In the software world, if someone finds a misbehaving program, they file what's called a "bug report".  This is sent to the maker of the software letting them know that something isn't working and needs to be fixed.  It consists of at least two core pieces of information - the expected behavior (what it should be doing), plus the observed behavior (what it is doing).  The onus is then on the person responsible for the software to correct the problem and release a new version.

Bugs are also usually assigned a severity too.  From least important to most important, there's usually a ranking of levels along the lines of "feature request" (meaning nothing really is wrong, but it would be nice to add something extra), "cosmetic" (meaning something is wrong, but only visually, like a typo, a wrong color, or untidy layout), "minor" (more severe than something purely cosmetic, but the program is still usable), "major" (meaning a significant problem exists that needs to be addressed), to "critical" (meaning the application is fundamentally broken, may cause a system crash, and it cannot perform its core reason for existing).

Christianity, as it's practiced by the vast majority of the churches today, has a critical bug.  Surprisingly it seems to have gone unnoticed by the general population, particularly the Christian community itself.  It's presumed that people who identify themselves as Christians, by their very definition, would seek to embody Christ's teachings more than anything else.  Christian simply means "like Christ" after all, and even the dictionary defines it as "a person who exemplifies in his or her life the teachings of Christ".

So let's first look at the "expected behavior":

The Bible is the best source we have of Christ's message and teachings.  In fact it's one of the only sources in existence today, so clearly we should expect Christians to adhere to what Christ says in there. I'll cite the relevant passages that demonstrate the bug.
This is Jesus himself talking to his followers.  The very important thing to note here is that this is the one and only commandment Jesus ever gave.  One.  In the entire bible.  An instruction to love others.  No conditions, no "ifs", no lists of who to love and who not to love.  Just "love one another".


This is from the "Sermon On the Mount", where once again we have Jesus speaking directly to a crowd of his followers.  Here he is even more clear; there's no ambiguity if he just means to love other disciples.  He's rewriting the Old Testament rule about hating your enemies and replacing it with "love your enemies" and "do good to those who hate you".

Okay, so we're seeing a pattern here.  But let's make it even more clear how critical and fundamental the role of love is in Christ's world.  In both Matthew 22:36-40 and Mark 12:28-34, we are told of a group of other leaders (religious and secular) who confront Jesus and question him, and ask him what the greatest commandment is.  Here's the version in Mark:


The scribe (a lawyer) who asked the question then confirms that loving God and your neighbors is more important than all the other traditions they'd been following to this point (offerings, sacrifices, etc).  Christ agrees, and simply replies "You are not far from the kingdom of God.", indicating that just grasping this one concept had nearly vaulted this layman into perfection and heaven.


Christ himself is not the only person to speak so clearly about this.  Paul, one of the apostles, and the author of nearly half the books of the New Testament, wrote in a letter to the Christians in Rome and said:


Paul then goes on to point out that all the other commandments are summed up as "love your neighbor as yourself".  Loving each other is itself enough to fulfill the law.  In other words, just focus on love, and you pass the test.

John, the second-most prolific author in the New Testament, reinforces this same message, with an even starker tone, in a letter he wrote to the early church:


and a few paragraphs later:


Note that he says "everyone who loves".  Everyone.  That means people of all faiths, Christian or not.  Loving is the path to growing closer to God and it doesn't say anything about needing to take communion, attending church every Sunday dressed in nice clothes, tithing, reading the bible all the time, donating to a charity, prayer, listening to Gospel music, abstaining from alcohol, or supporting a "war on terror".  Just loving each other.  And on the flipside, the act of hating is equivalent to murder.

I'm not going to quote every reference to love in the bible.  These already show that there is nothing else even close to important.  Jesus himself, plus the guys that wrote 18 books of the New Testament, reiterate repeatedly that the expected behavior is simple: Love.  Period, and with no exceptions.


So, what about the "observed behavior"?  I'm sorry to say it, but I almost never see anything resembling this unconditional love.  It's rare enough to see Christians loving each other unconditionally, much less loving their enemies.  What I see is them picketing Pride parades, boycotting restaurants, burning books, preventing gays from getting married and having equal rights, bombing abortion clinics, fighting Muslims, quashing programs designed to help the needy, and in the recent news of a pastor in Arizona, even outright calling for the death of President Obama.  Just as disconcerting, however, is the more passive Christian - the one who simply goes through all the motions of the church lifestyle and routine, reading all the books, doing all the sacraments, celebrating the holidays, but still entirely failing to actually do the one thing expected above all others -- to love everyone.

The glaring absence of love as the central theme of today's church and its followers means they are fundamentally not functioning as expected and instructed by the very figure they name themselves after.  How can someone even call themselves a "Christian" while not making a core practice of the one and only commandment that Christ gave?  The observed behavior and the expected behavior simply don't line up.  A dysfunction this severe thus merits a "critical" rating by bug report standards.

Luckily, personal faith is "open source", meaning that each person can fix this bug themselves.  No one needs to wait for some patch to get coded and sent out by some programmer.  If you consider yourself a Christian you can, starting this very moment, begin to embrace the simple elegance of what Christ commanded and just love others without exception.  That's the embodiment of his teachings.  That's Christianity.

So, are you going to fix the bug?  To discard all the complexity and moralizing that got added to this otherwise totally clear and simple concept?  It will involve some effort and resolve.  It will work some emotional muscles that are probably rather underused.  It takes some profound generosity to love everyone (and consider who that encompasses: your mailman, that loud obnoxious person next to you on the bus, sports fans of rival teams,  your ex, your boss, every government official who supports programs that alarm you, every queer person around the world, all the citizens of Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine, and even me.  Every one of us.  All 6.8 billion people on planet Earth)

That's the message.  That's the expected behavior.  To earn the title "Christian", I think that's the bug you have to fix.  I'm not alone in realizing this: Mahatma Gandhi observed this too and said "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."  It's time to get this bug fixed and upgrade, and let me know when you have, and we can mark this bug report "closed".

Let me preface this by saying I did not see the VP debates last night.  I got a blow-by-blow from my wife later, and have read some of the editorial spins on it.  But I have no direct experience to what happened.

So instead like usual I turn to the numbers.

Mitchell McKinney, a University of Missouri-Columbia researcher who has been studying national debates since 1992, did a study on last night's debates at 10 sites across the nation, by asking 500 voters to view Thursday’s debate and rate the candidates before and after on 100-point favorability scale.  So, aside from margin of error, that should be a relatively impartial analysis.  Let's look at what he found...

Overall, Biden’s favorability, already higher than Palin’s, rose by 26 percent, from 53 to 67 points. Palin’s, which started at 36 points and climbed to 41, rose by 14 percent.

So let's look at those numbers for a moment.  Biden already has favorable support from both parties apparently, given the fact that he garnered a "thumbs up" from more than 2/3 of the viewers.

Palin, on the other hand had barely 1/3 of the viewers thinking of her favorably.  And that even accounts for having people from her own party counted in that mix!  And even after she made it through the debates with no foot-in-mouth moments, she still is viewed unfavorably by more than half of the participants!  Her favorability only went up 5 points!

So, Mitchell and his folks also broke the numbers down by party and gender too.  Let's see the alarming news there:

Republican men ranked Palin high, raising her approval scores from 67 to 73. Only Democratic men, already displeased with Palin, became even more so, with scores falling by 21 percent, from 19 to 15.

Republican men are mesmerized by her!  She has them totally entranced!  McCain tapped into some seriously fanboy energy by selecting a woman, and a feisty one at that, for his VP.

On the flipside, the Democratic men, not having their opinions filter by rose-colored glasses, got exactly the impression they needed and expected to see.  Palin can't actually answer a question that is put to her.  She doesn't actually have a coherent policy plan.  She can't even enunciate what her partner McCain is proposing.  And 7 out of 8 Democratic men were horrified by what they saw.

How can she get 73% support from Republican men, but only 15% from Democratic men?  What is so genetically different between those groups that could account for a 5 to 1 difference?

The Republicans think Palin is their ticket to the White House.  It's pretty clear she was chosen to give the Republicans some "celebrity" attention.  Obama was already being sensationalized in the press and media far more so than McCain.  It was almost like a rock star versus a good 'ol boy politician.  They desperately wanted to steal the limelight back from Obama - get people talking about their camp for a while.  So they chose someone with no background (but also no dirt to dig up) so that curiosity would be raised.  They chose a woman to court all the Hillary fans who were grumbling about Obama.  They chose someone attractive and with charisma to compete at the game that Obama was already winning.  Palin was a holy grail for them.

Right up until she got interviewed and it became obvious how flimsy her qualifications were.

But she still represented a lot of hope.  Here they finally had someone who would get the attention of "Joe Sixpack", get the attention off of the increasingly unpopular messages that McCain was supporting (staying in Iraq, tax cuts for the rich, etc).  So when she made it through this debate without any major land mines (but also failing to answer the majority of the questions put to her, or just reciting soundbite distractions to them), the Republican men felt like they were in the clear...

But the Democrats, already dismayed at this bumpkin of a candidate who would be one heartbeat away (and a very old heartbeat at that) from the presidency, had no interest.  They saw the Sarah they expected.  Inexperienced, defensive, and certainly not able to lead this nation.

My vote was already decided long before this.  But I hope anyone undecided, in looking at these numbers, and realizing what is at stake, will at least entrust the future of this country to some experience.  Even if you aren't idealogically a fan of Obama or Biden, please give a lot of thought to the risk we take if put this little-known mayor and soccer mom from Wasilla, Alaska into the number 2 leadership role of one of the most significant powers on this earth.  How do we expect to be taken seriously by all these other countries we deal with?  How do we intend to begin to undo the damage to our reputation and trust by the global community after the brazen and impulsive warring habits of the Bush administrations?

Please, think long term.  Don't let a cute soccer mom with a coy grin be mistaken for vice presidential material.  I mean, to put things in perspective, I have more world travel and foreign policy knowledge than she does.  She'd never even been overseas in her life until a token trip to Kuwait last year.  And we expect her to participate knowledgeably with the other 191 nations in the UN?

My biggest hope right now is that she does some more interviews.  The first ones she did (check youtube for them) with Katie Couric are astonishing in revealing her shallow depth.  Perhaps a few more and her luster will wear off and this borderline publicity stunt by the McCain campaign to keep some attention will become more obvious for what it was...

In any case,  I respect your choice to vote for who you want to.  But please do some research into your preferred candidate. Be very very sure they are qualified to run our country, and be in control of our civil rights.  And then vote with that conscience....

 

Okay, I'm probably due for a meme too...

How did your day start off?
Long steamy shower, followed by dawdling down to my computer in my office

How old do you look?
People all seem to think I'm close to 30.

Where is the person who has your heart at this moment?
My wife, using the last of the hot water, my daughter in Missouri, and strange NRE sensations coming from Minneapolis

Are you waiting for something?
A career change?  WNBR? Burning Man?  A Rav4 with a stick shift?

What were you doing at ten last night?
IMing with the aforementioned person in Minneapolis

What made you laugh today?
Actually, I haven't yet, but the day is rather young.

Last myspace message you recieved?
That one of my friends had died.

Does anyone hate you?
I don't think so.  I know of only one person who is explicitly not speaking to me, and another who at least will be "diplomatic"

Where are your siblings?
One of the perks of being an only child is the relative paucity of siblings.

What are you up to this weekend?
A LoveTribe planning meeting tonight, probably some housework tomorrow or a workshop that interests me, and Sunday there's a LoveTribe event we're attending.

Are you happy with life?
Yes, or at least the things I am unhappy with are clearly defined and can be fixed.

Can you handle the truth?
I expect it at all times in fact, especially when it hurts

Have you ever read an entire book in one day?
Only short stuff like Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Do you believe everyone deserves a second chance?
Yes.  Compassion requires that.

Did you cry today?
Not yet, as I said the day is young, but odds are good.

Are you a jealous person?
I am, although it too is well defined and I manage it well.

Do you miss anyone?
Many.  Some of them keenly.  See the Myspace mention above.

Do you get 8 hours of sleep everyday?
Sometimes, although last night was about 6.5.

What was the last book you read?
Currently reading "Energy Medicine".  The most recent book I finished was one on backgammon. ;)

Do you hate the last girl you had a conversation with?
I don't hate anyone so if you draw a venn diagram for this one..... (big circle for everyone, with a small dot for last girl I had a conversation with.. then an empty circle to the outside of all that.....  Nope.  Apparently not)

If you were pregnant right now, what would u do?
Break the news to my daughter that she's finally getting a sibling, then desperately try to find the male equivalent of an OB/Gyn...

Is there anyone who understands your relationship status?
I think a few folks *sorta* do, although it does tend to require a lot of explaining

Is there something you always wear?
A chinese "love" kanji necklace - my equivalent of a wedding ring.

Have you ever thought about converting your religion?
I try to convert them all the time, but so many people, so little time. ;)

What's most stressing right now?
Not a lot - still dealing with unexpected news, and trying to get the IRS to give back some money they took from me

So, a friend posted this list of popular tv shows, with the instructions to put a title in bold if you've seen *every* episode, and italices if you've seen at least 1 episode.  My lack of tv watching shows up pretty clearly here, with only 4 bolds, and only 14 italics. I haven't even seen a single episode of half of the top 10.

50. Quantum Leap
49. Prison Break
48. Veronica Mars
47. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
46. Sex & The City
45. Farscape
44. Cracker
43. Star Trek
42. Only Fools and Horses
41. Band of Brothers
40. Life on Mars
39. Monty Python's Flying Circus
38. Curb Your Enthusiasm
37. Star Trek: The Next Generation
36. Father Ted
35. Alias
34. Frasier
33. CSI: Las Vegas
32. Babylon
31. Deadwood
30. Dexter
29. ER
28. Fawlty Towers
27. Six Feet Under
26. Red Dwarf
25. Futurama
24. Twin Peaks
23. The Office UK
22. The Shield
21. Angel
20. Blackadder
19. Scrubs
18. Arrested Development
17. South Park
16. Doctor Who (I caught maybe an episode or two of the very first series, but can't even recall them)
15. Heroes
14. Firefly (on DVD, never saw this on air)
13. Battlestar Galactica
12. Family Guy
11. Seinfeld (never liked it but was subjected  to a few)
10. Spaced
09. The X-Files (could use bold for the first 4 or so seasons, but gave up on it after Mulder left)
08. The Wire
07. Friends (perhaps 5 or 6 episodes)
06. 24
05. Lost
04. The West Wing
03. The Sopranos
02. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (seen perhaps 5 or 6 episodes)
01. The Simpsons

So.

Back in college I went to a lot of concerts.  I mean a lot of concerts.  I can tell this from the number of times a song will come on the radio and I can recall seeing it live.  And that's just from the ones I remember, therefore.  So I decided to assemble a list of the shows that I've seen.  About 90% of the ones below I still have my ticket stubs for.  The other 10% I have fairly clear memories of, and thus feel secure adding to the list.

With no further ado, for your perusal ( - there are some on here I'm not very proud of.  Please know that some of these were free tickets, and thus the rules of taste do not apply there- ) here is a mostly complete list of the concerts I've seen:

Amy Grant (x2, shook hands)
Andi Starr (x2, met)
Barren Cross
Blue Man Group (went backstage)
Blue Oyster Cult (x3)
Book of Love (x2)
Boston
Brave Combo
Buckwheat Zydeco
CJ Chenier
Cocteau Twins
Crowded House (was on stage singing with them)
Dead Can Dance
Debbie Harry
Depeche Mode
Dirty Dancing tour
Don Henley
Duran Duran
Fleetwood Mac
Floydian Slips (Pink Floyd cover band)
Geoff Moore and the Distance
Heart
His Name is Alive
Howard Jones (met, have pictures with him)
Icehouse
In Living Color - Lollapalooza #1
Jane's Addiction - Lollapalooza #1
Jesus Jones
Jimmy Page
Jerry Harrison
John Denver
John Gorka
Kenny Loggins
Kronos Quartet
Land Of The Blind (x2)
Loreena McKennitt (met her)
Material Issue
Men Without Hats (been in their tour bus with them)
Mylon LeFevre and Broken Heart
Neville Brothers w/Linda Ronstadt
Nitzer Ebb
OMD
One Bad Pig/ Paul Q-Pek band
Paul Simon
Peter Gabriel
Petra (x2)
Pink Floyd (x2 - Momentary Lapse, Division Bell)
Poi Dog Pondering (an in-store appearance)
Ramones
Reo Speedwagon
Richard Marx
Robert Plant
Rod Stewart
Roy Orbison
Rush
Sarah McLachlan (met her)
Souxsie and the Banshees - Lollapalooza #1
Stevie Ray Vaughan
Sting (x2)
Stryper
Styx
Suzanne Vega
The Bulgarian Women's Choir
The Cure
The Fabulous Thunderbirds
The Orb
The Sundays (met them)
The Who
They Might Be Giants
Tom Tom Club
Tone Loc
U2 (x2, Joshua Tree, Zooropa)
Violent Femmes - Lollapalooza #1
When In Rome
Whiteheart (met them, was a roadie for one show)
Willie Nelson

...go gentle on me

(edit - added a a few I'd forgotten.. there may be more coming.)

So, almost exactly one year ago, I posted the following blog to myspace:

The war machine springs to life, opens up one evil eye...

In it, I described some of the alarming aspects of Bush's 2008 fiscal budget,  which came in at nearly $3 TRILLION overall, and included $481 BILLION dollars for the Defense Department alone, a staggering $51.8 BILLION over just the prior year.

I also pointed out how the Defense Department got more than every other department in the government COMBINED.

So, that was last year.  Fast forward to today.  Bush just released his budget for the 2009 fiscal year starting in October.

Before we look at those numbers, let's survey the situation for a moment.  The most recent FOX News polls showed that a mere 33% of the voting public approved of Bush's job performance.  The Washington post just reported in a poll this week that more than eight in 10 people ranked the economy as "not so good" or "poor" and the majority believes the country has already entered into a recession.  Last week the Consumer Confidence Index dropped to 87.9, the lowest point since mid-2005 (and if we ignore the brief dip then, it's the lowest since Bush took office in 2004).  We're spending somewhere between 1 and 2 BILLION dollars every week in Iraq right now.

Clearly, things are tight right now, right?  We should be looking at trimming our deficit spending and improving the services for lower and middle class America now, right?  On the brink of a recession, our budget for 2009 should certainly have provisions for domestic spending and social services, right?

Well, let's look at Bush's plan for 2009.

The total budget he's proposing is increasing to 3.1 TRILLION dollars.  Yes, at a time when incomes are tight or down, and taxes cuts are being considered for relief, the president is planning on increasing the government's spending this year.  Well, that must be because of those social needs, right?

No.

The Defense Department is seeing another increase in its budget, to $515.4 BILLION.  This is the department that was already receiving more than everyone else combined, and he is planning on giving them a nearly $36 BILLION bonus.  And in case you didn't read my prior blog, that number doesn't include the spending in Iraq or Afghanistan, which is a separate budget item.  For that he's requesting an additional $70 BILLION dollars for "the war on terror".  So between the Defense Department itself, and the war, Bush is planning on spending $100 BILLION more than he did just this year, a time when nearly everyone in the world is asking him to pull troops back and cutting down the spending.

Can we at least look forward to some good news on the homefront?

No.

While overall spending is increasing 6.1 percent in his plan, cuts would be made in a number of domestic programs, with lower allotments for health and human services, and labor and transportation, among others.  He's cutting flood control programs, wildfire prevention.  This year marks the beginning of 5 years of cuts to Medicaid and Medicare, ultimately stripping $196 billion from programs that provide health care to millions of poor and elderly.  The budget includes what appears to be increases for the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), but are really just restorations of previous cuts.

We're adding a $410 BILLION deficit this year, and another $407 BILLION projected next year.  That's us spending $817 BILLION we don't have......  Put another way, his plan puts us another $2650 in the hole for each and every man, woman, and child in this country.  So eventually, each of us will need to cough up that difference in taxes just to get back the already horrendous level of debt we started at this year. (a mere $30,289 owed for every person in our country).  Would your bank or credit card company let you pull a stunt like that?  Already deep in the red and planning on overspending even more?  Not likely.  Yet that's the way we're running this country.  With no plans to get us back in the black either.  And to think people used to fear the notion of "tax and spend Democrats".  At least in that case someone in our country (other than giant defense industry companies) was seeing the benefits of those programs. Somehow we got the worst of all possible worlds: A "tax and spend warmonger" where we go deep into debt for the benefit of invading and occupying a sovereign country and causing the death of nearly 4000 of our citizens, not to mention the death of over a million Iraqi civilians. 

When will we start to take care of our people? Our land?  What do we need to do to bring compassion back into our government?  This to me is a clarion call to bringing some reform to our nation - we need progressive, compassionate leadership.  We need to focus on us again.  We need to stop this tyrannical folly and restore intelligence and forethought to how we conduct ourselves.  Let's stop spending our children's money on this war and bring prudence back.

Please vote this year.  Vote for sanity and vision.  We clearly lack either right now.

Portland in general is a rather overlooked city.  When people (from elsewhere, obviously) list off cities that come to mind, I suspect Portland is typically rather far down the list.  But it apparently has a lot going for it.  Headline News, Travel & Leisure and CNN.com spent three months collecting 60,000 votes from people about their favorite cities, and Portland makes quite a few cameos:

Flea markets

1. New Orleans, Louisiana

2. Charleston, South Carolina

3. Portland, Oregon

Farmers' markets

1. Seattle

2. Portland, Oregon

3. Philadelphia

Access to outdoors

1. Portland, Oregon

2. Denver, Colorado

3. Honolulu, Hawaii

Cleanliness

1. Minneapolis/St. Paul

2. Portland, Oregon

3. San Diego, California

Public parks and spaces

1. Portland, Oregon

2. Minneapolis/St. Paul

3. Chicago

If this were the Olympics, that's 2 gold medals, 2 silvers, and a bronze. ;)  But what's this about flea markets?  I'm not sure I can name a single one (unless they mean the little kitschy resale shops?)

In a new telephone poll, conducted by the Associated Press and Ipsos and released today, President Bush and Congress have recorded some staggeringly low approval ratings, breaking records in several cases.

Most of the numbers are reported are "approval" ratings, but I think that lessens the impact of how unhappy the public is, so let's also look at the flipsides of the figures.

Only 31 percent of Americans approved of the job that President Bush is doing.  That means a shocking 69% disapprove of his actions.  This is clear evidence that it's not just split down party lines like usual.. In fact 31% of Republicans came out against Bush (in addition to an unsurprising 81% of independents and 93% of Democrats).  Nearly a third of the president's own party can't even claim to support his actions now..

This is a record low for Bush, and is coming close to the ALL-TIME WORST EVER approval ratings for a president, a record set by President Truman 56 years ago, who had an approval rating of 23% at that time.

Bush dropped another 3 percent in his handling of the economy, breaking another record from his prior low of 37% approval to only 34%.  Two-thirds of our country thinks the president is clearly not doing the job for the economy.

71% of Americans disapprove of his handling of Iraq, a number that is a couple points better his worst record only because he has finally [and very reluctantly] agreed to a plan to eventually reduce the troop levels there (and actually, the reductions themselves are only going back to the headcount we had earlier this year).  So here at least public pressure appears to have produced some result, however small.

64% of Americans disapprove of how he is handling terrorism and foreign affairs, the one thing he seems to be devoting his time to.  This is only a single point better than his record low ever.  If his primary focus - the internationally posturing and meddling that he has dragged our country into - are rejected by nearly 2/3 of us, how can the things he's neglecting be fairing?

Congress is suffering from all this as well.  Bush's repeated vetoes and threats of vetoes have rendered them unable to do anything effectively, and their approval ratings have dropped to a shocking 22%.

What is the lesson here?

Americans very clearly have a sense that our government isn't doing the job we want it to.  The last congressional election was a huge turnover toward Democrats in a frantic attempt to defuse the damage being done by President Bush.  Even Republicans defected in huge numbers, in both the voting population and the offices themselves. (For example Jim Jeffords of Vermont left the Republican party shortly after the 2000 elections to become an independent senator in Vermont, and took the state, and the Democrats even chose to help him get elected).

Our country has many very serious issues that are being horribly neglected while our money, troops, and attention are focused overseas.  The public is totally fed up with this...  we're having another wave of economic problems, the healthcare and education crises continue to escalate, and only now are we beginning to grasp the implications and consequences of how we've abused the environment.  But the people we elected to address these issues have had to deal with a rogue president and an entrenched establishment that has been pushing its own agenda for many years.

What we need now are candidates who are willing to be accountable to the interests, needs, and demands of their constituents.  Right now it really doesn't even matter what party they are.  The Republicans are still reeling from what a tragic choice re-electing Bush was, and even they are eager to see him gone as soon as possible.  But we have another year before we can address the presidential issue.

Our governmental system tends to work by people starting in local positions, then moving up to the state level, then finally to the national government.  It usually takes years for people to move up through those ranks.  So the angst we are feeling now is due in some part to poor choices in candidates made years or even decades ago.  Many of the candidates then were elected due to "character issues" where they made themselves look good by besmirching the credibility of their opponents.  Others were elected because they were strong proponents for some cause or another.

What got left out was accountability.

The solution to a government that serves the need for the people it represents is to actually listen to and honor the needs of those people.  If you hire a cowboy or renegade to get the job done, they might do what you wanted, but then they are going to be more focused on what they want, and you'd better hope you can stomach their plans.  But if we only elect candidates that are committed to going to work on the things we care about, then we can be far more effective at improving life in this country, and by extension, everywhere else.  Picture how amazing it would be, if we had such people at every level of our government!

This isn't about party or platform.  This is about finding candidates that do what needs to be done, and those needs are determined by us telling them what's important.  So confront the candidates you're considering, particularly in your local and state offices.  Make them demonstrate they are seeking to be elected to represent our agendas, not theirs.  Get them to commit to listening to you and reflecting the mandates of their constituents.  Then support them in being elected and getting their job done.  Start now - today - and we can get back to making this a land that works, and we're proud of. 

The only moderately inspired name for this blog comes from your choice of 2 different poems by Thomas Hood, circa 1844

"November"
No sun—no moon
no morn—no noon,
No dawn—no dusk—no proper time of day,
No warmth—no cheerfulness—no healthful ease,
No road, no street, no t’ other side the way,
No comfortable feel in any member—
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,
November!

-and/or-

"No!"
No sun--no moon!
No morn--no noon--
No dawn--no dusk--no proper time of day--
No sky--no earthly view--
No distance looking blue--
No road--no street--no "t' other side the way"--
No end to any Row--
No indications where the Crescents go--
No top to any steeple--
No recognitions of familiar people--
No courtesies for showing 'em--
No knowing 'em!
To traveling at all--no locomotion,
No inkling of the way--no notion--
No go--by land or ocean--
No mail--no post--
No news from any foreign coast--
No park--no ring--no afternoon gentility--
No company--no nobility--
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member--
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees.
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds.
November!

Some poet purist might explain those are really the same poem, but I found them listed under different names in a few places. Also noted as being the words spoken in the Art of Noise song "Opus 4"

Okay, I've decided that OpenID isn't ready for primetime yet, so I'm making an LJ account mostly for reading purposes. I'll still probably post my blogs on MySpace: http://blog.myspace.com/brianbloom