Mark Byron

Blended Movies

Here's a few highlights from a little game we had going blending movie titles (with the occasional TV show thrown in)

First Place-Demi Moore and Drew Barrymore-St. Elmo's Firestarter
Second Place-Barbara Eden and Mr. T-Harper Valley PTA Team-"Pity da school!"
Third Place-Harrison Ford and Michael J. Fox-The Empire Strikes Back to the Future-"I'm your great-great-great-grandfather, Luke."

Honorable Mention-
Shoeless Joe Jackson and Meryl Streep-Eight Men Out of Africa
Dustin Hoffman and Don Quixote-Rainman of La Mancha-"Ten minutes to the windmill."
Charlie Sheen and Kevin Costner-Angels in the Outfield of Dreams
Oprah and Prince-The Color Purple Rain

Any additions?

Edifier du Jour:Genesis 21:1-7 (ESV)

¹The LORD visited Sarah as he had said, and the LORD did to Sarah as he had promised.  ²And Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age at the time of which God had spoken to him.  ³Abraham called the name of his son who was born to him, whom Sarah bore him, Isaac.^{[a]  4}And Abraham circumcised his son Isaac when he was eight days old, as God had commanded him.  ⁵Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him.  ⁶And Sarah said, "God has made laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh over me."  ⁷And she said, "Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age."

God changes things on a regular basis, pulling miracles out of a hat. Not always; usually the natural order of things holds. However, God can make a coincidence happen or outright do something that can't naturally happen. That will often create joy where there was sadness, as is the case here. Not just some warm-fuzzy joy that's decent and in order, but belly-laugh joy.

We normally don't associate God with laughter, for a lot of our laughter-inducing stuff will either be risque or making fun of someone else's misfortune, neither of which is overly edifying. However, the same God that makes us shout his praises also makes us laugh; it's good for the soul and the spirit.

Don't be afraid to laugh when God makes you happy.

No Bad Idea Left Behind

Your tax dollars at work. I'd expect more honesty from Armstrong Williams; generally, if a commentator goes on the payroll of a government or a campaign, they take a leave of absence from their day job, or at minimum let people know they're consulting with candidate X. It's sad to have to echo Joshua Marshall;"[W]ho else has been on the payroll?"

Having a commentator parrot the party line is one thing; there's a difference between journalists who are supposed to be objective and commentators who are openly partisan/biased. Having a commentator be paid to do so is another. You don't expect a political talk show to be an infomercial for a government agency.

That's what we're talking about when the Education department paid for airtime on Williams' show, an infomercial for NCLB. Often, an infomercial will take the form of an interview show, where a faux-journalist will "interview" the inventor/pitchman; it sometimes takes a couple of minutes to realize that you're watching an infomercial as opposed to interview show.

Now, we'll have to ask tacky questions of other commentators; who's putting stuff in your wallet?

Had Williams put up some sort of infomercial disclaimer that the Ed department bought the time, it would have been more honest; it would have given almost as much bad press as it's getting now, but it would have at least let people know where things were coming from.

The administration will be getting about a hundred times the badwill from this faux-pas than the $240,000 bought in goodwill. I think a $24,000,000 ad buy from the Soros Brigade would at least be the equivalent, and probably more, since it isn't made up; this  bit of sleaze has the added advantage of being true and unspun.

Some doofus in the Ed Department deserves more than just being fired; probably multiple doofi should be pink-slipped with extreme prejudice, since they're likely multiple fingerprints on this fubar.

An Epiphany on Epiphany

I always thought that Epiphany (Jan 6/yesterday) honored the day that the Wise Men showed up at the manger; that gives us the "12 days" of Christmas. That's the case for us westerners, but the Orthodox folks use it for commemorating the baptism of Christ. One more factoid in the databank.

One of the quirky things I saw on the local news was a Epiphany cross toss in Tarpon Springs, where the local archbishop throws a cross into the water and a bunch of teen-aged boys go after it, starting in a semicircle about 25 yards from the drop spot; the guy who gets it is a local hero and gets a special blessing from the archbishop. I saw footage of a similar outing in Turkey, but they used a floating cross, so the guys didn't have to dive for it.

However, Tarpon Springs has a history of Greek sponge divers, so diving is part of the local tradition; it would make since to have to dive for the cross in that town. This years hero is a guy with that quintessential Greek name of Andrew McAdams; sounds like someone who'd win a caber toss rather than a cross toss.

Not Quite a Blue Serge Suit

Before I ever got any linkage, I wrote this on the second day of blogging-

"Editorials are like wetting your pants in a blue serge suit- you get a warm feeling and nobody notices."- Jack Germond (from a McLaughlin Group show-may not be verbatim) I hope this blog doesn't have the same fate.

This Weekly Standard piece has the quote as such, well predating Germond,-"Why is writing an editorial like urinating in a blue serge suit? Because it gives you a warm feeling and nobody knows what you've done."

Even modest blogs like this will get 100 readers a day which can spike up to ten times that with the right link; this tsunami piece is generating about 400 hits a day. While it's not a huge audience, it's an influencial one. For example, my commentary on the lack of A-list evangelical blogs prompted the birth of a evangelical aggregator and Blogdom of God list.

Yes, the warm feeling's still there, but people are noticing.

Three At Last! Three At Last!

I started this blog three years ago today over on Blogspot. My first post was on Ted Turner's starting up Ted's Montana Grill. I might be have some bison as a side dish with my  crow-

Celebrity-based eateries are iffy propositions (e.g. Planet Hollywood), and if there is an untapped market for buffalo meat, is the McBison far off?

Well, not so far; TMG seems to be doing OK.

Americanism

Joe Carter's calling for posts on this David Gelernter Commentary piece, Americanism and its Enemies. Gelernter's premise that Americanism is the descendant of Puritanism is a bit flawed but is a good starting point for the discussion of the religious nature of Americanism.

Puritanism had two main elements: the Calvinist belief in predestination with associated religious doctrines, and what we might call a “political” doctrine. The “political” goal of Puritanism was to reach back to the pure Christianity of the New Testament—and then even farther back. Puritans spoke of themselves as God’s new chosen people, living in God’s new promised land—in short, as God’s new Israel.

I believe that Puritanism did not drop out of history. It transformed itself into Americanism. This new religion was the end-stage of Puritanism: Puritanism realized among God’s self-proclaimed “new” chosen people—or, in Abraham Lincoln’s remarkable phrase, God’s “almost chosen people.”

There are a lot of problems with Gelernter's rhetoric, especially when he all-but-equates quoting from the Old Testament to being proto-Jewish; this may flow from Gelernter's Jewish background.

Early exponents of Americanism tended to define even their own Christianity in ways that make it sound like Judaism. Thus John Winthrop: “the onely way to avoyde this shipwracke [of angering the lord] and to provide for our posterity is to followe the Counsell of Micah, to doe Justly, to love mercy, to walke humbly with our God.”

That must make Steven Curtis Chapman a proto-Jew when he uses that verse from Micah as a refrain in The Walk. Evangelical Christians of various eras will quote from the whole Bible, including the Old Testament. There are some corners of Christendom which are OT-phobic and others that are Gospel-centric to the detriment of the epistles and the OT, but most good Bible-preaching churches, the spiritual descendants of the Puritan ethic (even if they trace their lineage through Baptist, Wesleyan, Presbyterian and Anabaptist roots that don't flow from the Puritan line) will not be strangers to the Old Testament.

Edifier du Jour-Romans 8:35-39 (NIV)

³⁵Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? ³⁶As it is written: “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”^{[l]   37}No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.   ³⁸For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,^[m] neither the present nor the future, nor any powers,   ³⁹neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

We lost one of our Lakeland Vineyard home group members to cancer last night; we knew it was coming, for she was transferred into hospice care earlier this week once the doctors saw that the cancer had spread too far to be treatable.  Barbara was a retired nurse who had been there for her friends when they were sick and needed professional TLC. She was a "completed" Jew who still had a lot of that East-Coast sassy, don't-take-crap-from-no-one attitude, but once you got past that, she was a valued member of the church.

On to the verse; this is one of the eulogist's stock passages, but it's worth looking at again for the first time. Death can't get in between Barbara and God. In fact, this only brings them closer; I don't buy into the idea of Limbo or Purgatory, so I'm working on the cliched assumption that she's "with the Lord" literally.

Her cancer-ravaged body will be disposed of in some manner (I don't know the funeral details yet) but her spirit is free to be with God, unencumbered by health or problematic children and grandchildren or any of the other daily hassles of human life. Jesus conquered death, and passed that on to us.

I've read the end of the book, and the good guys win. We're more than conquerors, even if Ol' Sloughfoot wins the occasional skirmish.

Donkey Newt

I'm not sure what the future will hold, but the next few years may be crucial for the future of the US. By 2008, if things go the way they seem to be heading, a solid Republican majority may have developed. A 55-seat Republican Senate at present may well have expanded out to 60 seats and a Republican replacement for Dubya seated.

Baring a change in public attitudes, the Republicans seem to have a lock on the Senate and have an edge in the Electoral College. Five things could change that.

The first is a dramatic tanking of the economy that would make big government look good. That would give the Democrats hope of taking back the White House in 2008 and possibly the Senate in 2010.

The second is a major scandal in the Bush administration that actually in the White House. So far, the administration hasn't obliged, as the Plame affair is the closest thing we've gotten so far, and that seems to be fairly low-level.

The third is a foreign-policy debacle that will put the neocon vision on trial; some on the left would like

Iraq

to be that debacle, but it's still a work in progress. Alternatively, it would be some sort of UN transformation that would give the Europhiles in the Democratic Party something to write home about and campaign on.

The fourth is a Republican overreach to the right that will bring moderates over to the Democratic Party. It would likely come on economics (assuming #3 doesn't come to fruition), for the Republican's gambits on social issues seem to have majority support. The way the Republicans can do that is to do the partial privatization of Social Security without financing the resulting short-term shortfall; that will give the Democrats more ammunition to run as deficit hawks.

All four of those items above are out of the Democrats control; well, George Soros could try some run on the dollar to make the economy and the Republicans look bad ("Who says he didn't try that last year?" I hear someone in the back say) but other than that, they have to cross their fingers.

What they can do is item #5, which is craft an economic message that will resonate with swing voters. It's not going to be the Democrats finding God and tacking toward the center on moral issues, for the Bright wing of the party's in charge;that could change in future decades, but not anytime soon. It's unlikely to be on foreign policy, for the Europhiles seem to be in charge and the UN would have to somehow look good, which ain't likely to happen. Given that the party's going to be secular and internationalist for the foreseeable future, economics is their best shot.

What the Democrats need is a Newt Gingrich; are we already a decade downwind from the Contract with

America

gang? They need someone who can run on ideas to humanize the economy without trashing it and have a robust yet internationalist foreign policy that can be both explained to and sold to the swing voter. John Kerry isn't that person, and I don't think Hillary is, either.

However, the Republicans had spent 40 years in the wilderness before Newt helped give Republicans the House back; we're now at the tenth anaversary of their return. The Democratic Newt might be be a teenager waiting to get elected to Congress in 2020 in order to lead a return to power in the 2030s.

By the time our Donkey Newt appears, we may have a dramatically different Democratic Party, and everything I wrote above would me moot for Donkey Newt. All the stuff above assumes the status quo holds, and lots of things can and will change in the next decades. A Great Awakening could lean the country to the right on morals and church-going blacks and Hispanics coupled by blue-collar evangelicals could push the Brights aside. A growing economy might make big government less desireable, or robotics and nanotechnology might make retraining and jobs policy more important.

For now, things seem to be leaning in the Republican direction. The demographics seem to be breaking towards Republicans in the long run and population trends seem to be making the House and the Electoral College more red. In addition, the Democrats seem to have gone from Sore Loserman to Splitting Headache Loserman, but cooler heads will eventually prevail and start to figure out how to try to pitch their vision to the swing voter. Whether that will come in 2008 or 2028 remains to be seen.

Midday Musings

You thought Simon was tough? 'Idol' Reject Hung, Seeks Good-Guy Roles. Doing so in his second life after that lynch mob got him? Must be in Bollywood, since they believe in reincarnation. No, that's from the eat, shoots and leaves school of writing; I added a comma in the middle. Still, it's weird for a guy to make a career out of being a total flame-out on a contest show.

Speaking of Bollywood, I'm not sure what midday talker I was hearing yesterday, but he and his guests were impressed with Indian movie star Aishwarya Rai, who did a 60 Minutes segment on Sunday. She's a former Miss World who lives with her folks and has (at least in public) a squeaky-clean persona; she's working in the US now and is demurring from saying whether she'd kiss on screen, which is a Bollywood no-no. If you don't mind a devout Hindu, some people may have found their dream girl.

To someone who's not quite as dreamy; Barbara Boxer. This is one of the reasons why we need the "nuclear option" in the Senate; folks who don't know when to give it up.

Groaner du Jour-While he was still with us, Dr. Seuss was at a popular authentic Mexican restaurant. One of his friends hollers "Hey, Seuss!" and about a dozen Hispanic guys look at him.

Da Carrier! Da Carrier!

Since when did Diego Garcia become "one of America’s most secret bases." It's been well known for decades; bombers have flown sorties out of there to Iraq and Afghanistan for years. One of my good friends was in the Navy and spent a stretch there on "Fantasy Island" during a Indian Ocean/Persian Gulf tour on an aircraft carrier in the early 80s; it's so small and remote that "all you've got are your fantasies."

I was checking in on that base, since it is an American base not far from where some bad tsunami damage occured; they only got six-foot waves courtesy of some good geography.

Manny Wants to Know Why He's Being Sued

I'm getting a wave of Google hits courtesy of a typo; one of my tsunami posts got the temporary title of Tsumani Musings, and Google got to it before I caught the typo. The crazy thing is that there are 84,900 tsumani listing of them, including some major outfits like the CBC and the AP, yet I'm third on Google. Call it Rick's Tsumani Lounge; "Of all the tsumani joints in town, you had to walk into mine."  I'm normally a bit over a hundred hits on a normal weekday, but I had 434 yesterday.

Edifier du Jour-Acts 4:1-4 (ESV)

¹And as they were speaking to the people, the priests and the captain of the temple and the Sadducees came upon them,  ²greatly annoyed because they were teaching the people and proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection from the dead.  ³And they arrested them and put them in custody until the next day, for it was already evening.  ⁴But many of those who had heard the word believed, and the number of the men came to about five thousand.

They were sad, you see, for two reasons. The first is that they were running counter to their theology which lacked an afterlife. The second was that they were quickly being made obsolete as high priests and needed to become spiritual Luddites.

However, the new believer's preaching bore quite a bit of fruit; check out the five thousand alter calls. A little peaceful civil disobedience paid off, but not that it was only used to keep the Gospel going.

How to Mantle an Atomic Bomb

It looks like the Republicans in the Senate are close to changing the cloture rule for judicial nominees, what has been dubbed the "nuclear option" by Beltwayites. For balance, here's a pair of WaTi editorials defending the proposed change.

Is that a good thing? I think so. At least in the short-term, it would allow Republicans to get the President's nominees past Democratic filibusters. They talked about this last year, but they might not have had the votes, given that some moderate Republicans might not have wanted to go along with the change. Now that the four northeastern RINOs (Chafee, Specter and the RINO Sisters of Maine {someone Googled in for "rino sisters"; I have a Googlewhack for it, as it turns out}) aren't the swing vote, they can pass the change.

There is a thought to call the Democrat's bluff and actually do "an honest-to-goodness, 24/7, Robert Byrd reciting the entirety of Robert's Rules of Order at 3AM filibuster." However, given the lack of moderate Democrats to be persuaded by public opinion makes that option less appealing; they might just take the filibuster into early October and shut down the government and put the bad press back at the Republicans.

In the past, filibusters were reserved for big causes, not used routinely. Not any more. That makes the "abuse" of the filibuster more addressable than when it was a rare occurrence.

Frist's proposal is to have progressively smaller majorities on cloture votes (60, 57,54...) until eventually a majority can force a vote. The two downsides to this are that it's against tradition and Republicans are supposed to be traditionalists and that a Democratic president in the not-too-distant future might use it to get around Republican obstruction to get their nominees through.

The first argument is not all that strong; the cloture rule has gone gradually away from unlimited debate. The second is somewhat compelling, but nothing would stop a Democrat-RINO coalition from going nuclear if a Democratic president got into the White House in the future even if the Republicans played nice now.

Yes, the Democrats would scream bloody murder, but will they be any less helpful then they are now?

 

Edifier du Jour-Psalm 5:1-8 (ESV)

¹Give ear to my words, O LORD;
   consider my groaning. 
²Give attention to the sound of my cry,
   my King and my God,
   for to you do I pray. 
³O LORD, in the morning you hear my voice;
   in the morning I prepare a sacrifice for you^[a] and watch.

 

   ⁴For you are not a God who delights in wickedness;
   evil may not dwell with you. 
⁵The boastful shall not stand before your eyes;
   you hate all evildoers. 
⁶You destroy those who speak lies;
   the LORD abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man.

 

   ⁷But I, through the abundance of your steadfast love,
   will enter your house.
I will bow down toward your holy temple
   in the fear of you. 
⁸Lead me, O LORD, in your righteousness
   because of my enemies;
   make your way straight before me.

Check out verse 7. God's Mr. Love, yet we're supposed to fear Him. The Bible widely proclaims that the fear of the Lord is the begining of wisdom.

That's not a fear of a Thoresque quadruple whammy coming down from the sky if we slip up; it's a respect for God's greatness and power and goodness and wisdom and (how many more of these atributes can I rattle off?). That awe/fear/respect doesn't mean we're looking to get zapped every minute, for we won't get that full wrath-of-God treatment when we're in His care. A loving dad is one you don't have to worry about being randomly swatted; a bipolar or drunk dad might be, but that ain't God.

Evening Musings

Things have been rather busy. No jobs in hand as of yet, but a number of leads for both Eileen and I are popping loose. My best lead at present is a tax accounting position over in Lake Wales, while Eileen has what might be a near dream job lead as a Christian Ed director at a conservative Presbyterian church in Lakeland; yes, it's not the Vineyard, but it might be an excellent opportunity for Eileen to use her Masters in Christian Ed. I have thought through the implication of becoming an evangelical Presbyterian; the joke is that conservative Presbyterians are Baptist who are too cheap to buy a baptistery.

The tsunami relief continues; back on Sunday, I put $5 into an offering for tsunami relief at church; Samaritan's Purse seems to be a leading outlet for evangelical tsunami bucks. Yes, it's not much, but I'm unemployed at present.

That was before Dubya brought out the heavy artillery yesterday, the Big He and the Big Dad. That's a good touch, since this is largely a non-partisan effort. Some folks on the left might be tone deaf and be putting in unwarranted digs at Amerika, and some folks on the right (Rush for one) are tone deaf when they start to get on the anti-redistribution-of-wealth soapbox at exactly a time when some help to the needy is most needed. However, the other 85% of us just reach for our wallets, hence bringing Bush 41 and Clinton on board notes the non-partisan nature of the giving; $200m has already been raised.

However, that's a minor issue compared to the bombshell that came out of Indy:-); Mitch Daniels wants to put all of Indiana on DST. That's DST, not LSD, Zach, chill out. Having lived in Indiana for a while, I liked the idea of not being in the spring-forward-fall-back routine, but explaining it to the rest of the country can be a pain.

Boggs and Ryno in the HOF. Boggs is a no-brainer, for all the eligible 3000 hit guys are in. Sandberg was the best second baseman in the NL for over a decade and should have been in sooner. Sandberg's numbers were more balanced, having good power, speed and RBI numbers, as well as being a perennial Gold Glover. One of the ironies is that Pete Rose will wind up having to wait for the Old Timer's Committee if he doesn't get his lifetime ban lifted by next year.

The Yankeecrat Gambit-Part II

Richard Shuford left this comment on Part I that's worth looking at-

In your scenario above, it is not clear to me what benefit accrues to a defecting senator by joining a third party.

Given a week-plus of reflection, I'm starting to wonder myself. Well, let me look at my premise for part II. "I'll lay out a plausible scenario where the Yankeecrat Caucus can deny a Republican majority after the 2006 election." The core of that premise is that the Yankeecrats hijack the Republican label in the northeast and run as a third party elsewhere.

With 20/20 hindsight, I'm don't think I can do that. Let me explain why, if you're interested.   

Edifier du Jour-Psalm 4:3-5 (NASB)

 

³But know that the LORD has set apart the godly man for Himself;
         The LORD hears when I call to Him.

    
      ⁴Tremble, and do not sin;
          Meditate in your heart upon your bed, and be still. Selah.

    
      ⁵Offer the sacrifices of righteousness,
         And trust in the LORD.

We've lost the sense of awe about God. Notice how the word awesome has morphed from something that inspires awe to something that is merely superlative or even good.
Yet David's asking us to tremble as we contemplated God.

We've also lost the ability to be still. We all look like we have ADHD compaired with the psalmists. Stillness is the hardest discipline to achieve, for our minds will tend to race in umpteen directions other than God.

However, if we ask God for it, we can head towards that awe and stillness that we're being called to.

 

Edifier du Jour-Acts 1:15-26 (NIV)

¹⁵In those days Peter stood up among the believers^[c] (a group numbering about a hundred and twenty)   ¹⁶and said, “Brothers, the Scripture had to be fulfilled which the Holy Spirit spoke long ago through the mouth of David concerning Judas, who served as guide for those who arrested Jesus– ¹⁷he was one of our number and shared in this ministry.”   

   ¹⁸(With the reward he got for his wickedness, Judas bought a field; there he fell headlong, his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out. ¹⁹Everyone in Jerusalem heard about this, so they called that field in their language Akeldama, that is, Field of Blood.)   

   ²⁰“For,” said Peter, “it is written in the book of Psalms,

“ ‘May his place be deserted;
      let there be no one to dwell in it,’^[d] and,

“ ‘May another take his place of leadership.’^{[e]   21}Therefore it is necessary to choose one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, ²²beginning from John's baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection.”

   ²³So they proposed two men: Joseph called Barsabbas (also known as Justus) and Matthias.   ²⁴Then they prayed, “Lord, you know everyone's heart. Show us which of these two you have chosen   ²⁵to take over this apostolic ministry, which Judas left to go where he belongs.”   ²⁶Then they cast lots, and the lot fell to Matthias; so he was added to the eleven apostles.

A couple of thoughts came to mind as I read this. The easy one is the last paragraph; the disciples flipped a coin to pick Judas' replacement? Some historical purist will probably chime in that it was something other than a coin, but the idea still remains that they used "luck" to decide what would happen. However, since they knew God was a hands-on God, that God would load the dice so that the chosen one got picked.

The other thought was of Judas' fate as the betrayer. The other disciples were good, ordinary people that Jesus saw potential in. Judas, however, was a embezzeler and would sell out Jesus for a modest amount. Jesus knew this and picked him anyway, the ringer that would do Jesus in.