Citizen Phil

Senator Hagel, A Portrait of Confusion

(Also published on Townhall.com)

I hate writing about Senator Hagel of Nebraska. This man is one-half of the State's voice in the U.S. Senate, and he cannot decide if he is a Republican or a Democrat on critical national issues. Does this mean that he is independent and thus, his is a voice for which we should be grateful?

The distinction is, in fact, very important. By electing our Senators and Representatives, citizens are given a voice in the Federal government. That citizen voice belongs in Congress, not in the office of the President, except for the opportunity every four years, when we can speak on the subject of who should occupy the office.

Senator Hagel is unable to decide if we should carry a big stick or simply lie down and play dead. Senator Hagel does not seem to know, if he wants to be President, is the President, or if we simply do not need a strong President after all.

Abortion: A case of missing perceptions

(This is a prior article, edited and republished for Townhall.com)

Looking across the political landscape, I see a battlefield cratered and split by deep canyons. Past generations may recall times that were as contentious as our own, but the lingering effects could never have been so damaging. Today we are bombarded twenty-four hours a day by the media, stirring passions to a sizzle, leaving many of us in the end with feelings of hope and satisfaction or a sense of dread and disappointment.

What is it that has happened over these past few election cycles, I ask myself? It is perplexing to say the least, but I suspect that one or two central issues are at the heart of the divide. Perhaps the largest and most passionate disagreement is the life versus choice debate. This has become so irreconcilable, that both sides try to avoid the subject altogether. I am reminded of the movie, “The Village”, in which there are horrible creatures. The villagers refer to them as, “Those of whom we do not speak”.

Stewards of the Flame

The United States is under intense scrutiny these days. The widespread consensus, both foreign and domestic, seems to agree that Americans should pack her troops and send them home. What business is it of ours that we should try to dictate the behavior of nations?

I can understand where this sentiment comes from, and I can understand how our own citizens are weary of spending our blood and our treasure. The costs are high and painful in this quest to battle unseen boogiemen in lands far away. I maintain; however, that our goals in this regard are noble, and are in keeping with the spirit of the founders of our great nation.

Never before in history have people come from all corners of the globe in search of freedom, and so successfully implemented their desires. America’s spirit, the yearning of the colonists to live free and under a government of their own design, was made manifest by the men who crafted the Declaration of Independence, and later, by the wise ones who penned the Constitution of the United States of America.

It is that unique opportunity, fashioned by those pioneers of freedom hundreds of years ago, which never existed before, and may never exist again. It is our responsibility to care for that tiny flame, and to spread its warm passion wherever there are people who live oppressed, and yearn for that which we take for granted today.

I wrote the following short piece a little over two years ago. It is as relevant today as it was then, to the discussion of America’s place in the world, and her role in spreading the flame of freedom. Give it some thought in terms of our being stewards of a unique phenomenon, perhaps never to be replicated again if we fail to protect the tiny spark.

We can live here, relatively protected, and isolated from the rest of the world. However, to do so would be tantamount to allowing that flame to consume all of the fuel for our own selfish purposes. Once consumed, the flame will wither. The only way to keep it going is to pass it around, and let the flame catch on wherever opportunity arises.

The United States of Buffoonery

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Every so often, I must vent a bit. I realize that not all Democrats are ultra-liberals. They are not all Buffoons, and so they are at least not all liberal Buffoons. Yet, I dare say, that the Democrat leadership has likely held many seminars on the proper care, feeding, and usage of these liberal Buffoon suits, which were purchased at the behest of Mr. Howard Dean, I can only surmise this to be true. I suspect that these were quickly disbursed following the November elections. Anyway, my vent-therapy commences below.

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Securely, I am wedged into the living-room pilot’s seat. The remote control is glued firmly to the palm of my hand. An agile thumb hovers over the buttons, ready at a moment's notice to enter familiar cable coordinates.

I deftly navigate around torturously obnoxious commercials. I travel from the Discovery Channel to Fox News. Then a short hop with a layover at the Learning Channel en route to NASA-TV. Once in awhile, I become trapped in a holding pattern at the Sci-Fi Channel until a surprise commercial casts me into evasive maneuvers.

My passengers are dizzy by now, and have entered stand-by mode. Their eyes are directed toward the television screen, but in reality, they are in a semi-conscious state. I have effectively hypnotized them with rapid-fire channel surfing.

Suddenly, a commotion on the screen causes my thumb to stutter. In disbelief, I shout an alert to my passengers. They are violently taken out of stand-by mode and become wide-eyed with a surge of adrenaline.

"Look at that…" I declare. "Did you see that?"

The scene before us is utter chaos. This time, it is the Taiwanese Parliament. Another time it may be South Korea, Russia, India, Ukraine, Australia, or France. We see grown men and/or women throwing fists, microphone stands, chairs, and who knows what else at each other. Some are hiding behind tables while others are looking for projectiles.

We laugh in disbelief, and I am smug in a self-righteous cocoon of grand civility. Gee Whiz… I’m certainly glad we don’t act like that in this country. I think this to myself; or perhaps I say it aloud.

Mittens Made from Kittens

Hold on now… put down the pitchforks. I like cats, and most of them seem to like me back. I like dogs and other animals too; at least the ones that don't view me as dinner. Bugs are a different matter. One bug looks vicious, but he only crawls up your arm because you are in the way. Another one looks perfectly innocent as it prepares to bite you and turn your flesh into a black puddle of festering goo.

What I think about cats, dogs, and bugs really has nothing to do with my topic, but then, you have no clue what the topic is at this point. I just wanted to give you a moment to calm down. Certainly, a few cat lovers blew a retinal blood vessel or two after reading the headline, which brings me conveniently back to the actual topic.

Ann Coulter, some would say, pulled a real "boner" when she used the word "faggot" during a recent speech. She defended the use of the word as being an obvious sophomoric slam directed toward presidential candidate, John Edwards. Her intention, she said, was to convey the notion that he is a wimp.

Wow... I typed three things in the above paragraph, all of which makes my skin feel squirmy and exposed. Perhaps my sophomoric lack of sophistication is to blame, but I simply cannot get used to the word boner as a word that should be used in polite company.

I doubt that I have ever called anyone a faggot, and I am almost as certain that I have never written anything where the word was needed. Of course, the third item in the aforementioned paragraph should make everyone's skin crawl. The name John Edwards ought to give you the shivers. If it doesn't, well, I guess you give me the shivers too.

The first time I ever heard the word boner used to describe an error, was in a tenth-grade English class. Our teacher was an adorable old woman who had been everyone's English teacher since the end of the Second World War. If memory serves, a fellow classmate was recounting an embarrassing event. The teacher laughed with the rest of us, and punctuated the moment by saying, "Oh dear, you pulled a real boner, didn't you?"

There was a look of utter shock on every teenage face in that room. Had she stripped off her dress and danced go-go style on her wooden desk, the flush on our pimpled faces would have been no less obvious. I'm confident that she followed up by defining the term for us, but the trauma of the moment clouds my memory to this day.

Global Warming: Caused by Pepsi, Coke, and Al Gore?

Now, before the corporate lawyers for these beverage giants suffer the effects of knotty underwear, let me state for the record that these two companies are not implicated by any scientific study that I am aware of, for causing global climate change. In fact, the only reason I used Pepsi and Coke in the headline, is that those two names are synonymous when speaking about soft drinks in general.

I do have some anecdotal evidence; however, which at the very least is interesting for intelligent people to consider while discussing the cause and effect of CO2 in the atmosphere. There is a website called Science-House.org, on which I discovered a simple experiment for measuring the weight of carbon dioxide gas in a 16 ounce bottle of Pepsi One soda. The article title was: “How much CO2 is in a Bottle of Soda?” by Dr. David G. Haase, The Science House.

Upon completion of the experiment, the author determined that approximately 2.2 grams of carbon dioxide gas is contained in each bottle of soda. At least that was the amount of gas that he could extract from the liquid.

On another website called DrHealthSecrets.com, they claim that in the United States during the year 2000, more than 15 billion gallons of soda was sold. According to a CIA website fact-book, there were an estimated 298,444,215 people in the United States as of July 2006. So by my rough calculations, that means that every man, woman, and child in the U.S. drinks 50.26 gallons of soda in a year's time.

With that in mind, and knowing that whatever we put into our bodies will eventually come out, we can roughly calculate the amount of carbon dioxide gas that is belched or otherwise deposited into the atmosphere by soda-bloated consumers in this country. The human race in America loads the atmosphere with 132 million kilograms, or 291 million pounds of carbon dioxide gas, every year, simply by drinking soda pop.