Remember me telling you how that chocolate coverred apple from Godiva was a bust? Well, today UPS dropped me a package from Godiva. They sent a half-pound box of their fine chcolates to make-up for the lousy apple. Now that's a fine example of good customer service!

Tawny

Talk about wierd weather. Last week we had some days where the windchill was minus-somthing, the wind was whipping and it was snowing. Today it's 62 and the sun is shining!

I realized this morning when I woke up that I hadn't left the house since last Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. So I was out of here by 9:30 am to get some fresh air and run some errands.

I went to the hardware store in town to buy a toilet seat. The hinges on the right side of the old one snapped off. Just shy of $30 is what it cost for the new one. I should have gone toHome Depot, I think it would have been cheaper, but I didn't want to deal with crowds.

Finally finished that book I was telling you about, so I dropped it off at the library. Picked up a new one by Faye Kellerman, as well as the newest by James Patterson. The librarian said they were both good, so I'm hoping......

It was so warm that I didn't need my coat which was so darn bizarre because the last time I'd been out (on Wednesday) I thought I was going to freeze to death.

Hope things are good in your end of the world.

Call me.

Tawny
248-615-1300

Are you as stuffed from turkey as I am? I love the meal on turkey day! I roasted a 20 pound turkey, made all the sides, and had a wonderful group of friends and family to dinner at my house yesterday. It was perfect.

Did you go shopping this morning to get those day-after-Thanksgiving-Day deals? I saw on the news where people got trampled at the Walmart in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And the police had to come out to a couple of other Walmarts here in Michigan. Is it as crazy where you are?

Me, I stayed home. My house was nice and cozy and I loved every minute of being curled up in the recliner with Kathleen, my beloved cat, on my lap.

I've been reading a book by Bebe Moore Campbell, 72 Hour Hold. It's a fiction story about a woman whose 18 year old daughter is manic depressive/bipolar. I've been struggling to get through the book. It's been a hard read for me. See, my mother was manic depressive and the book brings it all back to me. The author knows what she's talking about, it's all real to me.

hugs--Tawny

Happy Thanksgiving to you!

hugs--Tawny

It is definitely winter here. Brrrr. The last few days have been frightfully cold. We seem to have gone from fall to winter in a blink of the eye.

I have some new winter boots, really nice and warm ones, that I orderred from Landsend.com. If you need a pair yourself, take a look at their site. They're maybe a little pricey but they sure are nice quality.

Stay warm.

hugs--Tawny

I am a chocoholic!

Yesterday I was at the big mall and I stopped at the Godiva store (www.Godiva.com). They had these humongous Granny Smith apples on a stick, dipped in chocolate and rolled in toffee bits. $7.50. I bought one.

Later that evening I got that apple and a sharp knife and went to cut a slice out of it, and you know what happened? The chocolate cracked and fell off! I was left with a big old naked apple on a stick and a pile of chocolate!

I emailed Godiva and they apologized, said they'd send me another one.

Usually I buy chocolate and caramel coated apples from the Rocky Mountain Candy Company. They have their stores, at least around here, at outlet shopping malls. The apples are huge, increibly good, and run about $5 or $6 each.

I hope I just had a bad Godiva apple because their store is a lot closer than the outlet mall.

hugs, Tawny

Remember me saying how my Uncle Richard was dying? How he'd called his grown children to come to Mississippi so he could say goodbye to them? Well, Uncle Richard died about a week and a half ago, his funeral was on Saturday the 12th. No, I didn't go to it. I had been saying all along I wasn't making the trip, but then I came down bad sick so it wasn't an issue.

Many of my relatives from up here got on the highway headed to Mississippi. There was a whole lot of car pooling going on. My cousins Bob and Gloria Jean, they have a big camper and lots of family went south with them. A few took the Greyhound to Michigan City, Indiana, then hitched a ride with relatives from there. Uncle Robert, he and his wife live in California, but they were in Texas when Uncle Richard died so the ride wasn't nearly as long as it would have been. Their oldest son is in the military and they were in Texas to say goodbye to him because he was deploying to Iraq. Uncle Johnny, who lives in Kentucky, went to Mississippi by way of Indiana so he could give a ride to those who needed one.

Aunt Shug, my oldest aunt, Uncle Richard was one of her exhusbands, and the father of some of her children. Aunt Shug loves Mississippi. Every chance she gets, that's where she heads off to. She'd still live down there if she could but she's old and a little sickly and her children insisted she move up north so they could take care of her.

I have two other great aunts, Alberta and Big Gal. They live here in Michigan too. Alberta is the youngest, although she's still old. Big Gal, well, the less said about her the better. But Alberta, well, she's a bitter woman and she's known for being hateful. When they had that big birthday party for Aunt Shug, remember me tellling you about that? Alberta and Big Gal boycotted it. Why? Because they're hateful, bitter women and they couldn't stand to see their sister happy. I should say they attempted to boycott the party. Someone, and they shall remain nameless, went and whispered in their ears that it would be better for their health and welfare if they got their behinds to the party......

So anyway, everybody was in Mississippi for Uncle Richard's funeral. Turned out it ws also Geat Aunt Baby Doll's 90-something birthday, so lots of extended fmily that otherwise wouldn't have been in town, was. It ended up being like a mini family reunion.

Plus, because Aunt Shug has lived most of her life in that small Mississppi town, she has friends, lots of friends, and they all came to see her and to attend the funeral. Alberta, who doesn't have any friends anywhere, and I'm not making that up, she doesn't have any friends, couldn't stand to see all the love being shown Shug. It was killing Alberta. So you know what she did? She called back up north to her kids, told them Shug's kids beat her up, and she needed money wired to her so she could catch a Greyhound home!

I don't know what would make a woman, even one as bitter as Alberta, make up a lie like that, but she did, and her kids bought it hook, line and sinker. Western Union had some money for Alberta and she came back to Detroit.

Then Alberta's kids got on the phone to Shug and her kids and started threatening them. Telling them they were going to kill them and stuff them in body bags. And that's the mildest stuff they were saying. They called and called and harassed everyone so badly that Shug ended up in the hospital when she got back to Detroit. The doctor said her blood pressure is so high that he doesn't understand why her veins haven't exploded and she hasn't died from a series of strokes.

I don't know what to say about these people, I really don't. But if you see you and yours in any of this--change your ways now before it's too late.


hugs, Tawny
tawnyford@webtv.net

I have so much stuff to tell you about that I'm probably going to have to spread it out for two days just so your brain doesn't overload.

Thanksgiving is almost here, right? Well, my cousin, Miranda, is angry with my cousin Lanita because Lanita hasn't invited her to dinner on turkey day. Why hasn't she been invited? Because Lanita is angry with her.

See, Miranda is Lanita's mother's boss at work. And Miranda, well, she's almost always been on a power trip her whole life, and it's gotten worse since she made top supervisor at work. To hear my Aunt Gloria (Lanita's mother) tell it, Miranda is going out of her way to give her a hard time. At work, Miranda rides her ass and treats her disrespectfully.

Miranda's mother, Aunt Anniebelle, well, she's a trip herself. When Miranda and her sisters were growing up, Aunt Anniebelle was addicted to prescription medications. Aunt Gloria, despite being less than ten years older than Miranda, spent a lot of time raising Aunt Anniebelle's kids for her. So not only is Gloria her aunt, but she's also like her surrogate mother, so it makes her harsh treatment of Gloria even worse.

Miranda, who is almst forty and has two teenage children, has been calling everyone up in the family saying she doesn't know how she's going to feed her kids Thanksgiving Day dinner. Now it's not like Miranda is poor and can't afford to buy a turkey at the grocery store and cook it, or make reservations at a restaurant. The woman brings home close to 70 grand a year. She's just too lazy to cook dinner and too cheap to make reservations.

Miranda's older sister, Yolanda, is addicted to crack. I think Yolanda is going to die soon, she's in a very bad way. She was in rehab a couple of years ago, but it didn't work for her. So mooching a meal at Yolanda's is out of the question for Miranda. Yolanda will more than likely be doing her celebrating at the crackhouse.

Miranda's youngest sister, Lil, I'm not sure where she and her two children are having dinner that day. I know it won't be at her place because her gas is turned off. Yes, it's cold here, at night it goes down to the 20's, and no, Lil has no heat in her house.

What gets me is that Miranda is pushing forty and she's so lazy and so cheap. What kind of an example is she setting for her kids?

Me, I've been cookng Thanksgiving dinner for years and I'm considerably younger than her. I've got a bunch of friends and family coming for dinner and it's going to be a wonderful time. It always is.

I hope your Thanksgiving is a good and blessed one. We all have so much to be thankful for.


hugs, Tawny
www.tawnyford.com

Thought you might find this interesting.


hugs, Tawny

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


Dear Mr. Bush:

I would like to extend my hand and invite you to join us, the mainstream American majority. We, the people -- that's the majority of the people -- share these majority opinions:

1. Going to war was a mistake -- a big mistake.

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/index.php?id=4924#mistake

2. You and your administration misled us into this war.

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/index.php?id=4924#misled


3. We want the war ended and our troops brought home.

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/index.php?id=4924#bringemhome

4. We don't trust you.

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/index.php?id=4924#trust


Now, I know this is a bitter pill to swallow. Iraq was going to be your great legacy. Now, it's just your legacy. It didn't have to end up this way.

This week, when Republicans and conservative Democrats started jumping ship, you lashed out at them. You thought the most damning thing you could say to them was that they were "endorsing the policy positions of Michael Moore and the extreme liberal wing of the Democratic party." I mean, is that the best you can do to persuade them to stick with you -- compare them to me? You gotta come up with a better villain. For heaven's sakes, you had a hundred-plus million other Americans who think the same way I do -- and you could have picked on any one of them!

But hey, why not cut out the name-calling and the smearing and just do the obvious thing: Come join the majority! Be one of us, your fellow Americans! Is it really that hard? Is there really any other choice? George, take a walk on the wild side!

Your loyal representative from the majority,

Michael Moore
www.michaelmoore.com
mmflint@aol.com

Rosa Parks is back in the news. Her nephew has filed a lawsuit to get control of her estate. Apparently the family feels that Mrs.Parks may not have been in her right mind when she made out her will in 2002. They say she was suffering from dementia. The two people she chose to carry on her affairs after her death--a retired judge and her longtime caregiver--are fighting him.

Tawny

Tell me what you think of this article from Rolling Stone.

hugs--
Tawny

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

Reverend Doomsday
According to Tim LaHaye, the Apocalypse is now
By Robert Dreyfuss


It might seem unlikely that the commander in chief would take his marching orders directly from on high -- unless you understand the views of the Rev. Timothy LaHaye, one of the most influential leaders of the Christian right, and a man who played a quiet but pivotal role in putting George W. Bush in the White House. If you know LaHaye at all, it's for his series of best-selling apocalyptic novels. You've seen the Left Behind novels everywhere: aboard airplanes, at the beach, in massive displays at Wal-Mart. In the nine years since the publication of the first novel, the series has sold 60 million copies. Next to the authors of the Bible itself, who didn't get royalties, LaHaye is Christianity's biggest publishing success ever.
LaHaye is a strict biblical reconstructionist -- taking the Good Book as God's literal truth. His books depict a fantastical, fictional version of what he and his followers think is in store for the human race. Not allegorically, not poetically, but word-for-word true. If the Bible (Revelation 9:1-11) says that billions of six-inch-long scorpionlike monsters with the heads of men, "flowing hair like that of women" and the teeth of lions, wearing crowns and helmets, will swarm across the globe gnawing on unbelievers -- well, that's exactly what LaHaye says will happen. And soon.

LaHaye's books, and his quirky interpretation of biblical prophecy that stands behind them, revolve intensely around Iraq, because LaHaye believes that Armageddon will be unleashed from the Antichrist's headquarters in Babylon. Since the 1970s -- when Iraq began a reconstruction project on the ruins of the ancient city, near Baghdad -- LaHaye has said that Saddam Hussein is carrying out Satan's mission. In 1999, LaHaye wrote that Saddam is "a servant of Satan," possessed by a demon, and that he could be "the forerunner of the Antichrist." Ultimately, says LaHaye, before Christ can return to Earth, Iraq, led by the Antichrist, must engage in a world-shaking showdown with Israel.

Of course, there have always been preachers on the margins of the religious right thundering on about the end of the world. But it's doubtful that such a fanatic believer has ever had such a direct pipeline to the White House. Five years ago, as Bush was gearing up his presidential campaign, he made a little-noticed pilgrimage to a gathering of right-wing Christian activists, under the auspices of a group called the Committee to Restore American Values. The committee, which assembled about two dozen of the nation's leading fundamentalist firebrands, was chaired by LaHaye. At the time, many evangelicals viewed Bush skeptically: Despite his born-again views, when he was governor of Texas, Bush had alienated many of the state's Christian-right activists for failing to pursue a sufficiently evangelical agenda. On the national level, he was an unknown quantity.

That day, behind closed doors, LaHaye grilled the candidate. He presented Bush with a lengthy questionnaire on issues such as abortion, judicial appointments, education, religious freedom, gun control and the Middle East. What the preacher thought of Bush's answers would largely determine whether the Christian right would throw its muscle behind the Texas governor.

Mostly preferring to stay out of the limelight, LaHaye has been the moving force behind several key organizations on the Christian right that have redrawn the boundaries of American politics. In 1979, at a time when ministers confined themselves to their churches, he prodded the Rev. Jerry Falwell to found the Moral Majority, a group that launched today's cultural wars against feminism, homosexuality, abortion, drugs and pornography. In 1981, he helped found the little-known but vastly powerful Council for National Policy, a secretive group of wealthy donors that has funneled billions of dollars to right-wing Christian activists. "No one individual has played a more central organizing role in the religious right than Tim LaHaye," says Larry Eskridge of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals, calling him "the most influential American evangelical of the last twenty-five years."

When the meeting with Bush ended, LaHaye gave the candidate his seal of approval. For Bush, it was a major breakthrough, clearing the decks for hundreds of leaders of the Christian right, from TV preachers and talk-show hosts to Bible Belt pulpit pounders, to support the Bush-Cheney ticket in 2000. "Bush went into the meeting not totally acceptable," recalls Paul Weyrich, the grandfather of the religious right, who has known LaHaye for thirty years. "He went out not only acceptable but enthusiastically supported."

More than half a century ago, as a student at Bob Jones University, Timothy LaHaye began his public ministry as a pastor at a small church in a tiny town in South Carolina, not far from the campus. He'd grown up dirt-poor in Detroit, peddling newspapers during the Depression. His father had died when he was ten. In 1944, after finishing night school and attending a Bible institute in Chicago, he enlisted in the Air Force at seventeen and served in Europe as a machine gunner aboard a bomber.

At Bob Jones, the Christian-fundamentalist college famous for being anti-Catholic, LaHaye met and fell in love with a fellow Detroiter, Beverly Jean Ratcliffe. The two followed the school's strict "no touching" dating rule, which required lovers to stay six inches apart; a year later, they were married. In 1958, they moved to San Diego. At that time, Southern California was a hotbed of former McCarthyites, neo-Nazis and the John Birch Society, a right-wing group so paranoid and extremist that it denounced President Eisenhower as a communist. They all muttered darkly about secret societies, the evil United Nations and one-world-government conspiracies, views that LaHaye would soon make his own. For years, LaHaye spoke at Birch Society training sessions, getting to know many of its leaders and building his ministry in the part of California that, twenty years later, would be the launching pad for Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential bid.

In the next dozen years, LaHaye built a veritable Christian empire: three churches, twelve elementary and secondary schools, a Christian college, an anti-evolution think tank called the Institute for Creation Research, the Pre-Trib Research Center to promote his views on how the world will end, and Family Life Seminars, a lecture program on sex, marriage and Christian living -- all while writing dozens of books. The Act of Marriage, a best seller published in 1976 and co-authored with Beverly LaHaye, is an explicit Christian sex manual, condemning "petting," abortion and homosexuality.

In the early 1970s, alarmed by laws and court decisions on abortion and school prayer, LaHaye began organizing the churches of Southern California for political action. In 1979, he established Californians for Biblical Morality, a church-based political group that lobbied in Sacramento. In many ways, it was the genesis of the Christian right. "I met Tim and Beverly about thirty years ago, while I was on a preaching tour of Southern California," says Falwell. "I found out that he'd done something no conservative minister had ever done before: He'd organized hundreds of churches into a political bloc. At the time, I'd never heard of mixing religion and politics." LaHaye persuaded Falwell to consider doing the same. "More than any other person, Tim LaHaye challenged me to begin thinking through my involvement [in politics]," recalls Falwell. Paul Weyrich confirms Falwell's account. "He encouraged Falwell to get involved in the political process," says Weyrich, who heads the conservative Free Congress Foundation. "But Falwell was reluctant to do so, because he thought it would ruin his ministry."

In 1979, LaHaye and Falwell established the Moral Majority, with Falwell as its leader and LaHaye as a guiding member of its three-person board of directors. The Moral Majority drafted tens of millions of conservative Christian voters into the culture wars, swelling the ranks of the Republican Party and serving as Reagan's core constituency. But while Falwell was catapulted to national prominence, LaHaye stayed in the background. "He flew under the radar, very behind-the-scenes, and didn't seek publicity," says Falwell.

Two years later, LaHaye founded the Council for National Policy. An elite group with only a few hundred members, the CNP meets three times a year, usually at posh hotels or resorts, going to extraordinary lengths to keep its agenda and membership secret. According to members willing to speak about it, however, the council unites right-wing billionaires with scores of conservative Christian activists and politicians, and these encounters have spawned countless campaigns and organizations. Its ranks have included prominent politicians such as Ed Meese and John Ashcroft, and among its members can be found an editor of the conservative National Review, leading televangelists such as Pat Robertson and Falwell, representatives of the Heritage Foundation and other key think tanks, and activists including Grover Norquist and Oliver North.

Supported by moneybags such as Texas oilman Nelson Bunker Hunt, Amway founder Richard DeVos and beer magnate Joseph Coors, some in the group helped fund Oliver North's secret campaign to aid the Nicaraguan contra rebels during the 1980s and financed the right-wing jihad against President Clinton in the 1990s. (The impeachment effort was reportedly conceived at a June 1997 meeting of the CNP in Montreal.) In addition, the group has funded an army of Christian organizers. Falwell says that in the past two decades, he has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for his ventures, including Liberty University, through the CNP. "My guess is that literally billions of dollars have been utilized through the Council for National Policy that would not otherwise have been available," he says. Bush attended a CNP meeting at the start of his presidential campaign in 1999 to seek support, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld took part in the group's gathering last April in Washington, D.C.

"Without [LaHaye], what we call the religious right would not have developed the way it did, and as quickly as it did," says Weyrich.

Besides the Moral Majority and the CNP, LaHaye established a third organization, Concerned Women for America, run by his wife, Beverly, which today claims 600,000 members. From the late 1970s into the 1980s, CWA, in coordination with Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, led a successful battle against the adoption of the feminist-inspired Equal Rights Amendment, and it thundered against gay rights, sex education in schools and abortion. While Schlafly organized the women in Republican clubs around the country, Bev LaHaye reached out to the women in churches, "the ones who were never involved in politics, who'd go to Bible-study groups," says Schlafly. "She reached a lot of people, particularly in the Christian churches, that I might not have been able to reach." Many of these women stayed involved, joining the ranks of religious-right activists.

By the mid-1980s, LaHaye was at the top of his game, powerful and well- connected, plugged into the Reagan administration and, through yet another of his groups, the American Coalition for Traditional Values, a pivotal factor in the 1984 election, registering Christian conservative voters through "pastor-representatives" in all 435 congressional districts. But he was also headed for a fall.

Lahaye's free-fall began in the mid-1980s, and by the end he'd almost been expelled from the political Garden of Eden. What set it into motion was his connection with the weird would-be messiah Rev. Sun Myung Moon, whose Unification Church cult of "Moonies" was viewed by most Christians as laughably heretical. When Moon got entangled in legal controversy, LaHaye sprang to his defense, amid reports that he'd received substantial funding from the wealthy Moon. By the time LaHaye backed away, it was too late. His credibility was shot, and the American Coalition for Traditional Values soon folded.

Then it got worse. In 1988, LaHaye was bounced from the presidential campaign of former Rep. Jack Kemp when the media learned of LaHaye's anti-Catholic views (he considers Catholics to have strayed from biblical truth and has referred to popes as "Antichrists"). After that, he was deemed nearly radioactive in politics. When he showed up later that year for a campaign event at the elder George Bush's home, the vice president rushed to Doug Wead, his liaison to the religious right. "Tim LaHaye is here!" Wead recalls Bush saying in alarm. By the early 1990s, LaHaye had retreated to a small Baptist church in Rockville, Maryland, and the Moonie-owned Washington Times noted that he had "left the national stage."

Within a few years, however, LaHaye would ride Left Behind back to the top. As LaHaye tells the story, one day, about 1994, he was sitting on an airplane, watching a married pilot flirting with a flight attendant, and it hit him: What would befall the sinful pilot if the Rapture happened now? What if, as LaHaye believes the Bible foretells, God suddenly snatches up to heaven all of the believers in Jesus? And that is how Left Behind starts. Everywhere, hundreds of millions of people vanish, leaving the unbelievers behind, from insufficiently pious Christians to Muslims, Catholics, Jews and everyone else. What follows is the Tribulation, in which God visits unspeakable plagues on the Earth, amid a climactic worldwide battle waged by a band of new believers, called the Tribulation Force, against Satan and the Antichrist. Seas and rivers turn to blood, searing heat burns men alive, ugly boils erupt on the skin of the disfavored, 200 million ghostly, demonic warriors sweep across the planet exterminating one-third of the world's population -- well, you get the idea. And why does a merciful God visit such horrors on mankind? According to LaHaye, "God intends that the terrible plagues and judgments of the Tribulation might cause the people of the world to repent and turn to him."

Reviewers trashed the Left Behind books as "almost laughably tedious" and "unrelievedly vomitous badness," and prominent Christian leaders condemned them as "unscholarly" and a "perversion" of the Bible. But the series gradually blossomed in Christian bookstores, gaining readers by word-of-mouth. In 2001 alone, the books sold a staggering 15 million copies. The intent of the books is frankly evangelical. "Our hope is that some people will be persuaded," says Jerry Jenkins, who co-authored the series with LaHaye.

The success of Left Behind gave LaHaye an enormous boost, returning him to prominence and making him truly born again. "At meetings of the Council for National Policy now, Tim and Bev are treated like rock stars," says Grover Norquist, perhaps Washington's leading conservative activist. Last fall, LaHaye released the first book of a new series called Babylon Rising, which takes his apocalyptic notions even further. Striking while the brimstone is hot, LaHaye has already received a reported $42 million advance deal from Bantam Books for the Babylon books, built around a swashbuckling, Indiana Jones-style biblical archeologist in the Holy Land.

Now seventy-seven, lahaye is considered rather scowly, even by his friends. A thin man who dyes his hair black, he wears a battery-powered earpiece and favors clashing polyester suits. "He can come across as stern and unloving," says Jenkins, especially when he gets up on his soapbox. "Then people say he can be too severe."

He is certainly gloomy about Earth's future. "We have more reason to believe that ours may be the terminal generation than any generation since Jesus founded His church 2,000 years ago," LaHaye told Rolling Stone via e-mail from his home in Palm Springs, California, citing not only biblical prophecy but weapons of mass destruction, incurable diseases, pollution and overpopulation. Despite Bush's election, Republican control of Congress and the success of his own organizations, LaHaye says that things are getting worse, and that "liberal, anti-Christian secularists still control government, media, education and other important agencies of influence."

That's a succinct summation of the tangled, conspiratorial mind-set conveyed in his books. In Left Behind, the "bad guys" just happen to be the same ones whom LaHaye, the Christian right and their allies usually demonize: the United Nations, the Europeans, Russia, Iraq, Muslims, the media, liberals, freethinkers and "international bankers," all of whom team up with the Antichrist, who ends up heading the U.N. and moving its headquarters to Babylon, Iraq. The "good guys," of course, are Christian believers, Israel and a phalanx of 144,000 Jews who accept Jesus. Another heroic force in the series is the right-wing American militia movement, which, as a world war erupts, makes a last-ditch, ultimately futile stand against the forces of Satan and the Antichrist in the United States.

According to LaHaye, civilization is threatened by a worldwide conspiracy of secret societies and liberal groups intent on destroying "every vestige of Christianity." Among the participants in this conspiracy are the Trilateral Commission, the Illuminati, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood, "the major TV networks, high-profile newspapers and newsmagazines," the U.S. State Department, major foundations (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford), the United Nations, "the left wing of the Democratic Party," Harvard, Yale "and 2,000 other colleges and universities." All of this is assembled to "turn America into an amoral, humanist country, ripe for merger into a one-world socialist state."

LaHaye professes no knowledge of whether President Bush buys into his views. "I have seen nothing from this president that would indicate that he is influenced one way or the other by my prophesy teaching," he says. But for Bush, an emotional, evangelical president who has repeatedly described the struggle against Saddam as a conflict between good and evil, LaHaye's views resonate with his. And though it's not known whether Bush has read any of the Left Behind books, he is a regular consumer of writing by other evangelists. Just recently, according to Falwell, Bush called a well-known born-again author, Rick Warren, to say he and Laura Bush had loved reading his new book, The Purpose Driven Life. Asked whether Bush is in accord with the End Times views of LaHaye, Falwell says, "My guess is that his views would differ very little, but that's conjecture." Jenkins, LaHaye's co-author, says only, "Every Christian ought to be happy that we have someone in the White House who says he believes what we do."

But the idea that Bush, in going to war against Iraq, might have been moved not by politics but by an apocalyptic vision is terrifying to some. Last October, the Rev. C. Welton Gaddy of the Interfaith Alliance wrote a formal letter to Bush, saying, in part, "Please assure the American people that you are not developing foreign policy on the basis of a fundamentalist biblical theology that requires cataclysm in Israel in order to guarantee the return of Christ." So far, he has not received an answer, and the White House didn't return calls from Rolling Stone asking whether the president has read Left Behind.

The final volume in the Left Behind series appears in the spring.

(January 28, 2004)

(Posted Jan 28, 2004)

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/rnd/1090028394515/has-player/true/id/5939999/version/6.0.10.505?rnd=1103998542781&has-player=true&version=6.0.12.872

There's been quite the hoopla in the Detroit newspapers, as well as on the local news regarding the images of the city of Detroit that the Sacramento Kings showed on the team's arena video prior to their game against the Pistons. Apparently they showed images of burned out cars, abandoned buildings, garbage strewn streets, etc. The other day there was a full page ad/apology letter from the Kings in the Detroit paper.

Okay, it wasn't polite to show pictures intended to embarass a visiting team.

But Detroit is acting like the Kings made those pictures up. It's the very same way they acted when 8 Mile, the film by Eminem, hit the theaters.

8 Mile was an accurate portrait of the city of Detroit. That's what Detroit neighboroods look like. The photos that the Kings showed? That's what Detroit looks like. There are thousands of abandoned buildings in the city. There are too many to count burned out vehicles littering the streets. And you want to talk about garbage? Lots of garbage dumped everywhere but where it's supposed to be.

If Detroit doesn't like the way their neighborhoods look, maybe they ought to do something to clean them up. Duh.


Tawny
tawnyford@webtv.net

On Tuesday the 8th we had a local election here in Farmington/Farmington Hills. The only thing to vote on was the mayor's position (only one person was running and they won by a landslide) and city council.

The city of Detroit had elections on the 8th too. The citizens were voting for, among other things--mayor, city council and city clerk.

Not that Farmington Hills isn't a happening place, because it is, but in the greater grander scheme of things, I don't think this election was one of those end- all-be-all events for us.

Now Detroit, on the other hand,.....


Accrding to the Metro Times (www.metrotimes.com), the weekly free alternative Detroit newspaper:

1. According to a survey done a dozen years ago, 47 per cent of the city of Detroit's population is functionally illiterate. That means they can't read or write well enough for ordinary, practical needs.

2. One third of their population lives below the federal poverty level.

3. Their property taxes are 73 mills, which are close to the highest in the state.

4. Their schools are unarguably terrible.

And these are just a few of the things wrong with Detroit.

Joe Harris, Detroit's auditor general, thinks that one of these days the city won't be able to pay its bills, and then the state will hve to step in and take control.

The last four years of fiscal mismanagement are the responsibility of Kwame Kilpatrick, the mayor. I've written about some of his excesses in previous blog entries. My best conservative guess, based on newspaper and tv news stories, is that he has personally jacked-off at least a million dollars of the taxpayers money for his own selfish pleasures. And it's probably more than that because the city is still stuck paying for a brand new Lincoln Navigator that he bought with Detroit's money for his wife. And then there's the stories of his clubbing, his limos, the big party he had at the mayors residence with the strippers (one of whom was later found dead execution-style), special contracts for his friends, etc.

The media has been busy exposing Kilpatrick's excesses at the expense of the city. When asked if he was afraid this coverage would hurt his attempt at re-election, he said no, his constituents didn't read the newspapers (?). And he must have been right because he won. Four more years.

On the one hand, I think if Detroit was stupid enough to re-elect this joker who spends their hard earned tax dollars like they're monopoly dollars while the citizenry lives in squalor and starves, well, then they deserve whatever happens to them and their city.

On the other hand, everything bad that happens to the citizens of Detroit ends up hitting the rest of Michigan right in their wallets.

Metro Times columnist Jack Lessenberry says we have to do like East and West Germany did after the Berlin Wall came down. East Germany, he said, looked like Detroit. West Germany, he said, looked like our wealthier suburbs. He said the rich half of the country stepped in and started rebuilding the poorer half, until today you can't hardly see the difference.

And that's nice, right? Who doesn't want to help people get on their feet and do good?

But doggone it, if they can't take some sort of responsibility for themselves--like electing officials who aren't out to fleece them....For example, what sense does it make for me to pay someone's enormous $800 shut-off notice electric bill, if the next time their bill shows up they don't pay it, or the time after that, and before you know it it's back to shut-off time again? And the reason they weren't paying their bill wasn't because they didn't have the money, but because they wanted to party instead? That's kind of how I see Detroit. I'm tired of doing without in order to pay for things that others could have coverred if they hadn't been busy living high off the hog and squandering.

Okay, I'm ranting now, I know it. But damn.


Tawny
tawnyford@webtv.net

No clue how the local news works where you are, but here, just about every worldwide news happening, they try to find the Michigan connection to it.

The hotel bombings in Jordan yesterday? Here's the Tawny connection.

My cousin Annie Ruth and her sister signed up with Annie Ruth's church to take a trip to the Holy Land. They wanted to walk where their god Jesus walked. Okay, everyone in the family tried to talk them out of it, to no avail.

Yesterday they pulled up to their hotel in Jordan just after the suicide bombers hit. When they called home, they were lying on the hotel room floor crying, wanting to come home.

My one cousin, her husband is a used-to-be official, so he was able to make arrangements with someone (if I told you who I'd have to kill you! just teasing) and he got them space on a plane. They should make New York in an hour or two.

Tawny

As my friend Judi pointed out to me the other day, it's been awhile since I've written anything here. I forget the reasonable excuse I gave Judi for not posting more often, but the more I thought about it--and since I've been sick (AGAIN!) I've had a lot of time to think--truth is sometimes I just don't have anything to talk about. And sometimes I have things I want to say, but I don't know how to express them. And sometimes I have just way too much stuff to discuss and can't figure out where to begin.

I'm assuming, because she was a national figure, that you know Rosa Parks died a week or two ago. And because of all the ensuing media coverage, you know that she died in Detroit. I had thought everyone knew she lived in Detroit, that when she did what she did on that bus, and then had to get up out of the south, Detroit was a safe haven for her.

In the metro Detroit area, her funeral was on television. When I spoke to Judi the other day she said she had wanted to physically attend Mrs. Parks funeral, but hadn't wanted to go alone, and almost called to see if I wanted to go with her. I told her we wouldn't have stood a chance on getting in, every one and their brother wanted in to Greater Grace that day. But Judi said we would have gotten in. And you know what? I'm sure we would have because when Judi puts her mind to something it gets accomplished. She's one of those people who just doesn't comprehend the meaning of can't.

I watched Mrs. Parks funeral on tv. Coverage began locally long beforethe funeral itself and, because I needed to make a trip to the mall and knew it would be empty whatwith the funeral on tv, I missed the first little bit and tuned in just as Bill Clinton began speaking. Did you hear his condensed remarks on CNN? That story of his about when Rosa Parks sat down in the front of the bus, he and his school chums decided that freed them up to sit in the rear of their segregated school bus.

There were so many people who spoke that I enjoyed, but I know I can't remember all of their names. Al Sharpton, I love what he said. I sure would have voted for Al for president. Even Farrakhan, he was right on the money with what he said, too.

Jesse Jackson, I don't know what to say about him. What sticks in my memory of him is him flapping his arms and saying 'fly away, fly away' repeatedly. And Aretha Franklin singing over the top of him while they got him back to his seat. Maybe the day was just a little too long for Jesse.

One of the many things I liked about her funeral was that folks set the record straight about that day Rosa sat down on the bus. For too many years too many preachers and others have been saying how she was tired that day, her feet hurt, and that's why she sat down. Lie. Rosa herself, in her autobiography, explained how she had been chosen to challenge the segregated busses. It was not a random act of tiredness on her part, it was a calculated move by the civil rights folks. Do some research on line, you'll find the truth.

Tawny