I’m sorry, but hearing Republican congressmen refer to Speaker Nancy Pelosi as “mean as a snake” and “Tom DeLay in a skirt” strikes me as very funny and very much deserved. For them, that is. Personally, I think she is like DeLay in the sense that she is very powerful and runs a tight ship, but she is also very different in that she is not a corrupt little weasel like the ex-bug exterminator was.
But almost immediately, Ehrman ran into a problem. It was an intellectual problem at first, but it soon became larger and harder to quarantine. In one of the first classes he took at Moody, he learned that none of the original texts of the New Testament exist. All we have are copies, made years later -- usually, many centuries later. In fact, the copies are copies of copies, and they’re filled with errors or intentional changes made over decades or centuries by scribes. Burning with fervor to discover the true word of God, the authentic divine voice that had been obscured or changed by all-too-human writers, Ehrman decided to begin a serious study of the New Testament. He completed his undergraduate studies at Wheaton College, where he began studying ancient Greek, the original language of the New Testament. But there was still no answer to his original question: How could we know what the word of God was if all we had were error-riddled copies? So Ehrman decided to plunge all the way in and immerse himself in the academic study of the texts of the New Testament. He entered the Princeton Theological Seminary, home to the world’s leading authority in the field, Bruce Metzger. His literalist faith in and his devotional approach to the Bible were under increasing strain, but he managed to hold onto them for a while -- until a professor jotted a casual comment on one of Ehrman’s papers. Ehrman was attempting to explain a passage from the Gospel of Mark in which Jesus refers to an event that took place “when Abiathar was the high priest.” The problem is that the book in the Old Testament that Jesus is referring to states that not Abiathar but his father Ahimelech was the high priest. Ehrman came up with a convoluted argument to reconcile the contradiction, using Greek etymology to prove that Mark did not mean what he apparently said. Ehrman believed that his professor, a beloved and pious scholar named Cullen Story, would appreciate his argument as a fellow believer in biblical inerrancy. Story’s response, Ehrman wrote in his best-selling 2005 book “Misquoting Jesus,” “went straight through me.” “Maybe,” Story scrawled at the end of Ehrman’s paper, “Mark just made a mistake.”
I am shamelessly swiping this idea from Donna. This is a list of my picks for the greatest TV moments. I am trying to stick to things that I saw when they happened and not re-runs This is really a hard list to do because while I can think of lots of TV shows that I loved to watch, it is hard to come up with one memorable scene that stands out above all the rest as one that I found especially funny, inspiring or entertaining. But here it goes:
Mork and Mindy: Mork (Robin Williams) goes into the kitchen and finds some eggs. Spaceships on his planet are shaped like eggs. He takes an egg, tosses it into the air and says “Fly and be free!” The look of shock on his face when the egg splats on the table is priceless.
Carol Burnet Show: Tim Conway playing the old man who does everything slooooooowly. At the end of the sketch he accidently falls out of a high-rise window. You hear him fall and crash at the bottom. There is a momentary pause and then he screams “Aaaaahhhhhhhh!”
SNL: Steve Martin performing “King Tut” live for the first time.
1988 VP Debate: Lloyd Bentsen knew than Dan Quayle was going to try and compare himself to John F. Kennedy at some point and he was prepared with the knockout punch. There has never been a more devestating takedown in the history of political debates.
1988 Democratic National Convention: Michael Dukakis makes his grand entrance with lights flashing, crowd cheering to the thumping, invigorating music of Neil Diamond singing “Coming To America.” I knew at that moment that he was going to be out next president.
Speed Racer: The mysterious Racer X lets the audience know for the umpteenth time that he is Speed’s long-lost older brother and pulls him out of yet another scrape before slinking away without revealing his secret.
Sesame Street: Depending on the number of the day, a pastry chef would stand at the top of a long flight of stairs and announce “Six coconut creme pies!” before inevitably tripping and falling down the stairs and covering himself with icing and/or pie filling. It delighted me everytime he did it.
Wide World of Sports: Evel Knievel attempts to jump the Snake River Canyon. (Also, anytime the Harlem Globetrotters were on).
Happy Days: Richie Cunningham strutting off singing Fats Domino’s “I Found My Thrill...” everytime a girl would agree to go out on a date with him.
Laverne & Shirley: “Hallow!!” Lenny and Squiggy would always make their entrance at the most inappropriate or inopportune time.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: When Spike first realizes that he has fallen in love with Buffy and gets really upset about it but can’t do anything to change it.
Jonathan Gurwitz’ latest column is a textbook example of partisan hackery, diverting attention away from the chief culprits of our economic crisis and trying to cast the blame at the feet of Democrats in Congress who have been practically powerless until just two months ago. Democrats may have gained a majority in Congress after the 2006 mid-term elections, but they have not had the power to actually change the direction of the government until just recently. Republicans still had the upperhand with a president who could veto legislation and a Senate that would filibuster everything else. And Gurwitz is also disingenuous when he claims the problem began with “failed congressional oversight”, as if we elect our Congressmen to regulate and police the banking system and not the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC, of course, was defanged over the past eight years by a Republican administration committed to its ideological deregulation agenda. The stage was set by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 which was never debated in the House or Senate and was slipped into an omnibus budget bill at the last minute by Sen. Phil Gramm. The bill contained a provision that has come to be known as the “Enron loophole,” which exempted most over-the-counter energy trades and trading on electronic energy commodity markets. The “loophole” was drafted by lobbyists for Enron working with senator Phil Gramm seeking a deregulated atmosphere for their new experiment, “Enron On-line.” But rather than acknowledging this deregulatory boondoggle, Gurwitz wants to distract readers with the totally innocuous issue of congressional payraises. Every year it’s the same thing, conservative government haters criticize the cost-of-living adjustment for Congressional salaries. If it wasn’t for the bipartisan compromise that made the increases automatic, Congress would never get a pay increase because no Congressman would ever want to take all the criticism and abuse for voting for it. Then we would end up with a situation where only the very wealthy could afford to be in Congress, which is already the case for many public offices anyway. And just remember that these automatic COLAs were in place the whole time Republicans were running Congress, but conservatives never complained about it until Democrats retook control.
Obama's first foray onto the world stage since being elected cannot be dubbed anything but successful. Obama appeared to be quite comfortable and confident as president of the United States at the G-20 summit that produced an unprecedented global economic recovery package.
The president's polling numbers at home are coming in at an impressive rate. A Democracy Corps poll taken this week found that the percentage of likely voters saying the country is going in the right direction is up to 38 percent, the highest level recorded in more than three years.
His budget is sure to be passed by Congress. And the recent special election in New York's 20th Congressional District in which Democrat Scott Murphy initially trailed by more than 20 points -- but wound up slightly ahead before officials count absentee ballots -- shows that the GOP is making few, if any gains among voters.
To top it all off (at least for now), the financial markets are expressing confidence in the president's leadership as they are expected to close up for the fourth straight week.
I have to agree. It looks like the economy is poised to start making a recovery just as Obama is getting his budget through Congress with every Republican in opposition. When the only thing Republicans can find to complain about is the gift Obama gave the queen, then things must be going well.
