do you think jesus would be proud that his present day disciples are the congregation of humans most easily cajoled in to angry, hate filled mobs?

driving up to cleveland last weekend i got a wreckless driving ticket in virginia (yeah – i know i’m screwed). it was classified as wreckless driving because i was doing 20+ miles over the speed limit (86 in a 65).

the friendly officer, who nearly rear ended me and practically drove me off the road (i guess to ensure i didn’t attempt a hide speed chase!) said he had to do 115mph to catch up with me.

i refrained from suggesting he was a more wreckless and dangerous driver than myself but in the end it still didn’t help because he wrote the ticket anyway.

the rest of the way up we saw a number of other people pulled over in equally hazardous fashion. once we were right behind the car targeted and had been for some time. the car ahead of us did nothing wrong but use the highway in front of an officer who is obviously working to replace falling tax revenues with traffic fines.

don’t believe its a flat out scam? today when i called virginia to see how much the ticket would cost they said it has to go to court first (so they can collect the additional court fees of course). they told me i can either show up or by default be found guilty and assessed around $350. or i can have an attorney show up to represent me.

when i said i’d have to go find an attorney she responded – “oh, i’m surprised you haven’t heard from one already”. apparently they troll through the public traffic records and cold call defendants directly. she then all but agreed with me when i said they had a fine tuned racket going on up there.

i almost never have more than forty dollars cash in my pocket but in clearing a debt recently i ended up with five hundred dollars cash.

being unaccustomed to having so much cash i headed straight to the bank to deposit the money and found myself unable to give them any more than three hundred dollars.

i’m one more bad story from stuffing valuables in my mattress (but of course it won’t be my mattress since i’ve announced that hiding place here)…

i just got done buying more than one hundred dollars worth of clothing at the barak obama store.

i did this as much to support him now as i did to have something to wear every single day of a possible mccain/palin administration…

man am i glad congress gave all those wall street fat cats an early christmas gift, otherwise i bet the stock market would still be sucking.

i didn’t post yesterday because i was traveling back from ohio and visiting all our dear friends there. i was having a tough time choosing between the ten or eleven ideas i had coming back from our trip but sixty seconds of the evening news took care of that and brought me starkly back to reality.

thank goodness john mccain is running for president because i thought after hillary was knocked out of the race we wouldn’t have a do/say anything candidate to rally around and i’m certainly anxious for more of the same and don’t want to see anything derail this finely tuned governing machine…

i’m taking the day off so i can over prepare for tonight’s vice presidential debate.

i figure if i study really, really hard like sarah palin did for her interview with katie couric then i might have a chance at being on sarah’s level and understanding all her brilliant answers.

the u.s. media preferring gossip over news and rumor mongering over investigative reporting spent the entire evening yesterday and morning today reporting that nancy pelosi said mean things and republicans got their feelings hurt.

this is immaterial to the financial crisis and completely not worthy of coverage. if anyone questions why there is so much partisanship in politics, i think the media and their superficial news coverage is a huge contributor. if in the place of conjecture and gossip we were given thoughtful and well researched stories i think the citizens of the u.s. would both be less partisan and make better decisions in the voting booth.

since this isn’t likely to happen any time soon, i’ll step up and provide an equally short house speech that could have been covered instead of the “hurtful” remarks from pelosi because at least this speech asks questions about which values are driving the decision to sell out our futures to same bankers who have already proven themselves to be all too anxious to short change us in the past.