I got a lot of small jobs done last night. I had intended to get online and check e-mail, but I never got that far. Instead, I typed up the minutes from the last deacon board meeting, printed out music and song sheets for Wednesday's youth group and at least started looking at some of my homework for Thursday. There is a lot of reading, so I'll need to crank that out tonight. I do have to write a paper on stress and burn-out. That ought to be easy; stress and burn-out have been pretty much my life for the last year and it keeps getting worse. There just seems to be more and more to do and less time to do it in. I did get one reprieve; it doesn't look like anyone will be going to the State Teen Bible Conference this year. I'm disappointed in a way because it's a good boost for the teens and for me. But I really couldn't afford to loose another weekend of working on the house. I have  to start making some serious progress.

It looks to be a nice day today, although it started out cold. The truck temperature was only 19 degrees F this morning. The weather liars are saying it will hit 40. We'll see.

Politics:

Granholm, the govenor of Michigan, made some big speech yesterday. One thing that caught my attention was that, according to her, not enough Michigan high school graduates are going to college and that's why the high tech businesses aren't flocking to Michigan and why the economy stinks (it really isn't that bad, but we all know how to tell a politician is lying; their lips are moving...). In fact every high school graduate must attend college to save the Michigan way of life, blah. blah, blah. Every  high school graduate? Is this woman on dope? Think about the people you graduated with. I doubt more than half of them have any business in a liberal arts college. Trade school? Great idea. Tech school? Wonderful. College? No way! Our colleges are already struggling with masses of freshman who can't read, write, or do simple math without using their fingers. Our govenor now wants to cram people who are even less  qualified into our colleges. And for what? I don't care how many years of school you force them to take, someone on the left side of the IQ bell curve will never  be a computer programmer or an engineer. That same person could be a fantastic electrician or plumber or car mechanic, but he can be those things without a liberal arts degree. Me thinks Ms. G must have put a little too much coke up her nose at some point in her life.

In Iraq, two car loads of people were machine-gunned to death in "drive by" shootings yesterday. One was a bunch of Baptist missionaries trying to get a water treatment plant working. No good deed goes unpunished. Expect to see more of this. Our military has done an excellent job of containing the worst of the large-scale attacks, but there is not much anyone can do about small-scale random violence committed by people that can simply disappear into the general population. The war zones in nearly every American city are a good parallel. What are you going to do? Arrest everyone? We could try the Roman method; kill one hundred people for every Roman soldier killed. No concern over guilt or innocence. Simply kill the first one hundred people you find. If you do that four or five times, the local populace becomes very effective at self-policing simply from a sense of self-preservation. We won't do that, and I'm not sure that I would want to live in a country that would. But then again, I don't think it is possible to carry freedom into the Muslem world on the points of our bayonets. Our president and his neo-conservative advisors seem to think they can. If Kerry has a single functioning brain cell (not something I would assume out of hand) he will re-run Nixon's 1972 campaign; law and order in our streets, and bring our soldiors home.

Spain: Laura Mansfield has an interesting commentary on the WorldNetDaily site. I'm not sure I completely agree, but she may not be far off. It's worth reading in any case. One thing is certain; giving the enemy what it demands after an attack simply guarantees more attacks. But the question is, does al-Qaida care what we are doing in Iraq? On the one hand, it's pretty clear there were at best tenuous ties between Sadaam and al-Qaida. On the other hand, there is a big difference between running away in the middle of the fight and choosing to not go and fight in the first place. The countries with military forces in Iraq are essentially forced to stay at this point, until we can get the situation on the ground stabilized. Talking about how things would be if we hadn't invaded falls into the shoulda, woulda, coulda catagory, unless we are prepared to learn from the experience when faced with similar situations in the future. Given recent history, there doesn't seem to be much chance of that. But maybe now we will look at what I think it is still an open question; whether or not having troops stomping about in Muslim holy places supresses or invigorates terrorism.

And that should be enough.