Damn the purists and the self-righteous.

  

God made us perfect once and we screwed it up in The Garden of Eden when Eve ate the Forbidden Fruit. Yeah, I know, the comedians want to tell you, the Devil made her do it, but we have only gotten worse over time. So why do so many good people still try to be perfect and end up falling on their face?

I am one of those bitter clingers the liberals hate so much but apart from my strong belief in our Bill of Rights and our Constitutional Republic, I take a dim view of people who are so blindly immersed in their religion that they can't see straight. If you read my bio you'd know I am a life-long Baptized Catholic and I can trace my Holy Bible back to Jesus Christ not to King James. But some Christians seem incapable of getting beyond Genesis without using a calculator. Those would be the people who had nothing better to do than add up the ages and years mentioned in the Bible and reached the astounding conclusion that the Earth is 6000 years old. My guess is that if God has a sense of humor He would be laughing right now instead of playing a game of marbles with asteroids. I'm not going to come out and defend evolution because it has come to mean a lot more than you would think but I do believe that something happened on this planet before and after God created Adam and Eve that hasn't been given much thought. Hint: man did not walk with the dinosaurs. Hint: God doesn't wear a wristwatch and measure time the way we do today. Hint: the funny looking rocks in this photo are 500-million year old fossil sea shells that came out of my back yard. The University of Oregon told me these are both common brachiopod shells from Late Ordovician rocks of the Cincinnati region. The dark ones, laying on the lens cap from my camera for size, are named Platystrophia laticostata.

Lets get on with another subject. Politics rules our lives and also ruins it. Maybe devout Christians should stay away from it, at least some of them should, anyway. In no particular order let me start with Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, a staunch conservative Republican, who has rightly earned a commendable reputation for fixing the fiscal problems in his state. Recently we found out that back in 2010, when before he was elected governor, while he served as a Milwaukee county executive his office learned that a woman doctor who had been hired at the Milwaukee County Behavioral Division had once been a model posing in underwear ads. Maybe she used the income to pay for education, no one knows, but the mere suggestion, while "It isn't pornographic" wrote one of Walker's advisers, it was a problem. Walker ordered his aid to "Get rid of the MD asap." Maybe the self-righteous Republican should read his Bible, whichever version he has, about the story of Mary Magdalene.

Here is an impartial excerpt from Wikipedia. "Mary Magdalene is a religious figure in Christianity. She is usually thought of as the second-most important woman in the New Testament after Mary, the mother of Jesus. Mary Magdalene traveled with Jesus as one of his followers. She was present at Jesus' two most important moments: the crucifixion and the resurrection. Within the four Gospels, the oldest historical record mentioning her name, she is named at least 12 times, more than most of the apostles. The Gospel references describe her as courageous, brave enough to stand by Jesus in his hours of suffering, death and beyond." Mary Magdalene was a prostitute before she met Jesus. She is considered a Saint in the Catholic Church and among her many patronage's she is revered by reformed prostitutes. 

The Pro-Life movement in America has become a powerful force within the Republican Party and their endorsements are coveted by many conservative candidates. The different Pro-Life groups usually rely on a 10-point questionnaire to rate the different candidates, both Republican and Democrat. Unless a candidate answers all ten questions correctly they do not get a Pro-Life endorsement. Not even if they answer just nine questions the right way. The 10th question that presents a serious problem to many concerns the abortion of an unborn baby for reasons of rape and incest. While many Pro-Lifers acknowledge that abortion is acceptable in a case where the life of the mother is at stake, I have never read any arguments that consider the life of the mother of a child conceived by rape or incest after being forced to carry it to birth. Pro-Life people view the life of the unborn child above that of the mother, no matter how young she may be. While I still consider myself Pro-Life, I would only get a ninety-percent rating.

When a political candidate is so concerned about offending the feelings of Pro-Lifers they can easily be coerced into making some ridiculous statements. Take for example the case of Todd Akin, former U.S. Representative for Missouri's 2nd congressional district, serving from 2001 to 2013. In 2012 he lost his bid to unseat U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat. His campaign was ahead in the pre-election polls until he said in a TV interview that women who are victims of what he called "legitimate rape" rarely get pregnant. He said, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Akin eventually apologized for the remark, rebuffed calls to withdraw from the election, and lost 54.7 percent to 39.2 percent. Todd Aiken meet Scott Walker.

On the subject of opposing gun control and supporting our Second Amendment rights I have been a big critic of the National Rifle Association because they have a senseless rule they use when handing out endorsements. For one thing, they favor incumbents over challengers and for another thing, they see nothing wrong with supporting the campaigns of so-called Blue Dog Democrats, the supposedly conservative politicians who buck their party's anti-gun agenda. Yeah, we have seen how well that works. For one thing, the NRA was instrumental in giving us the rabidly anti-gun Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House in 2008 after the NRA helped get 56 Democrats elected. By a simple majority of numbers, since more Democrats were elected to the House than Republicans, they got to choose the new Speaker and Pelosi got the vote. We remember Nancy for her famous remark about the ObamaCare bill, "we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it." It didn't matter whether or not 56 of those Democrats were supposed to be "conservative", it was their party affiliation that counted. Then, two years later, in spite of the wave of Tea Party opposition the NRA again endorsed almost as many Democrats but the revolution in the streets only allowed 26 to get elected or reelected. In 2012 at the height of Obama's anti-gun push, when the bill to create a national gun registry built around an enhanced background check, almost all of the Blue Dog Democrats who had been endorsed by the NRA voted for it.  Will the NRA ever learn anything? I won't believe them ever again until I read they have changed their rules. They also had a chance in 2010 of removing Nevada Senator Harry Reid as Majority Leader if only they had thrown their support behind NRA Life Member and Republican candidate Sharron Angle. Instead, they gave Harry Reid a lot of good publicity but chose to endorse no one in the Nevada race that year. The NRA knows a lot about firearms but not too much about politicians.

My name is Nelson Abdullah and I am Oldironsides.