A New Day in Congress

There seems little more to do now than state the obvious, that the democrats have now taken over both houses of congress. We have not typed under this Blog heading in nearly four months. What we do is jump around from Blog to Blog usually adding about four postings in rapid succession and then jumping to another blog, so I hope you have found us. The democrats had to take six of eight key states to win the Senate and that's just what they did. They won in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, Misori, and Montana. They failed to win in Tennessee and Arizona. The key event of this whole thrust came mid day Thursday when Senator George Allan conceeded the race to Jim Webb, being behind by seven thousand votes and confident that he would not be able to make this up in a protracted recount. Today George Bush is meeting with Senate leaders just as he met with Democratic house leaders on Wednesday. The democrats won at least 28 seats in the house, with a couple of races undecided. I heard 34 one place. What this all means is that it really is a new day in Congress now. Winning the house assured that President Bush could be investigated for his many questionable activities. Winning the senate means that our side is control of things like treaties and cabinent posts and who the next Supreme Court Justice is. I guess I'd also like to thank whatever Calvary Chapel Christians routinely pray "Thy Will Be Done" in terms of the election. You owe the democrats taking over both houses of congress to their prayers!

Donald Rumsfeld is out. That was the first item on the agenda and it was taken care of swiftly Wednesday morning when Bush announced his replacement, Robert Gates. And of course he was smart to do so while the old congress was still around to hurry up and confirm him without asking any embarrassing questions like his involvement in Iran Contra. Gates served as CIA chief from late 1991 to 1993. It's hoped that he will provide more lucid leadership in Iraq than we have seen there, though we can't be sure of this. Apparently now the US is being blamed for victories of Al Qaida in Iraq because the word went out at the beginning of the year that there would be withdrawals of US troops this year, therefore the enemy hearing this, became more confident. Few Democrats these days are talking about withdrawal now. Instead there is enphasis on the "basics of counter insergence" to insure success now.

NBC is talking a lot about "People of Faith" now and how you "get to heaven". Apparently if you're a Jew the key to getting to heaven is doing good works. People associate getting to heaven being a reward for people exercising sound morality. For Christians however, there's a whole other set of criteria for getting into heaven that has virtually nothing to do with morality, and we will cover this in further detale in a later blog posting.

In Mathematics there is such a thing as a "Taylor Series" that was invented in 1712 by Isac Newton or somebody. It's a formula where odd numbers do an increasing number of sine wave "itterations" that interrupt an otherwise diagonal line accross the graph. Many mathematical functions are deducable from the Taylor series including ordenary trig functions and hyperbolic trig functions- - as well as computations for calculating Base E. I say all this to remind you that math has a lot of formulas. There's a lot of "thinking" people have been doing to solve certain problems and mysteries. We all have to "stand on the shoulders of giants".

Rush Limbaugh apparently made the statement yesterday that he felt "liberated" now that Congress of either house was no longer controled by the Republicans. I'm not sure what me meant by this but it could be that Rush is considering getting out of the talk show business entirely after all these years. He's been at his current post for eighteen long years. Sometimes when people retire from a job they have a heart attack or stroke soon after. Their "will to live" is diminished. It could be Rush "just doesn't want to go through having a Democratic congress again". Apparently Rush says the Democrats didn't have any focused "Message".