Yar Har!

Avast, ye scurvy scallywags! It be International Talk Like a Priate Day, so be clenching yer teeth, squinting with one eye, and giving a hearty "Yo Ho!" to anyone ye be meeting. In honor of this auspicious occasion:

To Be Fair...

I agree with Senator Obama 99% on this:

Obama addressed the latest news from Wall Street -- the federal bailout of the insurer American International Group -- insisting that the solution should not reward those who reaped benefits from the company’s investments when times were good.

“We don’t know all the details of the arrangement with AIG,” he said. “The Federal Reserve must ensure that plans protect the families that count on insurance and it should bolster our economy’s ability to create good paying jobs and help working Americans pay their bills and save money. It must not bail out the shareholders, or management of AIG that were making big profits when times were good. They shouldn’t be bailed out when times are bad.”

The Federal Government should not be in the business of backing off when profits are high and saving the day when they are low. My 1% disagreement would be that to the extent that the shareholders in question are other banks whose reliance on AIG or other failing institutions in their portfolios to remain solvent, we must - to a degree - not just tell them to go Bork themselves. One issue where I see the repeated Main Streel / Wall Street dichotomy as a very dangerous storyline is that it disregards the interconnectedness of the US economy. As the failures of these huge institutions show, when Wall Street collapses it has significant, and harsher, effects on Main Street. To the extent that Obama desires to motivate Main Street at the expense of Wall Street, I think he'll find that the long term consequences are similar to trying to scratch your back with a chainsaw.

The Housing Bubble

Did you know that in 2003, the Bush Administration tried to institute reforms that would have intreased the capitalization requirements for "Fannie Mae" and "Freddie Mac," which would have addressed what has become the root issue of the present crisis?

Do you want to know what ranking Democrats thought of these reform proposals? Thanks to a poster at SilverandBlueSports.com... now you can know.

The last three lines in the article should be considered damning evidence against the Democrats in all the present "reform and oversight" talk.

Truth in Advertising

I've seen the quote in a lot of Senator Obama's campaign ads - deriding Senator McCain for saying he doesn't know much about the economy. And it caused me to stop and think: the implication, then, is that Obama does. That's a pretty broad statement, and it gives me pause, because I don't know that the best economists out there would make that sort of claim.

From what I can gather, Obama's main plan to fix the current problem is "leadership," which is about as perplexing an answer as I can imagine. What it sounds like is Obama saying that he will manage the American (and even Global, because it is so interconnected) Economy to prevent anything from ever getting out of hand.

It is possible, but not without a draconian shift in how the nation operates. If we're voting for a President who intends to be the captain of the economic ship, then I'd rather one who recognizes and admits his limits than one who derides the other for admitting as much.

Abortion

I can't help but think that this should be a powerful ad.

According to Nancy Pelosi, whether or not this woman was alive when her mother's abortion proved unsuccessful should have had no bearing on the fact that the mother's desire to have her unborn child killed completely trumps the woman's right to life.

And for Barack Obama to have voted against a measure to give the right to life to women like her when they are "born" is sickening. What might he have to say to her were they to meet? Like some Republican talk about GDP growth doesn't offest the personal impact on working families when defecit-driven inflation drives down the wages of working families... I can't see how Democratic talk about the right to choice can overcome the fact that their policies would have seen this woman discarded as "medical waste" when she was a living baby.

Shame

There are two types of shame born of sin. One says "I have sinned." It is properly aware of the nature of sin, and can drive a man to seek mercy and forgiveness - "Lord, have mercy on me the sinner." The other says "I have sinned." It is rooted in pride - at falling short of the standard we hold ourself to. It is dangerous, because what is really threatened by it is only our opinion of ourselves... and it can motivate us to hide sin, and actually thwart repentance and healing if the damage to our self-image of confession seems to great to seek healing.

Righteous shame seeks to restore broken relationships to man and God because of the realization of what sin has wrought. Selfish shame seeks to hide and cover the sin, lest we let slip that we don't have it all together after all.

It is fine to embrace the former, but we should cast aside the latter, because it is the fruit of pride, and serves to mask that most caustic sin.

Road Rage

Do you want to see men at their most raw, angry moments? Then take a drive through rush-hour traffic. Sure, it might exist elsewhere, but nowhere is it so convinient. At such times, people morph into impersonal vehicles... and tempers can flare.

It's easy to get frustrated - you just want to get home at the end of a long day, and there's SO MANY people in your way. I've gotten frustrated any number of times, so I know how it feels. But such anger is usually full of hypocristy and unrighteous indignation, so I have been working for some self control on such drives.

I'm gald, too, because it gave me an interesting perspective when an erratically driving woman who had been in front of me for a few miles made sure to stick her arm as far as she could out the window to flip me the bird as she was slowing down to exit the freeway, with her face contorted by what looked like pure fury as she screamed somethign inaudible at me from a couple lanes away.

For the life of me, I don't know what I did to make her so angry at me. My best guess is that I either was following her too close for her comfort on the freeway, or that I moved to the right to try and speed up at the same time that she intended to.

Being able to see it from the outside, but in a frame of mind where I wasn't affected by it gave me a chance to see just what it looks like when people get furious at each other on the road, and often over the most minor inconviniences to us. It was sobering, because the expression she wore on her face I've worn in my heart plenty of times as I'm driving.

So I asked for forgiveness for my own anger when I'm driving, I prayed for the woman that she was able to find release for her anger so that it wouldn't ruin her day, and asked that I might become more considerate when driving, so that if there was anything I had done to earn such a response that I would not do so again.

Irony

Because there's nothing partisan or divisive about guilt by association:

"The speech that Gov. Palin gave was well delivered, but it was written by George Bush’s speechwriter and sounds exactly like the same divisive, partisan attacks we’ve heard from George Bush for the last eight years, a campaign spokesman said."

--From the Obama campaign concerning the GOP VP nominee's speech last night.

Photography

I've updated the photos at my Flickr page. If you haven't checked in a while, there's finally something new to see!

"If we continue to follow this slippery, oil-slicked, downward-winding path, our citizens will shiver in darkness as our resources hemorrhage to Third World thugs whose only virtue is their control of petroleum-based energy," Reid said.

I thought that Republicans were supposed to be the"fear-mongers" - that's a regular accusation against them from Democrats. This is fiction, and either fantastically ignorant or frighteningly deceptive. It is on a level with racists who see any hint of Spanish as part of a plot by Mexico to annex the USA.

The very counter-argument to Reid's tale was evident in the first half of this year. What happens when the price of oil gets too high? People change. We, with our choices, have the power. The thought, then, that we would sit "shivering in the dark" as we throw money at the oil tyrants is laughable. Or, it would be if it weren't such a base attempt to prey on people's fears.

I am, as I have often been in the past - moreso since he became the majority leader, ashamed that this man represents my state in the Senate.