Monday Morning Minutes

1. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apparently went to Switzerland to meet some European diplomats and mistakenly gave a red button labeled "over charge" in Russian to her Russian counter part that was actually meant for the American people. She was supposed to give him the button saying "reset" to indicate that our current President is not like our previous President.


2. I remember being relieved that the President had dodged an ethical bullet when he chose to limit federal funding of embryonic stem cell research to those stem cell lines already in existence at the time. It was a good compromise I thought between a desire to increase scientific knowledge and a desire to avoid destroying more embryos that so many find morally repugnant. Now our new President is set to reverse that practise, despite the fact that there are sources of embryonic stem cells that come free of any ethical and moral entanglements, mostly it seems to prove that he is not like our previous President.


3. I don't know about you but I'm starting to wish our new President would put a little more effort into being President of the United States and less into proving that he is not his predecessor.


4. Recent events have reminded me of the episode in the Old Testament where the Israelites demanded a king so they could be like the other nations around them. God essentially said, you want a king? I got your king right here. God proceeded to give them exactly what they wanted and we all know how that turned out. (That story starts in 1 Samuel round about chapters 8 and 9 and goes down hill from there.)


5. New Yorkers are nuts. Rather than trim the state's spending they want to squeeze more blood from that turnip known as "the rich." Class warfare and plain old stupidity are alive and well in this state. I wonder if anyone here is paying attention to California's situation.