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You cannot serve God and Mammon or anything with peanuts.

The ice is melting -- and there's glass in it

When I was a bartender and I broke a glass in the ice bin, I had to toss all the ice and fill up the bin again. I couldn't pick broken glass from the ice because you couldn't be sure you got it all. Ice and broken glass look a lot alike. And if you were wrong and missed a piece, somebody got hurt.

This is exactly the way I feel about the global warming data. It -- and the science behind it -- has been corrupted. It needs to be tossed and begun again. Who are we to believe? What data is all this based on? How do we tell the shards from the ice?

That the EPA has plowed ahead and labeled greenhouse gas as a public threat suggests more politics and more bad decision-making based on bad science.

We're all heading here

Skimminton ride

Tumbrel

Viz.

ducking stool

cucking stool

Frightened victims, ride the rail

Or rolling carts, and wooden wheels

They carry crosses and dig ditches

And to no avail

They plead and gripe

Because the mobile vulgaris won't have it

What they want is a taught rope, a dropped blade, two horses

Bridled

After driving in opposite directions

The barnacled keel strewn with bits of flesh

The cheers, the guilt and the drinking

The fists and the kicks

The spit

The noisy stew

Bill's Gay Nineties

I use the above title to introduce thoughts on same-sex marriage only because I couldn't think of anything clever. Bill's Gay Nineties, by the way, is a bar in New York City on E54th street. I used to hang out there -- actually, more accurately used to end up there -- in the heart of my drinking years. I don't recall anyone there being gay, but I probably had beer goggles so couldn't see much of anything. The bar was named after the gay as in "happy" days of the 1890s. Had a piano and some guy used to play show tunes (ohhhhhh, I see). Anyway, just the other day a same-sex marriage bill was shot down in the New York senate. In the voting, all Republicans and one Democrat, I think, rejected the thing.

Being a straight, married-with-two-children Republican myself, here's my view: let them do what they want. Let them marry. What's the big deal?? Additionally, no self-respecting, true, small-gov Republican should ever reject a bill like this. Doing so goes against every tenet that I believe the GOP believes in. That is, "Do what you want but leave me out of it."

One of the reasons I feel a kinship with the GOP is because it is closest to those values.

Don't we want less government interference?

Don't we want to be left alone?

Isn't what I do with myself or my time, my business?
Don't we want to keep (and spend) more of our hard-earned money?

That's what I stand for. That's what we should stand for. I wish the GOP would wash its hands of the abortion debate and same-sex marriage. It's a no-win, dividing strategy that in the long run loses you more followers than it attracts. And if there's an objection by those that believe this should be our platform -- religious right -- then they can go find another platform. Go start your own party.

To me conservative ideas stem from individuality, personal responsibility, personal production, minding my own business and watching where the money goes -- not spending too much, not spending too little, and not spending on frivolous things. This doesn't mean being a tightwad. And yes, society's most needy should get the help they need. But this is it. It by no means means I should stick my nose into others' affairs. This isn't what Barry Goldwater would concern himself with -- in fact he supported gay rights -- nor Gerald Ford or a host of other conservatives of yore.

GOP should be for: limited government, reasonable taxation, and guarding the people’s rights and liberties (all people). Period.

I think and have always thought that the LGBT community gets the short end of the stick when it comes to equal rights. I don't know why no one attacks it from an equal protections argument. They pay taxes to the same government(s) as everyone else does.

On a lighter note, I don't know why people feel marriage needs protection from gay people. I mean, straight people -- i.e. Tiger Woods, do enough damage to the institution anyway.