U.S. Senate candidates

So far this year we seem to be having some very interesting candidates on both sides of the aisle running for the senate.
On the democrat side we have a candidate in Connecticut that has talked about his career in Vietnam even though he never left the shores of the United States. This should not be a surprise as he would not be the first politician that talks about a military career that never took place. If we just go back to the previous president he has never been able to justify where he was during his period as a reserve pilot. So this seems to be the ordinary, not the unusual, thing with politicians. They like to take credit for stuff that they never did.
Let’s turn to the republican side and look at some of their candidates.
In Utah a conservative incumbent that had supported the bailout of the banks proposed by President Bush was voted out. In his place a tea party choice was elected to run as candidate next November.
In Kentucky Rand Paul, a libertarian, was elected in the primary. He is also a choice of the tea party movement. The interesting part of this is that Mr. Paul, right after the primary, starting stating his points of view, which are not in the mainstream of the country. He says that if he would have had to vote for the Civil Rights Act in 1964 he would have voted for most of it, except for the fact that private business cannot discriminate who walks through their doors. This is a fundamental condition as African Americans were denied entrance at privately owned businesses such as Wolworth. Mr. Paul compares this part of the bill to the idea that owners are entitled to decide if customers can bring guns to a privately owned business.
This comparison makes absolutely no sense at all, as he is comparing gun possession with race discrimination. Other senators are now saying that he was very naive with the “liberal media”, and that he is not a professional politician, so he needs coaching.
Nevada has also an unusual candidate. Sue Lowden said that we should be able to reduce health care by bartering. She made a statement that said that we should be able, like in the past, to barter with doctors by given them chickens. First she stood by her statement and then, at the last debate, she said that she was not standing by it, and that she had been taken out of context. I really admire her point of view, but I don’t think that my doctor would accept bartering. I don’t chickens or painting her house or office is going to do the trick.
Now republicans say that Blumenthal, the Connecticut democratic candidate for senate, and his “misspeaking” about is role in Vietnam, and Ron Paul’s idea of doing away with part of the Civil Rights Act are the same. I have to disagree because the Civil Rights Act has served us well for almost half a century, allowing the same rights to African Americans that the white population have enjoyed since the founding of this nation. The Vietnam conflict has been over for over 30 years. It left nothing but bitterness and pain, 58 thousand Americans dead, over 1 million Vietnamese dead, and a memorial on the Washington DC Mall.
I’m not going even include in this comparison the Nevada candidate because she must live in a different world than the rest of us. I don't think I have to add anything to what she has already said.
Let’s hope that people at the voting booth can vote for the USA and not for the divisions that have had a stronghold on our government for the many years.

Family values

As we see the people who tried to impeach President Clinton in the ‘90s resign in disgrace we stop and think what really happened to these people.
Many of them were elected in the midterm elections of ’94 with the slogan of Contract with America, and with the concept of “family values”, as if it belonged to a particular party.
I always look at the impeachment that took place over a decade ago as the drug dealers being jury of a drug addict. My savior said two thousand years ago “he who’s without sin cast the first stone”.
Many of the members of congress involved in the impeachment had children out of wedlock like Henry Hyde; others were having affairs during the impeachment process such as the Former Speaker of the house Newt Gingrich, and Congressman Bob Barr.
Now we here that Congressman Mark Souder from Indiana resigned for having an extra marital affair, even though a matter of which he is not proud of, at least we can say he has the honor of making the right decision based on his conservative beliefs, not like other members that campaigned in ’94 under the same “values” and have had affairs such as Senator Ensign from Nevada and Senator David Vitter from Louisiana.
The party that thinks they own the “family value” label will have to do a better job in not only campaigning about it but actually living it.

The explosion of the oil rig and its implications

After weeks of the explosion of the oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico we still see on TV the disaster that it is causing to the environment with no end of the spill in the foreseen future.
We have had BP first say that the leakage was 5000 barrels a day when it looks that in reality it was more like 70000 barrels a day.
In the meantime the chairman of BP has said that this is a minor problem.
Rush Limbaugh said first that the sea will take care of the leakage, then a few days later he said “where is the oil” referring to oil spillage hitting the coast of the states on the Gulf of Mexico, and lately he says that the Sierra Club should be paying for the damages that BP, Transocean and Halliburton have caused, alleging that institutions like the Sierra Club have caused deep oil exploration. He is not the only media figure to say "where is the oil" as Britt Humes has said the same. They should go to Key West and to Louisiana to see oil washing on the shores.
Unfortunately you have politicians of both sides of the aisle who still believe that drilling off the coasts of the US is safe.
Americans have been misled for a long time into believing that the only way of having or maintaining a certain standard of living is by destroying the habitat in which we live in by burning fossil fuels provoking global warming, polluting the seas and rivers that surround us and cutting forests that produce oxygen.
The only way that we will survive in this world is by finding alternatives such as solar power and wind turbines.
It is appalling that the United States cannot break this vice with oil, when other countries that are not considered industrialized are using other combustibles such as ethanol from sugar cane for Brazil and Natural gas for Argentina to fuel automobiles.
I always tell my kids that addictions and bad habits are meant to be broken. The addiction is so strong here that we are willing to bankrupt the country into wars just for oil, not realizing that in reality we are funding the same “enemies” that we are fighting by purchasing the oil that they produce.
We are stuck in the past holding on to a technology of the mid 20th century instead of taking the leadership and moving the country into the 21st century, and not allowing another opportunity to go to waste.

A friend running for office

A friend of mine who lives in Maryland is running to a House seat as a republican. This seat is in the hands of a democrat in a district that tends to vote democrat. I do not have a crystal ball but he does not seem to have the best of chances for a win.
When I read what he stands for it reminds me pretty much what most republicans will likely say: lower business taxes, lower capital gains taxes, and tax reduction and simplification.
Everyone who reads that would pretty much agree with it because it makes a lot of sense, who wouldn’t like to pay lower taxes.
He goes on to talk about smaller government. That also sounds like something that I can agree with as well.
But, and there is always a but, we tend to forget that the largest growth of federal government in the last 40 years happened in the 80s under Ronald Reagan, and then with George W Bush, with not only an exorbitant growth of government but of huge deficits, primarily because of lowering of taxes, after inheriting surpluses . And of course the biggest cause of those deficits was the almost doubling in defense budget size plus two wars. So my point here is that you cannot bake the cake and eat, we cannot have lower taxes AND big military expenditures. The US spends 49% of the world’s military expenses. More than all the other industrialized nations combined. We spent close to 700 billion dollars during 2009 between the war on terror and the Department of Defense.
A good friend of mine, that I respect and value his opinion, says that I do not understand, care to understand or respect conservative views.
As much as try to I just cannot understand them.
I understand my friend’s view even though I disagree with him, as I like to base my opinions on facts. And the facts do not back the conservative views. Probably because they are not really conservative views but neo-cons.
Conservatives like Eisenhower and Goldwater would not belong in today's republican party.

The Arizona Law against "undocumented" people

I have been tempted to write about the new law in Arizona, and to be honest, I have been biting my tongue, but I can’t hold it back any longer.
This touches me to the core as a Hispanic and as an immigrant myself.
First of all, what a joke. I am being both facetious and serious at the same time. Where the hell is this country going to? I love when people say that they are against illegal immigration. Let’s be honest they are really against Hispanics; they are against the largest groups of immigrants that have been coming to this country for the last 20 or 30 years.
But why are Hispanics still coming even though white Americans are against them, or they say they are against them. They are against the fact that they have to educate their kids, provide them with health care, and the fact that we are in a downturn and jobs have dried up.
But I wonder if the vast majority of those who are against Latin Americans are willing to pay 5 dollars for a head of lettuce, are willing to work in the farms of this country, clean hotel rooms, and do a lot of the dirty work that the average American is not willing to do.
People will keep coming even though legislators always go against the people that cross the border. They are easy targets to demagogue about because until recently they didn’t vote.
It’s always easier to step on the weakest. They are blamed for the violence on the border.
Why don’t we start looking at the cause of the violence on the border?
There is a small minority that is involved in the trafficking of drugs; it is not the majority of undocumented people. Most of them come to make a living, to give their love ones a better future.
We have gone after countries like Colombia, Bolivia and recently Afghanistan to control the poppy production, but we are not willing to look in the mirror. The problem is not the rest of the world that is trying to sell us or smuggle the drugs. The drugs come here because we are the biggest consumer of drugs in the world, we cannot get enough of them, from the junkie in the streets of any city in the US to celebrities like Rush Limbaugh.
That is for the drug side of it. As far as the main reason why Latin Americans, and other countries as well, are coming to this country is because employers LOVE cheap labor. They rather pay somebody who is undocumented, doesn’t ask the employer for health care coverage, doesn’t care about working conditions or being part of a union. It’s music to any business ears.
If legislators would be honest about controlling the flux of undocumented people they should go after employers with high fines. No wall or fence will ever stop people from coming here. The high rewards are worth the risk.
I didn't even want to address the fact that the police will have to use their judgment to discern who is an undocumented and who is not. Just with that I can write a new blog.

Honor the victims of Kent St. University

This week we pay tribute to Jeffrey Glen Miller, Allison Krause, William Knox Schroeder and Sandra Lee Scheuer.
These names don’t seem to mean anything except for the fact that they were gunned down by the Ohio National Guard in a repressive act order by President Richard Nixon in May of 1970.
These students were doing nothing but exercising their right to demonstrate (included in the first amendment) against the policies taken by the Nixon Administration to extend the war in Vietnam to neighboring Cambodia.
Candidate Nixon had campaigned in 1968 under the premise of ending the conflict in what he called the "Lyndon Johnson war" in Vietnam. But in May of 1970 his administration decided to expand that war.
These students felt that they had no interest in keep on sending American kids to a region they new nothing about to a conflict that was not in the interest of this country.
The students that were demonstrating were unarmed, the Ohio National Guard starting shooting at the crowd with no respect to life.
There were 4 killed (previously mentioned), 9 who were injured, that fortunately survived the incident and many others were left physically but not emotionally unharmed, as this was an example of how our elected officials would try to silence its citizens.
I think of the 60s as a great period, as it was a time of great growth in this country. Although I wasn’t living here at the time, and I was a child, it showed how the younger generation confronted publicly the previous generation, and their policies, as they were in the mindset that this country should send its youth to fight, even though the reasons were not justifiable.
Unfortunately many times with growth comes pain, as there was a lot of blood shed during that period, with figures like President Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy gunned down, but the youth of the United States went from being kids to adults.
It would have been nice if today’s youth would do the same with the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, two conflicts that this country has no part of.

Matthew chapter 5

The last few times we have been meeting with the person that I am trying to disciple he seems to be stuck in the idea that the New Testament is a story of some events that happened two thousand years ago.
As I was reading Matthew chapter 5, I cannot find anything that Jesus says that could not be applied today.
Regardless of the fact that I am a Christian, I try to step back and read the wisdom of those verses.
I love the beatitudes, I find them moving. They give me comfort, peace, strength and hope. I feel the love of God, his compassion and his reassurance in them.
I also find some of those commandments to be extremely challenging, especially when he tells us to love our enemies, not that there isn’t any truth in it, but it is still challenging.
I love when Jesus talks about settling matters with your adversary. I feel these verses talk to me personally.
And even though, as I said earlier that Jesus challenges us, you can feel God’s love at the end of the day.
He is a patient father teaching what is right for us, just like we try to do with our own kids, strict but fair, giving us the base from which we build the rest of our lives, with a structure, and knowing that God is always with us, until the end of the ages.

John Kooreman

This week we said goodbye to a fellow coworker and father in law of one of the office brokers. He was a good Christian.
What is a good Christian? Is it somebody who leads a good life? Is it somebody who does good deeds?
These are often the wrong answers to what a good Christian is. You can have a good life and be a good citizen and not be a good Christian or even be a Christian.
Being a good Christian is somebody that accepts Jesus Christ as his lord and savior, and loves his neighbor as he loves himself.
That is what John Kooreman was.
He would wear his religion on his sleeve. Tried to a live a Christian life based on what the bible said, and use every single opportunity to present the gospel, regardless of who he was dealing with.
He came from a solid Christian background, lived through hard times during the depression, but always kept the faith that Jesus Christ was at his side.
He served as an elder, deacon and a Sunday school teacher at Midland Park Christian Reformed Church.
I will always remember him for sending postcards of encouragement to people who were going through low periods in their life and needed support, for making phone calls and talking to people who needed somebody to talk to.
My friendship time was not a very long one because I only met him 5 years ago, but his presence, his humor and his optimism will stay with those of us who had the fortune to have crossed paths with him.
He is safely in the arms of his beloved savior, safe from the pain of the illness that made him suffer during the last few months.
God bless you, John.