Marc Sullivan is a democrat.

Or at least he used to be.

I now disagree profoundly with the party on positions that its leadership and most vocal and influential constituencies have come to decree — since 1972, anyway — as litmus tests.

I always found the democrat’s position on abortion counter-intuitive. Defend to the last man the rights of every differently-abled physically-challenged transgendered albino little person of color with a speech impediment in their native language and no desire to learn English to be free of second-hand smoke from three states away, but ignore the most fundamental right of all – the right to life. Fight against all kinds of discrimination but never you mind about discriminating against Christians. Choose whatever you want to do with your body but forget about choice in schools, where your tax dollars go, and what happens to the money from your paycheck under the heading “FICA.” When you think of the “big tent” the democrats have been it makes you wonder how they got there. It is no surprise they might become an endangered species. Mark goes on to say:

This space hasn’t agreed with every position taken by Pat Moynihan, but has always respected and quite enjoyed the illustrious statesman from New York, whose loss to the Senate is rendered all the more grievous by the choice voters made on his successor.

Hillary Rodham Clinton. I thought only Republicans had three names.

Though I go only by two names I have been a Republican since way before I could vote or fit into Florsheims. I think Capitalism run amok is letting China into the WTO. A strong national defense and tough foreign policy is better than a thousand treaties, especially if the treaties involve things you can’t see like air. I used to smoke big topedo-shaped cigars to keep bugs and liberals away. Sure I care about the environment – I want to open my door every day to pick up my copy of the Washington Times and have the world still be there. A girl once broke up with me because she found out I voted for Bob Dole. That was after he became the poster boy for geriatric erectile dysfunction. Why am I a Republican? Because they don’t think the government can fix everything, they know how to win wars (they just can’t finish them), they believe individual responsibility, and generally speaking they are not pro-abortion. They understand and appreciate the Christian ethos that this country is founded on rather than discount it as archaic and backward. Oh, and they give me rides on their big boats.

Just think what a pickle we’d be in if Al Gore was President. The Chinese would be sending their laundry our way, he’d be snuggling up with Arafat, and he’d be funding research for vehicles that run on alternative fuels, like cars that run on Republicans.

My trip got cancelled.

As a result I am here for the weekend. I’ll have to do some reading and see what to blog about. I think we should all ask Alexandra why she hasn’t been blogging lately over at Oremus!

This is what I would characterize as a problem.

A former cop from Siberia has said he is Jesus since 1989. That’s only part of the problem. The other part of the problem is that people believe him.

“It’s all very complicated,” he starts quietly. “But to keep things simple, yes, I am Jesus Christ. That which was promised must come to pass. And it was promised in Israel 2,000 years ago that I would return, that I would come back to finish what was started. I am not God. And it is a mistake to see Jesus as God. But I am the living word of God the Father. Everything that God wants to say, he says through me.”

Someone please get the devil out of this guy! They call him “Vissarion Christ” – pretty scary.

“We’re not allowed to smoke, or swear, or drink,” laughs Larissa, a glowing 28-year-old mother of three who arrived here from Moscow with her mother as an 18-year-old. “Everything is banned here. We’re not allowed to do anything except fall in love.”

Sounds like Orem, Utah to me!

I’ve got to geek-out for just a minute

and tell you that I find it much easier to follow all the blogs with NetCaptor. It installs and uses IE as the browser engine but puts all the sites you open in a single program with tabs to arrange the windows so you can click back and forth between sites with relative ease. You can save all your favorite blogs as a group and open them all at once when you want to read. You can even reload ALL the pages at once to get updates. It is worth a look. Unfortunately, they want money for it. Maybe as St. Blog’s Parish we can get an institutional discount?