There are noble professions in this world. People who, through the way in which they make their living, make the world a better place.

Collections is not one of them.

I know that people who work in collections will tell you that they are simply the advocates for people who are owed a just debt, people who gave goods and services in good faith expecting to be compensated for it.

There's only one problem with that fairy tale. It presumes that everyone who owes a debt owes it for something where they had a choice in the matter. High living and luxurious vacations, or maybe just people who should have delayed gratification. Funny, though, how people whose debts are medical bills (and it's my understanding that medical bills are among the leading causes of bankruptcy) might not feel like seeing a doctor was merely an option or a luxury.

I realize that those collections agents would probably be happier if we all simply stayed home from the doctor and had the common decency to die. Or maybe not. After all, you can't collect your pound of flesh from a corpse.

Collections carries with it a assumption that ranks right up there with Neville Chamberlain's assumption that Hitler would keep his word about Czechoslovakia in terms of its absence of any basis in reality. Collections assumes that anybody who owes a debt has the resources to pay it, if only they can be persuaded or threatened enough, and if those don't succeed, they turn to the courts to confiscate their blood money at the point of a gun (which is exactly what a court order does). Now if the person who owes the money, is therefore going to be unable to pay their rent? Too bad, not their problem. Can't buy food? Too bad, not their problem. Can't buy medicine? Too bad, not their problem as long as the person lives long enough for them to continue to bleed the individual dry.

In short, they are either unable or, more likely, unwilling to grasp the concept that not every person in debt is a thieving scoundrel, and they are incapable of understanding that the end result of their actions cause a vastly greater harm to the health and well-being of the debtor than is remotely possible to inflict upon the creditor. Fortunately, however, they do not need to come to grips with their inability to understand these things because that would require a heart, a soul, and a conscience, none of which they give evidence of possessing.

No, theirs is not a noble profession. It is not something that people grow up dreaming of doing. There are no well-adjusted children who say to their parents, "When I grow up, I want to prey upon people who have very little and capitalize on their misfortune for my own benefit."

On the upside, I imagine their offices are cheaper to set up because the bathrooms really can't come with mirror. After all, if I spent the day gutting the heart out of people's lives, I would rather stay out of the bathroom altogether than run the risk of looking myself in the mirror. Wouldn't you?

(The following is the e-mail I sent to the office of Senator Ben Nelson (D). The other senator from my state of Nebraska, Senator Mike Johanns (R), has announced that he will vote against Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the United States Supreme Court. Senator Nelson has not come out and said how he will vote but he has earlier said that he was leaning toward supporting Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the United States Supreme Court.)

I am a Republican who has voted consistently for Senator Nelson. He is a Democrat I have been able to respect. Although he helps provide the Democratic Party with a majority that enables them to chair every committee and run the Senate, I have felt he was sufficiently unlike Senators Reid, Kennedy, etc., that I thought he could be a moderating influence on their extremism. However, I am deeply troubled by what I have read on his website about his inclination to support Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court. She has failed to adequately explain her comment about a wise Latina making a BETTER decision than a wise white man. Her belief that state and local governments are not bound by the 2nd amendment is deeply flawed and causes one to wonder what other Constitutional protections she feels that state and local governments can disregard. Her record of continual reversals by the Supreme Court indicates a judge who is consistently wrong. If Senator Nelson feels that she deserves to sit on the Supreme Court, then he will lose both my respect and my support, and it will take something extraordinary for him to ever earn it back again.

Last Sunday, Kansas doctor George Tiller was murdered at his church. Within hours, Scott Roeder, the man believed to be guilty of the shooting, was arrested. All evidence presented so far indicates that he acted alone. The only connection to any pro-life organization we've seen so far is that he posted on an Operation Rescue blog.

However, despite the fact that the crime appears to have been solved and the suspect is in custody, the United States Department of Justice is trumpeting on their website that they are also going to investigate the crime, ostensibly to determine if any federal laws, such as the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrance act, were broken. However, in their statement, Loretta King, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, is quoted as saying, "The Department of Justice will work tirelessly to determine the full involvement of any and all actors in this horrible crime, and to ensure that anyone who played a role in the offense is prosecuted to the full extent of federal law." That sounds like they're doing more than trying to see if other laws were broken. It sounds like they're looking for others who should be prosecuted as well.

Compare this to a couple of other current cases.

On June 1, a convert to Islam who had spent time in Yemen opened fire on an Army recruiting station in Little Rock, Arkansas, killing one soldier and wounding another. According to the police report, "he was mad at the U.S. military because of what they had done to Muslims in the past."

If the Department of Justice is working "tirelessly to determine the full involvement of any and all actors in this horrible crime, and to ensure that anyone who played a role in the offense is prosecuted to the full extent of federal law", you wouldn't know about it from their website. Their website says nothing about this case.

On election day, members of the New Black Panther Party positioned themselves in military attire and carrying a nightstick in front of a polling place in Philadelphia and made threatening racial remarks to people coming to vote. The Department of Justice had been pursuing a case against these individuals. They had an affidavit from credentialed poll watcher who had been an aide to Robert Kennedy's 1968 campaign and said that he hadn't seen anything like this in the 1960s in Mississippi. They were set to seek default judgment and penalties. Then the career lawyers were overruled by political appointees. According to the Washington Times, "A Justice Department spokesman on Thursday confirmed that the agency had dropped the case, dismissing two of the men from the lawsuit with no penalty and winning an order against the third man that simply prohibits him from bringing a weapon to a polling place in future elections."

There is no mention of this case whatsoever on the Department of Justice website.

Seems like an interesting and quite troubling contrast to me. I'm hoping this isn't an indication of the priorities of the Obama administration's Department of Justice, but it doesn't look good. What it looks like is a) they don't want to antagonize one key constituency, African-American, by pursuing a case against the Black Panthers so they drop it; b) they don't want to appear anti-Muslim while they are reaching out to Muslim nations, so if they are investigating the shooter's potential connections to terrorist organizations in Yemen, they aren't mentioning it; and c) they don't want to antagonize their allies in the abortion rights movement, so they make a big noise about investigating what is already an open and shut case.

I'd like to see an alternate explanation, but so far, I haven't seen one.

Interesting story today about an ad that ran in the personals section of the Warren Times-Observer, a local paper in Pennsylvania. It seems that somebody placed an ad saying, "May Obama follow in the footsteps of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy". Given that Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy are the four United States Presidents who have been assassinated, the matter has been turned over to the Secret Service to investigate. The whole story is here.

What struck me as remarkable, though, isn't the ad itself. There are always a few nutjobs out there that the Secret Service has to investigate. I remember a news story I read online a few years ago about John Hinckley, Jr. getting unsupervised release times from the psychiatric facility where he has been since pleading insanity for the attempted assassination of President Reagan, and some wrote a comment saying we should send Hinckley a map so he would know how to get to the White House.

The thing that struck me about this story the most, though, is that the representative who took the ad didn't make the connection. The paper says it was an honest mistake, and I have no reason to doubt them. What does that say, though, about what is and is not happening in American History classes? I know that I'm a bit of an American history buff, but it doesn't strike me that you have to be a historian to know which four American presidents were assassinated. If the person who placed the ad is from the Warren area, maybe the local school board should take a quick look at the curriculum and see exactly what the students are learning.

Today, the United States Senate passed (with only 5 no votes) sweeping reforms of the credit card industry. The fact that the spineless Republicans went in lockstep with the power-hungry anti-capitalist Democrats is a subject for another post.

What strikes me most about what I'm reading about with regard to the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009 is that it assumes that each and every credit card problem is the fault of the evil credit card companies.

Now, as a matter of full disclosure, let me say up from that I work for a credit card company. That being said, I'm not blind to the fact that some credit card companies behave badly and dishonestly. Common sense regulation isn't going to be opposed by the good guys in the industry.

But where is the consumer held responsible for their actions? In all the time I've taken calls, I have yet to talk to ANYBODY who has read their card member agreement. They just expect the bank to make exceptions willy nilly when the provisions of the agreement are inconvenient to the cardholder.

It is RARE when a cardholder who just forgot to send a payment takes any responsibility for their oversight. They just expect the bank, who is footing the bill for their expenses, to say, "That's fine, no problem, just send it whenever you can."

It is almost unheard of for a cardholder to actually READ the information we send them. We send out a change in terms, announcing an increase in interest rates, and two months later, we're flooded with calls from people who say, "Gee, why did my interest go up?" We send out new cards after a payment processor has a security breach, placing their accounts at risk, accompanied by a letter explaining why the cards were sent, and at first, we are flooded with calls from people who say, "Gee, why am I getting a new card?" A month later, when the old cards have been deactivated, we get an even bigger flood of calls from people who say, "Gee, why did my card stop working?" You would be AMAZED at the number of people who say, "Oh, I saw the card, but since mine hadn't expired, I just put it in the filing cabinet." Never read the letter. Even worse are the people who come right out and say, "Oh, yeah, I saw the letter, but I didn't read it."

If Congress wants to regulate genuinely predatory and genuinely dishonest practices, more power to them. But that's not what they're doing here. They're doing the exact same thing they did when they held a gun to mortgage lenders' heads, ordering them to finance more mortgages, leading to the whole sub-prime catastrophe that has sunk the entire world into a recession. Not once did they ever tell potential homeowners, "Guess what, YOU have a responsibility not to overextend yourself. YOU have a responsibility not to lock yourself into larger monthly payments than you can afford."

Now, they are going to paint EACH AND EVERY credit card company as greedy villains, despite that fact that these banks are taking more risk than any other lender. There's no car to repossess. There's no house to foreclose on. Most of the time, there are no assets related to the debt that can be captured to recoup their costs. It is a historic fact that the higher the risk, the higher the interest and the more secure the loan, the lower the interest. Does Congress care? Not one bit. They have constituents who, having grown accustomed to painless irresponsibility, want the legislative branch to make sure that they face no consequences for their actions.

But is Congress requiring consumers to live within their means? Well, no. Is Congress requiring consumers to delay their gratification so that they wait to buy wanted-but-not-needed things until they can either afford to pay for them up front or, for larger ticket items, they can afford to make the payments on them? Again, no. Neither of these are concepts Congress has ever been familiar with. What Congress is familiar with is the same behavior it is enabling: "We want it, we want it now, we can't afford it, but we want it, so we'll borrow to get it and just assume that we'll somehow be able to pay for it later someday."

One question: Once Congress makes it impossible for credit cards to turn any profit (and by forcing them to face increasing defaulted accounts without allowing them to cover the costs, they are making profit exceedingly difficult), and the entire industry withers and dies, are we going to be better off? How many families who have to replace a household appliance just happen to have the money for a new stove, refrigerator, or washing machine sitting in their checking account doing nothing? How many people have the cash in the checking account to pay up front for a new computer or a new big screen TV or a family vacation? Do you want to be the businessman trying to sell appliances, computers, TVs, or airline tickets when even those who are able to make the payments for those items don't have that option because the responsibly used credit is no longer available once the credit providers are forced out of business?

Brief explanation: Recently, at the end of the Final Crisis mini-series, Batman was sent back in time and is believed dead. In response, DC Comics is doing an event called "Battle for the Cowl", during which a number of people are stepping up to fill Batman's role as protector of Gotham City. Among them are Dick Grayson (the original Robin and now Nightwing); Jason Todd (the second Robin who was killedby the Joker but brought back to life who is now an anti-hero who is more than willing to use deadly force); Tim Drake (the third and current Robin), and Damien Wayne (son of Bruce Wayne and Talia Al Ghul, whose existence was unknown to Bruce until quite recently). At a point when I was lacking sleep and caffeine, this is the little bit of silliness I came up with as a potential aftermath.

Battle for Simon Cowell?
A Sleep-And-Caffeine Deprived Tale By Brad Pardee

Disclaimer: These characters belong to DC Comics and this bit of fan fiction is not an attempt to assert anything to the contrary.

"There was a battle? For the right to protect Gotham?"

Alfred nodded. As much as he had hoped Bruce would rest from his adventure of being lost in time, he realized that some things will never change. The return from every trip begain with a situation update of all that had gone on in Batman's absence.

"Well, at least that should've kept crime under control with all four of them in action," Bruce said.

"Not exactly," replied Alfred. "Each of them battled each other to bring their own personal interpretation to the role. The only thing they agreed on was the need for some manner of theme that they would make their own."

"Theme?" Bruce said. "What do you mean?"

"Perhaps it would be simplest for you to view the video logs of the costume vault as each one prepared to go out," and with that, Alfred made his exit.

Bruce spun around to face the computer and in moments, he had loaded the logs in question. He fast forwarded through several moments of an empty vault until there was motion and Bruce cued it to place at normal speed. Jason was the first to enter the room and garb himself in the famous cape and cowl. Bruce noticed Jason's lips moving, so he rewound and turned up the volume.

(Jason singing to The Bonanza Theme)
Listen to me growl
As I battle for the cowl
I'm BATMAN!
I think my scowl
Makes me look just like an owl
A terrifying sight to see

Bruce quickly hit the fast forward and zoomed past Jason's "performance" and departure. The next person to enter the vault was Tim, and Bruce watched closely and listened.

(Tim singing to Strangers in the Night)
I'm the true dark knight,
Exchanging punches
With each rogue in sight,
Following hunches
Proving that the cowl
Was really meant for me

Bruce sighed deeply as he skipped through the rest of that scene and watched as Damien took his turn in the vault.

(Damien singing to The Good Ship Lollipop)
I'm the Bat-man
Yes I am
If you're a bad man
Then you'd better scram

"Heaven help us if Talia sees that," he said softly to himself as he scanned ahead to Dick's appearance. He leaned back with an expectant smile at the sight of his eldest son. The smile did not last long.

(Dick rapping to the rhythm of I Like Big Butts)
I'm Batman now, and I cannot lie
When the criminals look up high
They're gonna see me, and they're all gonna say,
"Holy crap! I gotta get away!"

Bruce killed the video and hit the intercom. "Alfred, I'm going out to see what's left of Gotham. Once they get here, have the Four Tops wait for me in the costume vault. Bring your shotgun if you need to."

He quickly showered and changed into a fresh costume. Then, as the Batmobile roared to life, he muttered, "You want a theme? I got your theme right here." He hit a few rarely used switches on the dashboard, and as the car accelerated out of the cave, the bats were startled by the loud echoes that swept through the cavern from the state of the art speaker system:

Na na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na
BATMAN!

In a recent article about a ship that was attacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia, there was the following quote:

"The ship, carrying food aid for hungry Africans — including Somalis — was damaged "pretty badly" on its bridge, a U.S. official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record about the ship."

What I'd love to know is: If they KNOW they aren't authorized to speak on the subject, why don't they keep their lips zipped? It seems like every big news story we see includes quotes from somebody who, by their own admission, isn't authorized to be speaking on the subject. And this is nothing new in the Obama administration. I saw the same thing during the Bush administration.

If people who are genuinely in the know are talking to the press when they aren't authorized to, what does that say for their trustworthiness to hold any kind of security clearance? If they aren't genuinely in the know but are just talking as though they are, how do we know anything they are telling the press is the truth? And in either case, aren't there enough people who possess both integrity and competence to take their places?

Tonight, in the World Baseball Classic, the United States routed Venezuela 15-6 at the Rogers Center in Toronto, Canada. Seeing Team USA win in any sport is always gratifying, but I'd be less than honest if I didn't admit that beating Venezuela, and beating them so handily, wasn't particularly sweet.

I remember when the 1980 US Olympic Hockey Team beat the Soviet Union in the game called "The Miracle On Ice". It's true that it was an upset of a heavy favorite by an huge underdog, and it's true that watching your country's team win is yet more enjoyable. But what made the 1980 Olympic victory memorable even almost 30 years later is that it was the Soviet Union we defeated. The Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union made it much more than just a hockey game. Most people don't even remember that we didn't win the gold medal until we went on to beat Finland 4-2.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has made no secret of his contempt for the United States, or for the West in general. He has embraced the socialism that has kept Cuba from prospering, just as it has every country that has followed the socialist path. He has expelled missionaries whose sole interest was helping people. He has threatened to disrupt the world's economy by using Venezuelan oil as a tool of extortion instead of as an export that should enhance his people's lives.

Now I know that not all Venezuelans support Chavez, just as not all Soviet citizens supported any of the leaders from Vladimir Lenin to Mikhail Gorbachev. I know that the relations between the United States and Venezuela are not on par with the relations we had with the Soviet Union during the Cold War when we were both the world's only superpowers.

But that being said, Chavez was elected and he is the head of the Venezuelan nation. Consequently, knowing that we beat the team that represents Venezuela adds to the sweetness of victory.

There's a lot of press on the alleged corruption of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, including charges that he essentially has been trying to sell his selection to fill the Senate vacancy of President-elect Barack Obama. I'm trying to maintain the presumption of innocence, although the transcripts of wiretaps provided by the US Attorney's office seem damning and it's very difficult to imagine any possible explanation that would vindicate him.

I'm troubled, though, by the immediate attempts being made by some in the GOP to link President-elect Obama to the governor's actions. So far, there is no evidence that he had any connection to the corruption which has led to Gov. Blagojevich's arrest. Yes, the governor supported the Obama campaign. He's a prominent Democrat in the state and the candidate was a Democrat from his state. Of course he would support the campaign. But that alone is not enough to even begin to hint at any guilt on the part of the President-elect.

Now I'm not an Obama supporter by any stretch of the imagination. If, in the course of the investigation, we see actual EVIDENCE of a link to the Obama campaign or transition team, then that will be time to ask the questions being asked now. But simple guilt by association is wrong on both moral and pragmatic grounds.

Morally, you don't accuse somebody of a connection to criminal behavior without evidence. You don't even hint at an accusation. That violates every principle of truth or fair play. It may be considered as acceptable "hardball" in some political circles, but morals should take precedence over politics.

Pragmatically, by jumping to the attack without any evidence to support it, the Republicans are laying the groundwork for appearing like the boy who cried, "Wolf!" If the day comes when there is something real to question, how much credibility will the questioners have among those who remember this episode?

I would be one of those who are at best discouraged today. You can look at what I wrote on my e-zine to see what my feelings were and what they still are.

But I'm going to try something to see if it helps me keep in mind that when Scripture says, "This is the day that the Lord has made, I will rejoice and be glad in it," it wasn't a conditional thing. The Presidential Prayer Team has established an initiative called, "77 Days of Prayer for our New President: Countdown in Prayer - Election to Inauguration". You sign up, and you get a daily e-mail with a link to a new day's prayer. At that link, you will also see the prayer for today so you can get an idea of what it's like. I know that I have found with family and co-workers, if I was mad at them, it was hard to stay mad when I prayed for them. I'm hoping the same dynamic is in play here where rather than being mad, I'm just scared.