After a decade of GOP rule in Congress, 8 years of it with GOP control of the executive branch, the GOP Whitehouse now requests a $700 billion bailout for banking institutions which will be paid for by taxpayers.

As usual, Dumbya wants to rush this bill through Congress during an election year because (and I quote) Bush says, "We're going to work with Congress to get a bill done quickly. This is a big package because it was a big problem." Really? A big problem? (as usual, Dumbya didn't give any details because he doesn't know any of the details and his earpiece can't process the words fast enough for him to repeat whatever excuses his masters have for this stupid bail out) No doubt this "problem" was caused by the Democrats who haven't been in control of anything but their own potty breaks until 2 years ago.

The "problem" couldn't stem from the fact that the GOP has been dismantling safeguards and permitting corporate America to run amok for 10 years, could it? Naw, everybody knows that whatever the GOP does is in the best interests of the American people. Afterall, ALL Republican politicians are good ol' Christians. Christians wouldn't do anything bad.

Back to my main complaint. Why should ALL taxpayers foot the bill for the thousands of idiots who, having bloated self-entitlement perceptions, took out mortgages they shouldn't have from unfettered banking institutions who always intended to up the flexible rates?

Think about it for a minute. Banker says, here John Smith, have some money. Yeah, you don't have the income for it, but we'll "loan" to you the money for a house and then let you pay it back at an irresistably low rate. However we'll make the interest rate flexible based on [insert financial mumbo jumbo jargon here]. Now, sign on the dotted line. Oh, don't worry, your rates will never go up THAT much, they might even go down (wink wink).

In short, mortgage lenders suckered the typical self-indulgent low-wage American into low-rate mortgages, raised interest rates (as they'd planned to do all along), and, now that these low wage earners can't pay their mortgages and these financial institutions can't collect even a fraction of their payouts, they want Uncle Sam (via taxpayers) to bail them out of their situation caused by bad (get richer quicker) business practices.

But then again, the deficit that Bush has run up (after inheriting and destroying the Clinton surplus) is already at 10+ trillion dollars and this "bail out" will only add another trillion. What's another trillion on your great-grandkids' future tax bills?

Look at the bright side, as they are going now, the dollar won't be around much longer anyway and we can expect the rest of the world to give us handouts (like North Korea and all third world countries get). Afterall, Bush has started making nuclear (pronounced nuke-you-ler) bombs again. America can just aim at rich countries and extort money, food, etc., in exchange for NOT being a terrorist nation.

U.S. returned control of Anbar to the Iraqis...only, we haven't really. We haven't left, we aren't planning on removing any of our military forces. At best, this is an election year stunt by a lame duck president to make it appear that his "invade an oil-rich country and kill everyone in sight" policy is working.

We've basically given the Iraqis the key to one of their own cities but changed all the locks first so the key is useless.

In other news, the GOP is toning down its partying (I mean, their election convention) while awaiting damage reports concerning mighty Gustav. Meanwhile, no word yet on just why God chose the week of the GOP convention to attack America with a storm--maybe Pat Robertson can tell us.

Then again, maybe not. Afterall Patty predicted a terrorist attack for 2007, claiming God told him that the attack would affect millions of people and that it would take place sometime after September 2007. Patty hinted that it would be nuclear, "or something like that", but said that God wasn't clear.

Then in January 2008, Patty said that there would be worldwide violence and a U.S. recession in 2008 leading to a stockmarket crash by 2010. Worldwide violence??!! Really? He didn't even have the balls to say "worldwide violence would continue" in 2008; he just said it would happen as if it was just beginning. Meanwhile, experts have been warning us of the coming recession since 2006.

Maybe ol' Patty needs to consult his magic book of love and redemption, the Bible, rather than sit in a dark room and listen to mysterious whispers on the night breeze while Rev. Ted Haggard goes down on him. He might actually start preaching forgiveness rather than blathering hateful incitements to violence and predicting doom and gloom.

Meanwhile, I hope Gustav doesn't do too much damage. I'd hate to think of all those GOPers having to deal with feelings of guilt about the desolation in the south while they attend the GOP afterparty.

And, oh yeah, I almost forgot: FREE IRAQ! Now there is a bumper sticker for your Volvo.

As if this election year couldn't get weirder for America's backward thinking bigots, the Republican candidate has now picked a woman for a running mate.

This means that bigoted white males all across America now have a choice between voting for a black man with a white VP or for a white man with a woman VP--either way, their prejudices prohibit them from voting for either.

Meanwhile, a certain fundamentalist type of pervert won't be able to vote Republican either. They're everywhere. These are the allegedly christian, values voters who do not believe women are eligible for positions of power. Some months ago, a letter written by a 14 year old girl was printed in my local paper. She stated that she believed that a woman should not be president or hold other offices of power over men. She claimed this was part of her religious faith. When several people wrote responses kindly encouraging the girl to consider some examples of successful female leaders in history as well as currently around the world today, several others wrote rebukes against them for "attacking" the girl and her "good christian morals".

As much as I'd like to portray these white male bigots and religious perverts as fringe groups who do not matter, the truth is they are found in abundance throughout America and are active voters. They are the people who work against sanity in government, who would outlaw the option of abortion, would imprison gays (or outright kill them), who believe religious freedom means christian theocracy, who claim to hate the sin and love the sinner but end up hating anything/one who differs from their world view.

They are your family, friends and neighbors, and they are not sane people. In fact, they are about to become very desperate people who will feel cornered. And, cornered desperate people with irrational world views WILL act out violently against the thing/people they fear.

Be forewarned; the whackos are about to go apesh*t on us.

So the christian story goes that Adam and Eve were the first people. They were perfect, sinless, and had face to face fellowship with god (or as face to face as anyone can get with a faceless, bodiless, all-knowing, all-powerful being).

And still, Adam and Eve chose to disobey god by disbelieving the word of this all-knowing, all-powerful being in whose presence only goodness and righteousness can exist. Go figure.

Anyway, assuming that that is all clear and understandable. Adam and Eve were then thrown out of Eden's paradise, the whole universe was cursed, and Adam and Eve were damned as well as all of future Mankind.

Now, ask yourselves why! Why were Adam and Eve created perfectly only to willfully (or through Satan's trickery) throw it all away for a taste of forbidden fruit? I mean, their actions (and reasoning) are the actions (and reasoning) of sinful Mankind, not the actions (and reasoning) of perfect people who've been living in the glorious presence of god. If they willfully sinned, then they weren't the perfect beings god claims to have created; if they were tricked by Satan, then they still weren't the perfect beings god claims to have created--or, at best, they weren't technically at fault.

How about asking yourselves another why?! If Adam and Eve, while still perfect and sinless, were given the opportunity to sin or not to sin, why are the rest of us born into sin? Is it passed down through our genes? Is it some sort of spiritual genetics? If we're all individuals and to be held accountable for ourselves, then why are we also held accountable for Adam and Eve's sin? Oh, I know the pat answer that most christian theologians support. Man, like god, is composed of 3 parts--soul, spirit, and body. (I say "like god" because after the Fall of Man, the ever constant, unchangeable god formed a male body inside a virgin, and after the body's death and resurrection, god formed a spirit to dwell within believers. Nevermind that that means god created man in his future image rather than his "at the time of creation" image. It's a god thing, apparently, to be completely contradictory. And apparently god can only be on Earth in one form at a time...kind of like how we never see Janet, Michael, and Latoya Jackson at the same time and place.) Adam and Eve's sin resulted in their spiritual deaths (which god didn't make quite clear enough when warning them against eating the Fruit of Knowledge, I suppose). So after their sin, Adam and Eve each had a body, a soul, and a dead spirit, plus they'd disobeyed god so he wasn't speaking to them anymore and decided that nudity was ugly and shameful, etc etc. He also decided that since he was forced to kill some goats to make aprons to cover their nasty nudity (which somehow also covered their sin from this all-knowing being), then Mankind had to frequently repeat the ritual killing of animals to re-establish the still broken fellowhip between man/god. It then follows that we are born into sin because our parents (all the way back to Adam and Eve) were spiritually dead and passed that condition onto the next generation. So, man and woman can conceive new souls, new bodies, and new dead spirits through the shameful act of sexual intercourse (which was not shameful before the Fall of Man, just as nudity was not shameful).

I know. It gets harder to follow and harder to understand why anyone would bother believing in this stuff the more one actually examines the details of christianity (or judaism or islam, for that matter).

So, a few thousand years pass in which god destroys the earth with water, saving one family and 2 of every "clean" animal and 7 of every "unclean" animal (or vice versa). (wait, god created unclean animals? No, they're unclean because of the Fall of Man. Oh, then where do the "clean" animals come from? Are they not cursed? Did god make them after the Fall of Man, thereby retaining their "cleanness"? Did some other god create them? Who knows??! Moving on...) The Flood recedes, god repents of his destructive deed (i.e. destroying sinful men with water), and the family he saved begins sinning like mad again. Also, during these thousands of years, the family breeds like mad, forming all sorts of civilizations, and god chooses one man to start a nation that he'll adopt as "his chosen", (by a slip of the tongue, god decrees that this man's offspring will father a great nation which will number more than the sand. The chosen man then fathers two sons (one out of wedlock with a slave/maid) thereby creating judaism and islam because god is as good as his word. Meanwhile, the "chosen" undergo all sorts of bad luck and ordeals (all of which supposedly anger this all-knowing, all-powerful god into defending them) including their demand for an earthly king which causes even more trouble for them. The culmination comes in the form of the Roman empire, which enslaves the "chosen" just as the Egyptians did before them.

And it is during the Roman enslavement that god decides to impregnate a virgin through entirely spiritual (not sexual, not never, no, not THAT) means resulting in a male child (though this is physically (and I do mean "physically") impossible for a female (XX chromosome) human to asexually produce a male (XY chromosome) offspring), thus creating the god-body he didn't have at the time of creation. (god followers call this one a "miracle". It's the same word they use for all of the unexplainable contradictions. Well, THAT and "the Mystery of God")

Thirty odd years later, godman stirs up a following and preaches peaceful acceptance, free forgiveness, and eternal salvation. The "chosen" hate him and contrive his execution via the Romans. He raises from the dead, but leaves the Earth for an unspecified time period. At this time, or some months after, the godspirit (that third part of god which he didn't have at the time of creation, but which now makes god in the image of man which was created in the image of god...whew!...so...dizzy...must...concentrate) descends upon the Earth, grants miraculous (there's that word again) powers to godman's faithful dozen (minus one traitor, plus one replacement who never actually met godman, but hey they needed an even dozen so they HAD to get a replacement for the traitor who was pre-ordained (denying him his god-given free will) to betray godman to get the sacrifice for all of Mankind going). Somehow the powers given to the faithful dozen aren't in evidence today, presumably because those powers were only necessary until the christian bible was finally completed. This bible is comprised of the judaic pentateuch, an assortment of other judaic writings, as well as the writings and letters of the faithful dozen including a final book which reads wilder than the worst acid trip any junky ever had. The final completing touches to this bible come in the form of revisions done by the medieval compilers who altered these "holy scriptures" to meet the conservative standards of the then reigning English monarch. This bible is not to be confused with the catholic bible which is almost identical but contains a few additional books (but then, catholicism, though still considered christian, originated from a religion based on an incestuous mother/son duo--but we're not supposed to know that).

Simple. Straightforward. Hogwash (and not even a kosher hog, at that)!

So, why are we sinners?

Because a long time ago when people were still scared of things like nighttime, lightning, sunshine, etc, they imagined stories to explain what they didn't understand but which made them feel better about their perceived vulnerability. They reassured themselves. These stories have lasted and been built upon for thousands of years. They originated out of fear and confusion, absorbing guilt, hatred, and ending in a neverending search for salvation through self-denial and violent acts.

Was perusing the net as usual. I stumbled upon a website/blog whose christian writer lectured at length upon various topics concerning pagans (and catholics). The writer didn't appear to have much nice to say about catholics, but was even worse to what he called "the pagans". Is that anything like "the TV" or "the rock music"?

Anyway, this self-admitted christian made the following comment (the context was derogatory): "Pagans have always coveted eternal life..."

Now that is a pot calling the kettle black, if ever there was one.

I mean, c'mon! What is the driving force behind all of christianity's various "denominations" (I mean, sects)? Answer: that's right, ETERNAL LIFE.

christians are continually told to seek eternal life through jesus christ. And yet, any other religion which in any fashion seeks or reveres eternal life is "coveting" it. No doubt while good little christians are merely stumbling upon it on their neverending march to war with all things outside the bounds of their limited, guilt-laden superstition.

Yeah, gimme a break already!

Even worse, the writer then listed some of "the pagans" gods, like Dionysus (a Greek god) and Bacchus (the god of drunkeness). This launched a rant about alcohol--such as catholicism's ongoing battle with alcoholism, and the comment that countries like Ireland and Italy have always been "known" for their drunken abuse of alcohol.

Now, in addition to insulting entire countries and societies (as good christians are wont to do), the writer also got Bacchus' godhood wrong. He is not the god of drunkeness, as much as simply the god of wine who presides over religious wine festivals. Both he and Dionysus (sometimes argued to be the same god) also govern wisdom, fertility, and agriculture, to name a few of their beneficial influences in the world of Nature and Men.

But nevermind that, this christian (like so many of his "brethren") are held fast in the throes of mindless faith to a god whose religion portrays him as jealous, moody, contradictory, violent, bloodthirsty, suicidal, oh and above all, loving to those free-thinking, free-willed followers who relinquish all thought and all will in deference to their god's whims. i.e., christians lay claim to a godlike free-will (which they must never use) while wallowing in a veritable orgy of mindless, self-demeaning slavery to an insane deity.

Gimme "the pagans" anyday over that lot.