) in Iraq. As we all know, the fastest way to send a message to our elected officials is with the vote. The people were impressed with the initial decisive action and results in the early days of the war. That is why the President's approval ratings were high. Since then, the results have slowed, the communication with the public about what is going on has decreased, and so has the President's approval rating. The "people" are a fickle bunch. They expect everything, all the time, and they expect to be kept in the loop. They don't like to see the ugly underbelly of war, they like it to be quick and clean with movie-like precision and when the "good guy" always wins. "Maybe", they think, "if the war isn't progressing as we think it should, we do not have the 'good guy' leading us. Maybe we should change guys." And so they do.

Clearly, we need a change in Iraq. Maybe it has turned into more of a civil war, but if we leave, it will turn into a terrorist free-for-all. However, we may need to alter our strategy. We certainly need better communication between the Government and the public. We need to see results, or at least progress. That is what the fickle bunch has said.


What the Democrats will think it means:

Nancy Pelosi and Harold Reid will extrapolate these election results into permission, no, a request, for absolute social restructuring. They will push their personal agendas for rights for illegal immigrants, easy abortions for minors, same-sex marriage, embryonic stem-cell research, and weaker sentencing for sex-offenders and other dangerous criminals. When questioned, and they will be, they simply claim that "the people have spoken and they want change." They will attempt to push through social programs and higher taxes. They have a chance to work for a bipartisan solution to the war on terrorism, but they will be too focused on their private social war to accomplish anything together. The voters across the nation voted for marriage protection amendments and tougher penalties for sex-offenders (except in California; apparently, here, sex-offenders are more valuable members of society than are children), but the liberal members of congress will ignore that fact when it suits them.


What will really happen:

The next two years will probably be a stale mate. Although the Democrats control both houses, they do not have enough a majority to pass anything controversial. They do, however, have enough to shoot down any conservative action that is proposed. The 2008 election will depend on which party and/or candidate is better able to spin the war in their favor. If it improves, the Democrats will claim the changes in Congress are the cause, while the Republicans will credit their continued leadership. On the other hand, if their is no (or little) improvement, both parties will claim the other tied its hands.

The best hope for a Republican victory in 2008 is to have dramatic results in Iraq in the next couple of months. Otherwise, the entire face of our nation may be changed dramatically with a liberal President and Congress working together.

I shutter to think...

Don't forget to vote!

At the risk of being redundant, I thought a quick recap and reminder about the upcoming election was in order. I also decided to send it out a little early this week for those filling out their absentee ballots at the last minute. The two most important things I can say about any election are these:

Don't let others decide for you by not exercising your right and privilege to vote.

Don't make uninformed decisions that effect everyone. First, know. If you don't know, don't vote. You don't have to vote on every issue and candidate, but you should get informed and vote for all those you have an informed opinion about.

One of the best sites I have found for information on California's candidates and ballot measures is Robyn Nordell's (thanks to my friend Barry). Click on each measure or candidate to find supporting arguments for the recommendations.

California voters are faced with a huge number of new bond issues (over $40 billion). What most voters don't seem to realize is that bond is just a political word for loan. We have to pay them back, folks. What's worse is that we already have over $26 billion in bonds that have been approved, but not yet released. At this point, any new bond, even for a good cause, is a bad idea for California.

One measure I previously supported (though not strongly) I have decided not to endorse. That is the Prop 86, cigarette tax. Law enforcement agencies seem to believe this will create such a disparity in tobacco prices between California and other states that it will encourage smuggling. Also, there is very little control set for how the money would be spent. Giving a large amount of money to a group of people with little or no accountability is not a good plan.

On the other hand, I think I may vote for Measure 1A, after all. I don't like the idea of locking the budget for future years, but the transportation fund is one that seems to get plundered regularly and the result is partially completed roads, and many in disrepair, and delays in improved public transportation, ie: light rails, bus systems, and so on. This measure doesn't create any new debt or raise taxes, but it does prevent the robbing of Peter to pay Paul (at least from transportation).

Locally, I have to vote against Measures Q, R, and L.

First of all, SMUD is really attempting a hostile takeover of Yolo County and hasn't been consistent in their own cost analysis. There is too much room for error here and way to much disparity in the estimates. Besides, I have had both companies and I am not convinced that SMUD is a better choice than PG&E.

Q raises taxes, period. R claims that some (less than 50%) of that tax revenue will go to build a new sports facility. Although the ads claim it's for the Kings, nothing in the measure guarantees that. There is way too much the voters are not being told. Keep in mind that Las Vegas wants a sports franchise and the Maloofs are already connected there. I think the Kings are leaving anyway. Have you seen the ad where the Maloofs are bragging about their net worth and their $6000 burger meal? They can buy and/or build an arena anywhere they want to and that is exactly what they are going to do.

I haven't spoken much about the candidates this election. Our state has become polarized. One side is extremely liberal, supporting special privileges for special interest, protecting the illegal immigrants and giving them drivers' licenses, more concerned with their rights and the rights of terrorists than they are with the rights of unborn children or of parents trying to protect their children. They propose higher taxes for everything. They believe that the government can do a better job of raising our children and that a having child is a choice to make sometime after one becomes pregnant, while serial killers and rapists must be protected from a justice system that would keep them away from our children.

On the other side, we have those who think that human life is more valuable than the environment or than unproven research and that the Nation's border needs to be protected from those who would do us harm, economically or physically. These believe that the economy (and the people) are best served by lower taxes and more freedom from governmental intervention.

And then Arnold Schwarzenegger is standing in the middle trying to be everything to everyone. It's not possible. Although I have chosen not to endorse him because of the support he gives to anti-family causes, his opponent is a horrible alternative. Similarly, I am not, necessarily, in favor of Steve Poizner for Insurance Commissioner, but I am strongly opposed to Cruz Bustamante.

The other races are pretty clear for me. The Republican candidates are pro-family, anti-abortion, favor protecting our borders and stronger punishments for crime. The Democrats, on the other hand, favor drivers' licenses for illegal immigrants, secret abortions for our daughters, and would have us abandon the war on terror, exposing us, and the rest of the world, to further attacks by radical Islam.

The California Socialist Republic

The CTA sent me a list of candidates and ballot measures they support. Sometimes, I think it would save me a lot of time and research if I simply waited to see what and who they endorse; and then vote the other way.

Every candidate supported by the CTA would raise taxes and they support every measure which would result in increased cost for the people of California and increased power for the government.

Phil Angelides is only about two steps away from being a "sold swamp land" real estate scam artist and Cruz Bustamante would be in jail for embezzlement except that he only manipulated campaign funds. The CTA endorses them both (and others) because they "are friends to education." The CTA is opposed to protecting children with Jessica's Law, and opposed to parent's right to be informed of a child getting an abortion. They think the tax payers should pay for campaigning cost of candidates and that Jerry Brown, the governor who put California in the red in the first place, should be in charge of the State's justice system.

Finally, they think the government should be allowed to take property from anyone for any reason and call it "for the good of the community." Proposition 90 would prevent the government from abusing eminent domain. As it stands, people have had their homes taken (at a loss) and sold for less than market value to developers "for the general good." How many of these developers made significant contributions to those politicians? That is an interesting question.

It seems that the CTA would turn us into a socialist state. Take more of our money in taxes and fees and give the government more authority to determine what is best for us and our children.

I think that Nancy Pelosi summed it up quite well, in an interview, the other day: "I will do whatever I have to do to win the election." Maybe if liberals, like Pelosi and the CTA, would get their mind off of themselves and winning and back onto doing what preserves the freedoms and persuits of life liberty and property the Constitution promises us they would be, well, less liberal.

It never ceases to amaze me at how often liberal and selfish go together.

Live Within Our Means

As I look over the initiatives on the coming ballot, I am a little surprised at the amount of money they call for when we are still in a financial crisis.

Prop 84 is a bond initiative to improve water quality and parks. Ads claim it will protect us from floods, but those receiving that money are the ones claiming that. The fact is that the text of the proposition does not make any provision for flood control. Most proponents seem to believe that bonds are free money (no taxes), but a bond is a loan and guess who pays it back?

Prop 89 raises taxes to provide campaign funding. So now politicians want to use taxpayer money to get elected to positions where they will be paid by tax payers? Please! Who thought this was a good idea? Maybe I could get prosective employers to pay for my resume costs and, while I am at it, they could buy me a new suit, so I look good for the interview when I meet them.

Speaking of tax increases, Sacramento local issues, Q and R, are being advertised as money for a new publicly owned sports facility to keep the Sacramento Kings in town. OK, I like having a professional sports team (even if I root against them), but let's set aside the emotion of these issues and look at what they actually propose. First, Measure R calls for a .25% sales tax increase for 15 years. That's all. No conditions, just a straight tax hike. Second, Measure Q limits the use of the new tax increase for a sports facility to 50%. That's right, limits! The tax revenue may be used for anything and NO MORE than 50% can (not will) be used for some sports and entertainment facility. No details, no mention of the Kings. It could be used for anything. Even if it is used for the Kings new arena, they will be building a play ground for the rich, at tax payer expense, to provide the Maloofs with the ability to become even richer. There is also nothing that says the county could not sell the facility to some corporate sponsor at any time, but the tax hike continues for 15 years. Frankly, I hope the Kings stay, but this is a bad deal!

I hope you look over the ballot measures for yourselves. Don't decide based on what you see on television. They are lying to you!