Last week, news outlets around Augusta, Georgia confirmed rumors that Senator Ed Tarver has been confirmed as a United States attorney for a district in Georgia.  Mr. Tarver will resign his state senate seat to accept the position.  Since Mr. Tarver is my senator, when was I consulted ar asked why should I allow him out of his promises to represent and serve me for the limit of his term.  I believed all his campaign rhetoric about wanting to serve and voted to elect him.  But then, along comes Obama with his $150,000 a year minimum job and Mr. Tarver smiles at the camera and talks about honor and service.  His is leaving me in a lurch–moving on up–like pastors in churches always accepting calls to bigger church and more money.  There should be a law that currently serving politicians should not be allowed to resign to accept higher paying government jobs.  He was elected senator.   Serve out the term,  Mr. , that’s what you promised to do when you were elected.  Once your term is done,  then move on.  I am really getting tired of being used as a stepping-stone for career politicians.

So the military and civilian establishment had warnings about the radical views of the cowardly Islamic shooter at Fort Hood, but did nothing about it.  All those who participated in this deadly instance of political correctness should be fired.  Collectively, they failed every one of the Fort Hood victims.  Now, the same Army Chief of Staff  who allowed an atmosphere in which one Muslim Major,who was ranting terroristic threats and the chain-of-command knew he was, could kill 13 of his people  is concerned about protecting 1000 Muslim soldiers from a backlash that has never happened.  Sir, something is out of kilter here, and it is you and all those who allowed this to happen.  How can the troops ever trust you again?  If the Muslim troops have a problem with the Army, send them packing.  One American life is worth more than any number of Muslim feelings.  If they need protecting and you want them to stay in the Army, send them to the White House and they can serve canapes like the Marines had to in the Clinton days.

Yes.

Reprinted from AKSFiles and U. S. Army Statistics:

“Are America’s youth too fat, dumb or dishonest to defend the nation against its enemies?

The latest Army statistics show a stunning 70 percent of military-age youth are ineligible to join the military because they are overweight, can’t pass entrance exams, have dropped out of high school or had run-ins with the law.”

That is one of the reasons that the same people keep returning over and over again to war.  There is no one to replace them.   Not only are our soldiers, sailors, and Marines the best, they are the only.

As I sat in Mass today, my attention was drawn to one of the stained glass windows above the sacristy.  In it, God the Father and Jesus are sitting across from each other.  There is some deep symbolism and meaning to the glass, but all i could do was stare at the rendering of God the Father.  The artist, whoever he was, had pictured God the Father as an old white man with a white beard staring benignly at Jesus.  It was then that the idea for this post leapt into my head.  If God is all love and so gentle and there are multiple ways to get to heaven without believing in Him, why did God have to die in the first place?

If God is the all-loving, merciful, father-figure of modern Christianity, was it necessary that He complete the sacrifice to Himself  by allowing Jesus to die on the cross?  The modern all-loving God, who modern liberal theology reminds us not to “fear,” would not harm anyone for breaking His laws.  So, if this is true, why did He have to die?

Secondly, if ; as modern theology wants us to believe, there are other ways to Heaven than through Jesus, didn’t God know this?   If He did, why die?  If He didn’t know it, why not and how do we know it now?

Marina in Charleston Harbor with Cooper River Bridge in Background

On Saturday we decided to go to Charleston instead of the Beach.  We had wanted to go to on a plantation tour, but when we arrived, we discovered that there some Scottish Highland Games were being held at Boone Hall Plantation.   We didn’t want to spend the whole day there, and the tours were crowded with Scotch; so we decided to go back to Charleston.  We took a boat tour of the harbor (great), ate seafood at the Market, and went to mass at St. John the Baptist Cathedral.  The best part of the boat tour was sailing under the bridge.  The tour guide said that the bridge pylons had elevators inside of them for maintenance.  The pylons are in fact hollow, that should make you feel comfortable driving over the bridge.  The whole Charleston thing caused me to go back and finish Conroy’s new book, South of Broad.  I think that was the only reason I finished it.

Under the Bridge

There really are elevators inside those pylons.

I didn’t realize that it had been so long since I last blogged.  I really have no excuse for neglecting blogging except laziness.  Also, for a long time, I have hade anything earth-shattering to write about.  You see, don’t you, how that last sentence validates the first, at least in my mind.  Anyway, tomorrow, we leave for a week at Edisto Beach.  We are all packed, except for the computers, the dogs are at the vet for boarding,  and Kathy and I are looking forward to a week of sitting on the beach and listening to waves, seagulls, and snoring.  It has been two years since we spent any real time at Edisto.  We went down for three days earlier this year, but we were camping and the first day and last day were consumed by setup and breakdown.  And, it was hot in June, that made the setup and breakdown even more miserable.  This time we are staying in a condominium that we have leased before.  It has a great view of the sunsets and marshes off the lanai.  I am really looking forward to it.

Doesn’t it bother you to be celebrating freedom but the government says you can’t do it with fireworks?

Prior to our recent trip to Lake Chatuge and Edisto Beach, I made a trip to Barnes and Noble to pick up some “I don’t have to think about it” reading.  You know, those mysteries and novels that you can read with “half your brain tied behind your back” (sorry, Rush).  I picked up a couple of Tony Hillerman novels and a novel by Neil Gaiman, American Gods.  First of all, let me assure you that American Gods is not a light-brain novel.  It is, however, well-written and so engrossing that I never did get around to reading any of the Hillerman novels.  The plot of the novel revolves around an ex-con who gets involved in a war between the “old gods” and the “new gods” in a mythological, realistic American landscape.  Even though I think that Gaiman wimped out on the ending, the book was a great read and mind-opening.  Gaiman pulls off a coup by doing both in the same book, and doing it well.

This blog, however, is not meant to be a book review of American Gods.  That book merely provided a backdrop for my observations on the hullabaloo surrounding the death of Michael Jackson.  On the television tonight, one of the talking heads said that people were trying to show a reverence for Michael Jackson.  At first, I recoiled at the phrase, but then I began to understand that in the minds of many in the secular culture where God is irrelevant, people like Michael Jackson are the closest things to gods that any of these people have.  I am sorry that Jackson is dead, and I offer my condolences to the family, but Jackson was no god.  He was a human being who made gobs of money and achieved fame by singing and dancing.  It is a  pity is that many in America have let their gods become so small.

This spring when we planted the tomatoes, we added a bunch of compost to the soil.  This compost had been percolating in our compost bins for over a year.  Anyway, this season we have huge plants and tomatoes everywhere.  Everyday, it is a battle to keep the plants staked and tied up since they have grown past the tomato cages we carefully put around each plant when we originally planted them.  The garden is quite a sight now with stakes and white sheet-ropes used to tie up and support the plants.  We have given tomatoes away and I get to eat the meal of the gods-a tomato sandwich on regular white bread, with lettuce, a piece of bologna and Duke’s mayonnaise-every lunch.  Wonderful.

Last year I changed the outside porch light, and I kept the old light fixture  in the shed.  This winter I decided that I needed an outside light on the shed, and so I decided to put that light up on the shed.  It didn’t seem like a big job, but for some reason I kept putting it off.  This week, I did a thorough cleaning of the shed and found that light fixture.  So, this morning, I decided that this was the day I would install that fixture.  I went to Home Depot and purchased a switch and a junction box, and got to work.  I drilled the hole through the shed wall and mounted the light-so far so good-I used a drill and chisel to cut the opening for the mounting box-on a roll now-cut off the power-switch 30 in the breaker box-spliced into the power supply-connected the wiring using those net orange colored plastic twist things-and when I flipped the switch it didn’t work-the breaker would not reset and the lights in the house would dim.  Not only didn’t the light work, it was hot today (high of 100 actual), and a basic flaw in my plan was the lack of electricity going to the electric fan while the power was shut off made the job even hotter.  I rewired, re-rewired, made trips to check the breaker, re-re-rewired to no avail.  I finally went to the computer and found a wiring diagram that a second grader could use, did the wiring that way, and “there was light.”  It is just after 11pm and I have to let the dog back in, but while I am there I am going to use that switch and turn the light on and off.  I hope it still works.

Status report:  The dog is in, the light works, but my clothes are still wet from the perspiration and are still hanging on the fence to dry before they are allowed into the house.