SMALL BUSINESS STIMULUS BILL PASSES SENATE

Let's pop the champaign corks. The small stimulus bill finally passed the senate fillibuster. The vote was 61 for and 38 against. Now the bill goes to the President's desk. The bill will cut taxes on new payrolls for small business and encourage banks to loan to businesses and contains investment tax credits. I feel a whole lot better about the "record" of the Obama administration with this particular piece of legeslation passed. As I said in the last blog, I think the President needs to somehow "appear" flexable, and yet still manage to get his agenda passed. I was just on the phone to my [Christian] brother and even he seems to agree with the provisions of this bill. He is concerned about all of our accrewed debt. However I'm not that worried if the economy continues to improve and Obama keeps his spending freeze promises.

Elizabeth Warren, a former Harvard Law professor and chairman of the congressional oversight committee, will be named on Friday to the post of Consumer Czar who reports directly to the President on consumer fraud and other abuses. The thing with this appointment is that we have been hearing about it for months and I was beginning to think it would never happen. After all when was the last time this President appointed anybody "tough" in any position that wasn't a pawn of the corporations. At least we progressives have a chairman we can be proud of and can look forward to do productive accomplishments in consumer affairs.

But there is negative news still. Housing foreclosures for last month hit an all time high. This can't be good news. More and more people are feeling comfortable about walking away from their mortgages. On the Thom Hartman program they said the people get back only nine percent of the money they send to government in the form of taxes. This is opposed to 32% in France and 27% in Germany and even 14% in Canada. Indications are that if the people got more visable pay-backs in services, perhaps they'd be more comfortable paying a slightly higher rate. Of course the poverty level has risen to 14%. If John Mc Cain were president we could blame the Republicans. But I'm not sure we can do that now. They are now saying that we are pretty much doomed to see poverty rates this high or higher throughout this decade.

Anthropologists say now that we and Neanderthol man have a comon ancestor in a creature called "Heidelburg man", which shows up in Spain, of all places. They say that the differences in Neanderthol man is not in the frontal lobe, as you would expect, but rather in the temporal and periatal lobes, because the skull king of slants back and down, rather than the modern "dome" shape. There is this cave with thirty partiall or complete skeletons. Apparently the last vestages of Neanderthol man was about 140,000 years ago. That isn't that long considering Neanderthols were around nearly a million years. Neanderthols were almost exclusively hunters of big game, and seemed unable to adopt to new methods, or fishing, as their plentiful game subsided. The waves of the ice age in Europe became increasingly severe. People like to say that adversity makes man better. While it's true that "survival goes to the fittest" still something can be said for diversity. You never know where the next genious idea will come from. The Semaritans of the Bible clung jealously to their Jewish sacrificial laws, and also laws on race and intermarrying. Today the Semaritans are so inbred they will soon become extinct. One can say, as Christians are wont to, "adversity is good". But the same could be said of Evil, too. Evil overcomes its adversity and refines its evil. Bacterial strains that survive disinfectants become even stronger than they were before, and harder to erridicate. (Selah)

I would like at this time to do a first draft of my piece on John Lennon that I plan to submit to Dr. Levy for next month’s newspaper. No doubt I’ll be changing it around a little to accomidate his biases and my own faulty sense of taste. As you may know, John Lennon and I share the trademark of low self-esteem. In Lennon’s case it was because of the loss of his Mother at an early age. He was constantly seeking out some superior to tell him what do do, some guru. You saw this in the case of the Maharishi, and after this it was Magic Alex, whom he was captivated with for a while as some electronic genious. But in both cases he became highly disillusioned and disenchanted. In my own case I haven’t caught my own pastor fooling around with women, however there are the cases of Ted Haggard and Larry Craig and others where you are somehow supposed to reconcile their wanton behavior with the policy of Calvary Anaheim, where if you mess up you’re pretty much “gone”. There is no place for you in the church. The two artists the Beatles most emulated were Chuck Berry and Freddy Cannon. Many will acknowledge the first but I seem to be the only one who sees the obvious Freddy Cannon connection in the Beatles’ early music. As to Lennon’s writing, Jealousy is an underlying theme. John Lennon I see as kind of a male Leslie Gore, who wrote all these “romantic soap opera” songs in the ‘sixties, each one with a whole story line. These are songs like “You “Can’t Do That”, “I’ll Cry Instead”, “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party” and “No Reply”. Other songs in this vein are "When I Get Home", "I'll Be Back", "Baby's in Black", "Yes it is", "You're Gona Lose That Girl" and "Run for your Life", which has the classic line in it, "You know that I'm a wicked guy and I was born with a jealous mind". In my own case when I was married I did accuse my wife of playing around behind my back. Of course, particularly in the first couple years, I had a few sexual flings myself. But being a man I saw these as not indicative of anything. But when a woman even hints at it, well that's another matter. I’m just that type of personality. But you can divide the life of John Lennon into three basic section. There are the early rocker years, the Psychedelic Lennon, and the “House Husband” era. Oddly the two worst albums did in the ‘seventies were “Rock and Roll” and “Walls and Bridges”. These two albums have in common that they were done during Lennon’s “Lost weekend” that lasted a whole year and a half. He spend much of that time right here in L A. My favorite Lennon is the psychedelic Lennon. Here is a John who is constantly curious about everything and was always seeking new sound effects and things the Beatles could do to push the envelope, electronicly. I do the same thing both in my BASIC programs and in my programs in Google Sketch. I’m always pushing the envelope and doing something I haven’t done before. John would take inspiration from anything that was going on, just as my writings are influenced from often very recent news from off the wall sources. Lennon liked to incorporate inspirations from a box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes to a poster on the wall, to various radio broadcasts. But most importantly John Lennon and I had the same approach to religion. We were open minded and would listen to any source that seemed to offer some spiritual truth I hadn’t been exposed to, as long as they made some kind of sense. But the minute they cease to make sense I, like Lennon, would turn and attack. Both Lennon and I were fans of Bob Dylan. He is eminently quotable. But after Bob Dylan got saved as a Born Again Christian, the trouble was we could not be sure whether the songs still came from Dylan’s heart or whether they were just regurtitations of Church doctrine on obscure things like “spiritual warfare”. The lyrics had a form of Dylanism but the music no longer seemed to come from the heart but took on a parodied, synthesized quality. Lennon picked up on this, perhaps quicker than I did. He wrote vicious songs attacking Dylan’s Christianity mocking the idea of a person “finding Jesus” (as though he were missing) Lennon of course was all about “Love”. I admire Lennon’s love and peace stands although there are times where he would do things I wouldn’t. I would not pose nude on a record album that people actually buy, with my wife. I wouldn’t have a “bed in for peace” on my honeymoon. One detractor who shall go nameless says “John Lennon only was as famous as he was because he was cut down in his prime. Had he been allowed to live he might well have become old and boring just like every other has been from the “sixties”. In a perverse defense of this line of thinking, after 1972 John’s subsequent albums did become rather stale and predictable, and they all had this trade-mark re-virb engeneering. But it wasn’t the high tech ‘eighties re-virb but the old pase ‘seventies style of vocal revert. Often the chords became quite predictable, to the point of being almost trite. I would like to conclude by saying that if I had had a better self image I never would have become a Born Again Christian, because basically it had nothing to offer to me in a positive way. The difference between myself and John Lennon is that John already had this “Image” of peace and love and all when the Jesus Movement hint. I was still searching for my identity so was more vulnerable to it. But we both had in common that we were willing to try new things and accept input from a wide variety of sources.