Quiet for a Couple Days

I haven't posted for a couple of days. Been busy and in light of the VT shootings other issues didn't seem so important. A few thoughts on other events in the last few days:

1) Gonzales hearings - I listened to portions of them yesterday and read more online. He is either incredibly incompetent or brazenly dishonest. I vote for dishonest. Time after time he didn't remember meetings where his top aides have testified under oath that he was there. What's he got to hide? He is a loyal soldier to the President and what hasn't been revealed yet is the involvement of the White House - Bush and Rove - in the firings. This is why we are getting all the stonewalling. If Congress ever gets its hands on all of those "lost" emails I am betting that heads are going to roll.

2) Abortion ruling - This is why national elections matter. Roe v. Wade has been eroded, but it is probably safe unless one more justice retires while Bush is still President. Although, with the current Congress another Roberts or Alito would never be confirmed.

3) War is lost - Senator Harry Reid is taking a right-wing pounding for publicly saying what everyone aside from Bush/Cheney, Fox News, and a few die-hard neocons know to be the truth. We could spend another five years in Iraq and nothing will change. It isn't just the Baathists and al qaeda who are waiting us out. Its the current government; the Shiite-led coalition has no interest in working out a power-sharing agreement when they know that once the Americans are gone they can take over on their own terms. The war that should never have been fought is lost.

4) Paul was a mystic - I have spent the last couple of days re-reading Crossan and Reid's book In Search of Paul, and was struck this time by their section on the depth of Paul's mysticism; he had frequent mystical experiences where he vividly and intimately saw his Lord. You can't, they say, understand Paul and his vision without seeing Paul as a mystic.

5) State troopers have tintometers - I didn't know that until a few weeks ago when daughter Meagan was stopped on her way back to school in Mankato by a state trooper for no other reason than he said he couldn't see her face as she drove by. He pulled out his tintometer and her window tinting was illegal. She was ticketed and told she would have to remove the tint. At our attorney's suggestion, we called the dealer where we purchased the car - with the tint already on it - and the dealer agreed to pay to have it removed. The deal was done today and the ticket will now go away.