You Can't Fool Mother Nature

If I was a card-carrying Republican, the last thing I would want is that President Obama’s State Department would okay the Keystone XL pipeline. Every time that President Obama has taken the Republican position on energy, there has been a disaster. It is Gaia’s revenge. The disasters are getting worse and the intervals between the policy change and the disasters are getting shorter.

February 3, 2010 President Obama announces his "clean coal" initiative.	Two months later...	April 5, 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine disaster
March 31, 2010 President Obama announces offshore oil drilling expansion	Twenty days later...	April 20, 2010 The Deep Water Horizon oil rig explodes in the Gulf of Mexico.
February 14, 2011 President Obama's budget request asks for investment in nuclear energy.	Less than a month later...	March 11, 2011 An earthquake off the eastern coast of Japan hits the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the subsequent tsunami hits the facility which causes the reactor core to fail.

The Republican position should be to back away slowly. "No thanks, nothing to look at here. We will find something else. With friends like you..."

As I am not a Republican, if I were Secretary of State I would say, "Sure, go ahead with the pipeline - as soon as the Kalamazoo River is cleaned up. I mean pristine!

That's the Ticket

If I was lovely Rita, meter maid, I would be ticketing all the Red Box subscribers. I would issue tickets for general mopery. For some reason, when their subscribers see that big Red Box, they all lose any concept of 'parking lot'. They will be in the middle of acres of empty parking spaces and they will be unable to recognize a parking space. They park up on the curb. They will block store entrances. They will park in fire lanes. They will leave children in cars with the motor running. They will pets in cars with the windows closed. They will lose all ability to walk in order to get to that big Red Box.

I would like to see a study to decide if Red Box subscribers are a self-selected group of idiots or if the Red Box itself mesmerizes the weak minded.

If I Was A Teacher

When prayer is brought back into the classroom, I will get my teacher’s certificate and begin every day having my class recite the rosary. I don’t think the proponents of prayer in schools meant that the prayer would be the rosary, but that’s what you get when you don’t think it through.

I am old enough to remember prayer in public school. We began the morning with prayer. I do not believe that prayer in school was detrimental, but I had the advantage of a homogeneous neighborhood; I lived in a predominately Catholic neighborhood, where many of the teachers we saw in church on Sunday lived within the school boundaries. I am a contemporary of the children of Madalyn Murray O'Hair and Vashti McCollum. Long after the Supreme Court’s ruling on prayer in school, my high school, which had a history of anti-Catholic acts, was still teaching the King James Version of the bible, only this time in English class.

I do not believe in prayer in the public school. Those who want to see it are wrongheaded and shortsighted. They will open their children up to unexpected religious experiences. They will find that they cannot fire a teacher for their religious views and teachers will find themselves in danger of explicit and implicit disciplinary action because of their religious views.

Me, I am going to teach those dear little children the roasary.

If I Was A Lexicographer - Or Intercourse the Penguin

If I was a lexicographer for the OED I would reclaim "intercourse". It is not just for coitus anymore, it is any interaction between people. I shouldn't have teenagers giggling when I say, "In my daily intercourse with foreign businessmen…"

The transition should not be a problem since there is a perfectly acceptable substitute: congress. Sexual congress is much closer meaning of the common Anglo-Saxon phrase.

If I Was Perry White

If I was the editor of a major metropolitan newspaper – yes, if I was Perry White – I would send my crack investigative reporter to answer one question: Who built the Halliburton world headquarters building in Dubai?

Corporations moving off shore and not paying U.S. taxes are far too common. A corporation that spent more than a decade getting bloated, no-bid contracts from a government where the Vice-President held that corporation’s stocks in a blind (wink-wink) trust moves off shore it is appalling. But, that is not the worst. The curious question is, why Dubai? Of all the tax havens in all the world, why did Halliburton choose Dubai as their world headquarters?

When you read Dubai you should think bin Laden. The bin Laden family construction company built Dubai. Dubai is the showcase for bin Laden construction and it was built with American tax payer money. One son attacks the world’s tallest building – twice – just in time for his family to build the world’s tallest building in Dubai.

The graft, the corruption, the payoffs and the bribes of ten years of two wars concentrated in Dubai. When Michele Bachmann attributed all those construction cranes in Dubai to oil money, she was wrong, that was American tax payer money. That was construction dollars that she will never see in her Minnesota congressional district.

So, who built the Halliburton world headquarters? We cannot speak the name. I hope that they have gold plated urinal fixtures. I am sure that no one using their showers will be electrocuted. It is probably as buggy as the American embassy in Moscow. Yet, no matter how much tax money is lost, Halliburton belongs there; it may be the most honest thing Halliburton has done.

If I Were Pope – Conclave Edition

If, during the current conclave, I was tapped for Pope, the first thing I would do would be to write an encyclical insisting on the tabernacle being placed back in the center of the altar. How many times have you gone to Mass and could not locate the tabernacle? You get to your pew, genuflect, then realize that you are not genuflecting to the living presence of Christ, but an empty altar. The tabernacle, the holiest place in the church, is over in the corner, used as a side table to hold a vase of flowers and extra copies of this week’s bulletin.

As the American Catholic Church lurches closer into Protestantism (Vacation Bible School? Really, Catholics?), and as the sacristy lamps flicker out, modern church architecture does not distinguish the unique features of a Catholic church. How are we to keep Christ at the center of our lives if we can’t even bother to keep Him at the center of our Church?