The earnestness and diligence displayed by fellow bloggers amuses me. I wonder how many truly believe their favorite candidate’s election will solve all of our problems while the election of their opponents will destroy what’s left of our country.

After our local newspaper touts its choices, I expect it to take a strong stand on the importance of voting: We live in a democracy, yadda yadda and yadda, and voting is what separates us from the Iranians and the folks in Myanmar and Zimbabwe.

I sometimes fantasize haranguing participants in a Fourth of July parade by urging them to let go the past and get on with their lives. Same with the annual Good Friday Walk by Catholics to re-enact the crucifixion of Christ. I sometimes imagine the faces of Catholics being told, “Come on, folks, that was almost 2000 years ago. Get over it!”

My main reason for writing these essays is to say what others aren’t saying. But lately, I’ve found it gratifying to find in the hard copy of this paper some things I don’t have to say. Here are some samples:

This essay is not for the reasonable readers, the ones who demonstrate some reading comprehension skills and some ability to reason. There’s nothing here for you. If you’ve read what I have already written, you know there’s nothing really new here and I advise you not to bother with this essay.

Major League Baseball is considering expanding the baseball playoffs. Under the proposal, each league would add another wild-card team and the two wild-card teams in each league would play in a one-game playoff to advance to the round of eight.

I don’t like that proposal. Teams that earn spots in the post season deserve more than one game to determine their fates.

Instead, I would expand the playoffs to three rounds of best-of-seven competition instead of two. And we can do it without having to postpone the start of the league champion series games.

1) Since the Constitution requires that only Congress can declare war, why haven’t all the “strict constructionists” opposed the two wars our country is now fighting, not to mention all the wars since the last legal one in 1941?

2) Now that we’re supposed to treat corporations like people, why can’t we deport chronic lawbreaker BP?

Happy Constitution Day.

Turns out I did not burn any Books of Mormon last Saturday after all. I decided doing that would incite Mormon terrorists around the world to retaliate against the United States.

After all, burning the Book of Mormon is just exactly the same as offending the residents of Oklahoma City by transplanting a basketball team from Seattle—and then inflaming passions by calling the team the Thunder, a grim reminder of the noise generated by the 1995 explosion, which I blame on all former Catholics of Irish descent.

This past weekend I thought of a Shelly Berman stand-up comedy routine from the 1960s. Berman told of seeing a murder in progress, running across the street to tell a cop—and getting arrested for jaywalking.

The Sept. 12 newspaper reported the arrest of five Americans for carrying AIDS drugs to Zimbabwe for poor people there. The government reportedly charged them with dispensing medicine without the supervision of a pharmacist or proper licenses.

One would think this were an election year. Wait, come to think of it, it is an election year.

Some wacko Florida pastor gets his 15 days of fame--or infamy--by promising to burn some Qur’ans on 9/11 and the rest of the country uses the event to polarize, polarize, polarize.

So we have another orgy of charging the other side of hypocrisy. Funny, when was the last time people accused their own side of hypocrisy? That's really funny because seeing the other side’s hyocrisy instead of your own is a form of—hypocrisy.

I’ve been thinking recently about Minnie Wells. I took her English class in the late 1960s at the University of Alaska before it turned into the University of Alaska Fairbanks. I don’t remember much of her course more than 40 years later but I do remember her comment that people wrongly refer to the looking up a word “in the dictionary.” Not all dictionaries are alike, she pointed out; therefore, definitions vary among dictionaries. She didn’t have to point out that even the same dictionary often provides several definitions for the same world.

A refrain in a song from the musical “Camelot” has been rolling around in my head for the last week and a half. The way I remember it, the song exclaims:

“It’s May! It’s May, the lusty month of May,” when, the song tells us,
“Everything goes blissfully astray.”

Social Security reform is back in the news. A commission set up by President Obama is considering plans to take care of the problem, which could begin to arise in only 27 years. That’s when, according to reports, the program could begin to pay out more than it collects. That could lead over time to—gasp!—a deficit. It’s hard for me to envision the federal government operating at a deficit, but we have to face the reality that some day it could happen.

My first reaction to this morning newspaper was to ask: Where are Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Howard Dean, Harry Reid, and The Brian when you really need them?

Glenn Beck plans a rally of his own Saturday on the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech during a march on Washington 47 years ago and in the same location. Apparently, we’re supposed to believe that is just a coincidence.

Funny, none of the guys above have expressed “sensitivity” for the feelings of black people whose family members were killed by Ku Klux Klan terrorists over the years.

Who woulda thunk it?

Sometimes the way events follow each other can be downright eerie.

This week talk show host Laura Schlessinger complained about the loss of her freedom after she reportedly dropped the dreaded n-word 11 times on her radio program and criticized a black woman for taking offense at her remarks by telling the woman, “if you’re that sensitive about color and don’t have a sense of humor, don’t marry out of your race.”

Let’s see now. Laura uses a word meant to offend, not in private conversation, but on public airwaves and wonders why people should take offense at that.

I had some interesting reactions to a recent essay comparing abuses of power among the leaders of the Catholic Church and the United States.

A quote from the Times Square would-be bomber brought me a feeling of déjà vu.

When a federal judge asked Faisal Shahzad how it made sense to him to kill civilians, even children, indiscriminately to protest US government policies, he reportedly told her, “The people select the government. We consider them all the same.”

I’ve read similar sentiments on these cyberpages. An August 2 statement excusing attacks on Palestinian civilians typifies this attitude: “The overwhelming view in the Palestinian population is clear when they elect Hamas to represent them.”

If you were born on the day the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, you’re eligible for Medicare.

For 64 years pundits, moral theologians and peace activists have marked the anniversary of the world’s first nuclear holocaust by questioning and defending the decision to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese. So it’s hard to say something that hasn’t already been said hundreds of times.

Mr. Kirk Wickersham’s August 2 column in this newspaper’s print edition opposes a pre-emptive strike against any Pebble gold and copper mine in the Bristol Bay region.

Mr. Wickersham argues that since there is no proposal for that mine at this time, it’s “not OK to just oppose the Pebble mine’” since “Technically, there’s nothing to oppose.”

He affirms what he considers Pebble’s “fundamental constitutional right to apply for permits and evaluated according to the law. To deny them that is a blatant attempt to bypass the rule of law.”

A Garry Wills essay a friend sent me recently provided a couple of interesting factoids I was unaware of. British Lord Acton, famous for his dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, was a Catholic and he was referring to the power both of the state and of the Catholic hierarchy.