I am in my fifties (just past the old double nickle last year), retired on perminant disability since January 2004 and getting poorer by the day. My advice is don't get sick!

Social Security and Medicare is truly a lifesaver and any politician that wants to do away with them is nuts.

Last November I had my second pacemaker/defibrallator put in and so far it seems to be working O.K..

On the bright side I still ride my motorcycle and enjoy camping although my stamina is not what it should be.

When I'm sitting at my computer I like to read a few political blogs mostly liberal because thats where the most truth is.

My new favorite quote is :

Morality is not determined by the church you attend nor the faith you embrace. It is determined by the quality of your character and the positive impact you have on those you meet along your journey - The Immoral Minority

How I became a Liberal Democrat.

I was a Republican. My brother, parents, aunts and uncles and grandparents were Republican. Like most of my family I would vote for a candidate just because he or she was a Republican.

August 1986 I was transferred to the engineering department at the company I worked. One of my co-workers in his paranoid delusions told me that the Republican party was being taken over by the fundamentalist Christian movement with the idea that everyone will have to bow down to their beliefs.

Naturally, I didn’t believe him and I told him that. He said “just watch, listen and learn”. He was right. I paid attention to what I was reading and hearing on the news and I found out a few things that I find disturbing.

I noticed over the last twenty years how the Fundamentalist Movement and the extreame right wing convsertives had taken over the Republican party. Some of the things I learned scare me. Like (and these are just some of the latest):

At the Grand Canyon National Park visitors center all books that describe the canyon as being created several million years ago by erosion of water and weather have been replaced with books that claim the canyon was created by Noah’s flood and dinosaurs were on Noah’s Ark because “it says so in the Bible”.

Global Warming, although the vast majority of the world's leading climatologists and scientists studied and know is real and happening is called “junk science” the fundamentalists want to have only creationism (now called intelegent design) taught in schools as fact because “it says so in the Bible”.

Using unwanted fertilized eggs from fertility clinics cannot be used for stem cell research to help cure diseases like diabetes, heart desease, Parkinsons and Alzheimers even though they will be destroyed anyways because that would be murder. Besides, there has not been any cures using them so, why even try. However, capital punishment is good because “it says so in the Bible”.

Pat Robertson of the 700 club is the chancellor and President of Regent University a “Christian” law school is using his school to forward his agenda of controlling the US government to make this a fundamentalist Christian country where everyone has to pray to his version of god.

There are about one hundred fifty graduates of Regent University (about one sixth of all graduates) working in some form of government work.

John Ashcroft former Attorney General teaches at Regent helped to start the ball rolling by systematically gutting the Civil Rights Division of the justice department by firing or forcing out career lawyers and replacing them with members of conservative or Christian groups or people with little or no civil rights experience.

Monica Gooding now former counsel to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Justice Department Liaison to the White House, a 1999 graduate of Regent, continued the tradition of the replacing talented experienced lawyers with junior people that were loyal to the Bush White House and the Christian movement. Rather than tell the truth about her role in and what she knows about the prosecutor purge she “took a bullet for the team” by pleading the fifth and resigning her position so she wouldn’t have to testify in front of Congress.

There are many examples of the corruption in the govenment by self-described Christans doing "God's work".

I thought being a Christian ment telling the truth, and accepting others as they are.

Silly me.

Summer of 2003 on my way home from work, I was listening to a conservative radio talk show host blast the liberal Democrats and how terrible they were for not blindly believing everything President Bush and the Republican Party said. The radio host said that it was time for all his listeners to take a stand and “do what’s right”. I went to the town hall and now I’m a registered Democrat. I don’t think that’s what he had in mind.

That is why I am now a Liberal Democrat.

Quote from Justice Brandeis:
"We must subject government officials to the same rules of conduct that we expect of the citizen. The very existence of the government is imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously.

As Brandeis puts it, "if the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.

To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means—to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal—would bring terrible retribution.

Against that pernicious doctrine this court should resolutely set its face."

************

Louis Brandeis served on the US Supreme Court from 1916 to 1939.