Yes We (the government) Can!

what dreams may come

3 days of agonizing waiting, convinced all hope was gone.

Since I'm a pastor you probably think you know where this is heading, but we're in Fall, not Spring, right?
(Though if you come back during my Advent ramblings, this story is going to pop up again.)

This is not about the 3 days from cross to resurrection. It is far less spiritual and much more comical (now)

Here's the skinny on our recent adventure...

At about 4 PM on Saturday, we dropped off Tilly (The Wonder Hound) at our friend's* house in Plover.

*We love our friends, and even though they may not mind me sharing their names, I am going to refrain from doing so.

We then headed off to visit with my wife's sister and our brother-in-law at their home in Appleton, since we were planning to visit Green Bay the next morning. I have a dear friend who is the Worship Pastor at Spring Lake Church in Green Bay and I love to visit his church when we are on vacation. They way he uses his creativity and weds it with the sermon is both artful and worshipful...and any chance I can just attend a worship service without having to take a lead role I welcome....but I digress.

We were watching the Packers route the Bills when the call came.

"Hi...this is not the call you wanted to get tonight."

What happened shortly before is now very comical, but was at the time very sad.

Tilly (TWH) had apparently been waiting for just the right moment, and when their door was unexpectedly opened, she made her move.

Now you must understand that our dog typically makes an Olympic sport out of couch-holding-down. Once in a great while she will race around the house allowing herself the laughable illusion that she is a greyhound at the track. Graceful when she runs - she ain't.

So the door opened and she made her move. My friend walked outside calling her... and even getting close enough that he considered diving at her to capture her. But she bolted.

At just that same moment one of Plover's Finest pulled up in a squad car.

"You want me to help you get the dog back?" the officer asked.

What followed, I am told, was a cross between a low speed chase and a bizarre parade that included 3 squad cars with flashing lights, a closed off section of a pretty major thoroughfare and our dog out for a trot. Yep. I think it's safe to say that our dog is the first (?) to have shut down HWY 54 'cuz she is... well... the Wonder Hound; queen of the red and blue parade.

Eventually Tilly (TWH) had used up her 15 minutes of fame and raced into the woods... the chase was off.

We decided not to tell our kids what had happened. This was, after all, our last 'fun' vacation day. Sunday after church we took them to Bay Beach in Green Bay, WI.

I am not sure if we were just more sensitive to their remarks or what, but all day the kids kept saying: "I hope Tilly is OK", "I can't wait to get back home and see Tilly" and other comments like that.

Our kids had a blast at Bay Beach. "This was such a good day!"

Upon returning home I checked our phone messages. TTWH has I.D. bling. Yep - a collar full of rabies info, microchip info, dog license and an impulse Wal-Mart buy: a little silver dog bone with our address and phone number. Silly at the time, but now our only hope.

No messages.

"Kids we need to talk to you"

Sobs and sadness from them as we told them what happened. And then we prayed that God would show us mercy and return our dog.

My son and I drove through their neighborhood for an hour calling her name out our windows... hoping... praying for a miracle sighting.

nothing.

3.00 AM - our daughter came into our room- "I miss Tilly"

3.30 AM - our son, not having heard our daughter came into our room. "I really miss Tilly"

I couldn't get back to sleep and my mind was playing tricks on me - I could swear I heard her jingling collar in the backyard.

The next day we took them bowling to get their minds off the dog, again hoping we'd get a call while we were out.

Nothing.

Later that day they went to grandpa's house to get their bikes and I returned to the neighborhood to search for Tilly TWH.
I had grandiose visions of being the hero, returning with glory. As I walked around the perimeter of the "No Trespassing" forest, I prayed that God would lead me to her. I had a ziploc baggie with summer sausage and dog treats - hoping she would come trotting out after catching its scent on the breeze

Nothing.

I felt awful coming home empty handed.

I scoured the internet wondering if her microchip could be used with GPS to find her. I had no idea how GPS worked, but I do now and it doesn't work that way. During this search I learned that only 12% of missing animals are ever reunited with their owners. I decided not to share this info with the family.

We emailed photos and a description to the Humane Society in Stevens Point and WI Rapids - just in case.

Today I read Luke 2 in my devotions, about angels filling the night time with "Glory in the highest!" and about ...well I'm saving the next part for Advent.
Today my son awoke and said, "I dreamed we found Tilly"
Today my friend, Bethany, wrote me on Facebook and said she dreamed we would find Tilly... it should be noted she has also dreamed that a volcano erupted in our backyard and we had 6 kids. :)
Today it stormed and TTWH hates storms. She gets edgy, she shakes, she paces.
Today I decided on my lunch break to see if the storm had spooked her out onto a sidewalk. I was going to scour the neighborhood again.. somehow hoping to find her.

As I was driving there, my cell rang. It was a number I did not recognize. I snapped the cover open and said, "hello?"

"Hi - are you missing a dog?"

My heart leapt.

"yes - did you find her?"

"Yes we think so. I'm at the Plover Public Library - do you know where that is?"

"I just passed it, like 30 seconds ago! I'll be right there!"

When I got to the library, I approached the check-out desk.

"I think you have my dog?"

"Oh glory!" she responded.

Glory! yeah! Glory!.... I thought

She took me downstairs to an office and opened the door. "Tilly there's someone here to see you!"

I walked in and saw our Tilly - looking like a huge drowned rat.

"At first we thought she belonged to a patron. But then when the door opened a little girl patted her leg beckoning the dog in, we soon realized she might be lost and read her tags and called you."

Tilly does this funny thing when she's happy - she wags her whole butt. not just her tail - her whole butt. And this dog was wagging her butt off. I knelt down to hold her and she climbed up into my arms like she needed a hug. She whimpered as if to say, "I am so glad to see you!"

I scooped her into my arms like the big baby she is and took her to the car.

I quickly dialed my wife's phone.

"Are you at home?"

"Yes."

"Are the kids there?"

"Yeah... why?"

"I'm just on my way home for lunch, I'll see you in a few minutes"

When I got home I opened the door and placed the dog inside. She walked into our family room to the delighted squeals of "Tilly! You're home!"

We are thankful to God for letting us have our dog back.
His mercies are, as Zechariah said, "tender" indeed. (Luke 1:78)
He let me be a hero to my kids... but I know who the real Hero is - the one who gets glory; glory in the highest!
I am still hopeful that Bethany's other dream is wrong and the volcano doesn't come... and I'm not sure we're ready for quadruplets to round out a half-dozen.


thanks God!

best summer flick so far - and here's why...

As I was preparing a tomato/yellow pepper/basil bruscetta tonight I was reflecting on this question : “Why did I love the movie Julie & Julia more than Star Trek, more than G.I. Joe?”
I mean, I am a bona fide sci-fi geek and I am definitely a guy.

I’m not a sports fanatic, gear-head, mr. fixit kinda guy… but I am also thoroughly convinced and comfortable in the fact that you can love art and beauty and still be all male, regardless of what our culture may imply or say.

As an aside - my heroes include Michelangelo, Camille Pissaro, Leonard Bernstein, Gene Kelly, James Galway, Luciano Pavarotti, Emeril Lagassi and other men who are manly and involved in great art.

Back to the original question...Well, apart from getting older, there are a couple of reasons.
Here they are in order of importance:

3. Location: NY & Paris. In the immortal words of Eric Idle: "say no more!" Even Lord of The Rings was accentuated by the breath-taking scenery of New Zealand. I once read an interview with a graphic artist who said that graphic artists cannot compete with "real" nature because the best that they could do would not be believable.

2. Plot – as great as any sci-fi/fantasy/blow-em-up/CGI-FX-fest can be, it will never beat a great plot. Moreso when that plot is based on a great book. And even moreso when it is based on actual events.
My growing list of favorite flicks includes: Amazing Grace, Amistad, Braveheart, Schindler's List, Walk the Line, and Gods & Generals.
Now I realize that any movie “based on a true story” or “based on actual events” is embellished (and perhaps cleaned up a bit), but that such a story exists in reality is compelling due to the fact that some part of it it actually did happen.

The real events of Julia Child’s life are remarkable. Paul's and her time in the OSS. Their adapting to French culture. Her rise from a nobody housewife to a television star given her quirky personality, odd way of talking and her non-glamorous appearance are all the ‘underdog’ elements that are that much more heart warming and inspiring because they are not just the imaginings of a screenwriter, but they are true.

And I used to laugh watching Julia Child on TV growing up. "Make sure you add the fish head back to the broth because that's where a lot of flavor is!"

Julie Powell’s story is somewhat interesting, but nowhere near as captivating a story of Mrs. Child.
Apart from her ‘blog experiment’, it was refreshing to see a married couple who love each other stay true to each other even through difficult times.

1. Acting - Seriously, even though this was a quirky role, Meryl Streep should be up for an Oscar nomination. To convincingly pull off the range of emotion from eccentric and silly to the heartbreak of not being able to bear children to the sobbing elation of getting her cookbook published is quite a feat. Not only does Meryl Streep do this well – she draws the viewer in and you are rooting for Julia Child as though she were a dear friend. Another reminder as to why Merly Streep is considered such a great actor.

Amy Adams does a fine job... but let's face it - Meryl Streep sells this. Stanley Tucci is good too.

I loved it because it was a real story about the real lives of real people pulled off with a realism that was both entertaining and inspiring.

Star Trek and G.I. Joe were "fun" movies… but Julie & Julia was an artistic, worthwhile film. It was no Capra film, and it will most likely not get huge publicity, but it was the best thing I’ve seen at the cinema so far this summer.

G.I. JOE movie reviewed

I grew up a GI Joe fan... comics...figures... the animated show. Between this franchise and Star Wars, I daily kick myself for not having invested in Hasbro when I was 9.

While not knowing all the Joes, I was pretty familiar with the storyline(s).

NUTSHELL:
- high body count (both combatants and civilians) most of it wince inducing and on-screen
- lots o' language
- female heroes and villians are dressed to entice
- lot's of CGI & high tech gadgetry
- it's fitting that the end credits' song is "boom Boom Pow" with all the explosions
- if you love Paris, be prepared to say goodbye

This is not a movie to take your kids to. I think the PG-13 rating was generous, and while it's not 'R' material, this 'summer blockbuster' - like Transformers and Terminator - should NOT be targeted to kids. But Hasbro is marketing all the way down to the pre-school level with toys.

The old animated series was laughable in that everyone was constantly shooting at each other but it seemed no one ever got hit. At least no one of great importance... and if they did they got medical attention and you could be sure of their return. The comic books were similar but since their story arcs covered months and years the healing time was extended. And yes, in the comic stories - sometimes people died.

This movie's body count is high, with both combatants and non-combatants dying frequently. This often happens off screen (cars blown up and down a street, offices and storefronts and busses getting destroyed with the implication that their visible occupants are affected) - and yet much is on screen... and some of it pretty grisly. It's a military flick though right? Perhaps. But the body count here is not like that of 'Private Ryan' - serving to detail the horrors of war. Joe's body count is done for entertainment value. Many of the COBRA soldiers get impaled through the eye, there is at least one fairly noticeable decapitation and one character ends up looking like Freddy Krueger after a mishap with fire.

I should mention that the last film I saw (rented) was "Hotel Rwanda". It is (or should be) nearly impossible to go from that gut-wrenching disgust of the casualties of war to the killing glee-fest of this movie. Also it is just tough to go from a film of that brilliance, depth and artistic nature to G. I. Joe.

Also in the disturbing violence category, Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes are shown fighting as kids. Not in a Sandlot kind of way, but in a no holds barred, martial arts, fight-to-kill sort of way. I get the rivalry, but given the original storylines the hatred from SS to SE reached it's zenith when the two were much older than 9 or 10 years old. How many copycat fights are there going to be because the kiddos saw this type of fighting on G I Joe?

Finally in the violence category, I am not a fan of women trying to kill each other. I have never understood the sick draw of a 'cat fight'. Moreso when blades and chains and pipes are involved.

Speaking of the women - Scarlett and the Baroness are both mostly dressed in outfits to induce male arousal - and not in clothes that would be worn in those type of combat settings. And really - if you need body armor is it going to be that formed to your body or draw attention like that? C'mon! Yes, the comics always had busty females, so I knew this might enter the mix. The one other female 'main' character 'Covergirl' is dressed in fatigues, but she gets axed pretty early on in a nasty way.

So that leads to the Joes armor & costumes. The comics and TV show were vibrantly colorful, because each Joe was unique and their clothes (often times completely impractical) demonstrated this. Here - everybody gets black, or white when we reach "Hoth" (more on that later). The Accelerator suits were cool.

My main beef with costuming? Who decided to give Snake Eyes lips??? Seriously?? He doesn't need them.

Which leads to storylines.

Snake Eyes - did not take a vow of silence when his master died! He was horribly wounded while saving Scarlett's life! this caused him to be horribly disfigured (the need for he mask) and irreparably damaged his vocal chords.
(POSSIBLE SPOILER: In the comics, Snake Eyes' Master was killed by Zartan - NOT Storm Shadow)

Scarlett & Snake Eyes (in the comics) were a serious item / or Scarlett and Duke. The movie hints (barely) at a relationship between Scarlett and Snake Eyes, but quickly dumps it to pair her up with... wait for it... Ripcord. Uh... Ripcord? Read his Wikipedia page. He's about as minor a character as you can get in the comics. Sheesh.

Duke & Baroness - totally not in the comics, but it worked for me except that if this truly is going to be a trilogy of films, let her 'turn' at the end, not 5/6 of the way through this film! And don't reveal her brother's fate until that last film!

Cobra Commander - wha??? backstory - nope. waaaaay too stupid. I won't spoil it here. And the mask at the end. um.. people at Universal and Hasbro - this was so silly as to make it laughable. Just give him the hood!!!!

Storm Shadow - Without ruining things, I'm not sure how they could bring him back in a semi-believable way. I loved that in the comics he eventually came around and became a Joe.

Nanomites - whatever. biggest disappointment of the film and utterly preposterous.

They threw in Dr. Mindbender, but let's pray that the shark that killed G.I.Joe (Cobra-la & Serpentor) never enters the film adaptions.

and..erm.. G.I. Joe was an American special ops team. The film says they are made up of the best and brightest from 10 allied nations. Uh... anybody explain to me why a multi-nation special ops team has a decidedly American name? General Infantry Joe (slang for American soldier).

What's with the 'Hoth" comment? Once the Joes track the villians to their secret hideout, it really reminds you of Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back... and the heroes daring escape? It is at times almost frame for frame the escape route of Lando Calrissian and Nien Nunb from Return of the Jedi. *Sigh* *yawn* - I saw that before... in 1983!

SUMMARY: Some good thoughts, but if this is a trilogy... I'll watch the next ones on DVD. The altered storylines bugged me, but the body count moreso. And again, I come back to this: movies with this level of graphic violence should never be marketed to kids. The comics and animated TV show were not this rough.

The movie swings back and forth from "gritty realism" to "cartoonish" subplots and dialog. So it's got enough eye-rolling moments. "Knowing is half the battle" is actually a line... as well as "Yo Joe!"

oh - and can someone explain to me how ice can sink and destroy underwater military complexes?

this movie could have been so much better.

Great Speech by Judge Andrew Napolitano

Let me set down a couple of fervent beliefs that animate everything I do and everything I say.

I believe that God created heaven and earth and every single individual on the planet.

I believe that the God who gave us life gave us liberty and that freedom is our birthright.

I believe that the States created the federal government and not the other way around. And that the power that the States gave to the Federal Government – they can take back.

When we were colonists, and the King and the Parliament needed money from us, and they always seemed to need money, they devised ingenious ways to tax us. One of them was called the Stamp Act. The Parliament decreed that every piece of paper that the Colonists had in their homes; every book, every document, every deed, every lease, every pamphlet, every poster to be nailed to a tree had to have the King’s stamp on it. You think going to a Post Office is bad? You had to go to a British Government office and buy a stamp with the King’s picture.

Question: How did the King know that his picture was on every piece of paper in your house? The Parliament enacted a hateful piece of legislation called the Writs of Assistance Act which let the king’s soldiers write their own search warrants, and bang down any door they chose to look for the stamps or anything else that they were looking for.

It was the last straw.

We fought a revolution. We won the revolution. We wrote the Constitution. The constitution doesn’t grant power, it keeps the government off our backs.

When they were debating the Constitution in the Summer of 1787 in Philadelphia, there were two great arguments – one by the Jefferson and Madison crowd and one by the Adams and Hamilton crowd. Jefferson argued, though he wasn’t physically there in Philly, as he did in the Declaration of Independence that our rights are ours by virtue of our humanity. That as God is perfectly free, and we are created in his image and likeness, we too are perfectly free. The big government crowd – yes they had them even in those days – argued that you can’t have freedom without government, and that government gives us our rights, and therefore, that government can take them away. This is not an academic argument. Jefferson and the natural law argument prevailed because the Constitution was written to keep the government from interfering with our natural rights.

And so, your right to think as you wish, to say what you think, to publish what you say, to travel where you want, to worship as you see fit, to keep and bear arms to defend yourself against a tyranny. And, after the right to life, the greatest and most uniquely American of rights – and I say this in front of the seat of the government – is the right to be left alone.

We wrote a Constitution to ensure that the government would never interfere with these rights. Think about it – if rights come from the government, then the government, by ordinary legislation, or presidential decree can take them away. But if the rights come from our humanity, then unless we violate someone else’s natural rights, the government cannot take our rights away.

This is not just a democrat, upper case D, or a republican, upper case R, problem. It’s a problem with government today.

There’s a republican version of big government just as assaultive to our liberties as there’s a democrat version of big government.

We fought a revolution because British soldiers could knock on our doors and demand that we house them, and demand that we turn over property to them because they could write their own search warrants. In the Patriot Act, the most hateful piece of legislation since the Alien and Sedition Acts, a republican congress and a republican president authorized federal agents to do the unthinkable – to write their own search warrants. And the republican administration didn’t even let members of the House of Representatives read the Patriot Act before they voted on it.

Why should the government be able to spy on us? We should be able to spy on them!

When some judge is rationalizing away our liberty, or some congressman is plotting to take away your freedom or your tax dollars, we should know what they do every minute that they do it.

I was speaking to a group of congressman from a neighboring state – I won’t tell you which state it was, but they don’t play football there – and they came up to me and said “this is the first time we have heard that the Patriot Act allows federal agents to write their own search warrants.” Remember, in the Constitution, we put in the 4th Amendment, the right to be left alone, to make sure that if the government had a target, no matter how guilty the target, no matter how widespread is the belief in the guilt of the target, no matter how dangerous is the target, the government has to go through a neutral judge with a search warrant before it can get to that target. These members of Congress said, “we didn’t know that the Patriot Act allowed the government to bypass the courts and write any search warrant they wanted.” Then I asked them a question I knew the answer to already – did you read the Patriot Act before you voted on it? The answer – no. What were you voting on? A summary we received. Let me guess who wrote the summary – some lawyers in the justice department, right? Of course.

Would you hire anybody to run your business that committed you to a violation of the very reason you’re in business if they didn’t even the document by which they were making that committment? Of course not.

The camera is the new gun. There’s nothing that government dislikes more than the light of day, and cameras recording what the government is doing, whether it’s on a street corner, or in there, or in Washington D.C., we have the right to know everything that they do and why they do it, and when they do it, and how they are taking our freedoms.

[PART 2]



I have another one of my basic core beliefs. The individual has an immortal soul. Every individual is greater than any government.

Your government is based on fear and force. You don’t have to take my word on it. The 2nd president on the United States, John Adams, said “Of course the government is based on fear.” And the first president, George Washington, said “Government is not reason, it is force.” I think they knew what they were talking about.

Now fast-forward to modern times. Whenever the government wants something, it scares us. During the civil war, Lincoln tried civilians in this state where no battles occured, by military tribunal. After he died the supreme court invalidated everything the military tribunals did. During the first world war, the Wilson administration locked up 2000 people called anarchists – same thing as enemy combatants. No trial, no charge, just jail for the duration of the war. In world war II, FDR locked up 150,000 Japanese Americans, people born in the United States, who got no trial and had no charges, and when the war was over were given $25 and told to go home.

Today we have federal agents. You know I get in arguments with my friends at Fox News, and one of them, I don’t have to tell you who it is, but is truly the most irascible person there. And he said to me, you know you have a problem with Guantanamo Bay, and you have a problem with the Patriot Act, what will you do if I get sent to Guantanamo Bay, will you visit me? And I say, Bill – no, because they’ll probably keep me there as well.

Government likes to say that it’s taking an oath to uphold the Constitution. In the years that I was on the bench, it seemed that every time government lawyers were in my courtroom, if the government was prosecuting someone who was legitimately guilty or whether it was a mistake, or whether somebody was suing the government because government contractors or government doctors, or government workers made a mistake – the government doesn’t come in to the courtroom to enforce the constitution, it comes into the courtroom to evade and avoid it. That, ladies and gentlemen, must be stopped.

This is a great moment in our history. A crowd of this magnitude on a beautiful day, in the boiling sun, in the most middle-American of great middle-American states…comes together not because the president is a democrat, not because his predecessor was a republican, not because a war is just or unjust, not because the Fed is stealing or printing – you’re here because you believe in human freedom.

It is the essence of our existence that we should be free. But remember this: the government hates freedom. It is an obstacle to every one of their designs. Whenever they write laws, whenever they take your tax dollars, whenever they regulate your private behavior, whenever they tell you how to spend your money, whenever they tell you what medicines to take, whenever they tell you what food to eat, whenever they tell you with who you may or must associate, they are taking away your freedom and they love to get away with it. And they cannot get away with it any longer.

In the long history of the world, very few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its maximum hour of danger. This is that moment and you are that generation! Now is the time to defend our freedoms.

Jefferson was no saint but he was the greatest of our American presidents. He believed that the individual was greater than the state. He believed that the states were greater than the federal government. And when he wrote that our rights come from our creator, and that our rights are inalienable, he forever wed the notion of natural rights to the American experience and the American experiment. We must be vigilant about every right that the government wants to take away from us.

You’ve heard the president say, present president and his predecessor, “my first job is to keep you safe.” He’s wrong! His first job is to keep us free. It is his only job to keep us free.

Shortly before he died, Jefferson lamented, that in his view of the world that is was in the natural order of things for government to grow and freedom to be diminished; how ardently he wish that that wouldn’t happen. And in order to prevent it from happening he had a very simple remedy, “When the people fear the government, that is tyranny. When the government fears the people, that is liberty!”