You could tell something was up with the weather today when the morning dawned bright and blue, but with a breeze. Very unusual for around here this time of year. The day was hot, and the clouds took their time developing, but soon the mountains to the east and west of us were blue and covered in a variety of cloud cover - some dark and threatening, some wide and flat like a huge pizza crust suspended above.

The afternoon became still and hot as the clouds continued to gather and the humidity increased. Around 5, the sky darkened and the wind chimes outside signalled the arrival of the weather. The temperature dropped about 15 degrees, thunder pealed, and the wind began to made whipping sounds through the mesquite and palm trees. A few fat drops, then nothing. A few minutes later, more fat drops followed by some smaller drops, then, suddenly, some straight-line winds around 50 mph blew through, accompanied by sheets of rain that seemed to come from out of nowhere. Standing under the tiki bar with a glass of Pinot Grigio, it truly was a wonder to behold - you could almost hear the trees and bushes sing a Hallelujah chorus to the Almighty for the wondrous wet gift they received.

The storm continued to gather above us but slowly passed to our south and east, turning the sky a Crayola shade of midight blue, occasionally punctuated by orange streaks of lightning. The humidity returned like a wet sponge, and the sky above us slowly gathered itself into a soft blanket of battleship gray. The rain stopped for a half-hour, but the wind chimes stirred uneasily, softly tinkling as a new breeze began to gather, this time from the east. And then, softly and slowly, a soaking rain began to fall, filling the air with the musky scent of Texas sage. As darkness closed in, everything became cloaked in a blanket of wet - soft, soaking, and dripping.

I sat under the patio roof and watched the puddles in the swimming pool dancing with every new gift from the sky and reveled in the reflection of the backyard lights on wet concrete. What a nice change and a perfect end to a mid-summer Arizona day.

Think it’s those mean-spirited old Republicans and Christian conservatives that want to impose their own version of free speech on the American populace? Think again. Here is an article by the AP’s David Bauber (Hat tip: Drudge) that ought to send shivers through any prospective 2008 presidential election voter, no matter what side of the political aisle you sit on:

Liberal activists are stepping up their campaign against Fox News Channel by pressuring advertisers not to patronize the network.
MoveOn.org, the Campaign for America’s Future and liberal blogs like DailyKos.com are asking thousands of supporters to monitor who is advertising on the network. Once a database is gathered, an organized phone-calling campaign will begin, said Jim Gilliam, vice president of media strategy for Brave New Films, a company that has made anti-Fox videos.

The groups have successfully pressured Democratic presidential candidates not to appear at any debate sponsored by Fox, and are also trying to get Home Depot Inc. to stop advertising there.

At least 5,000 people nationwide have signed up to compile logs on who is running commercials on Fox, Gilliam said. The groups want to first concentrate on businesses running local ads, as opposed to national commercials.

If this article wasn’t so chilling by its very nature, one could look at it and simply shake their heads in wonder. After all, outside of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, virtually every major daily newspaper (NY Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, L.A. Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, etc. etc. etc.), every major television news network (NBC, CBS, ABC), every other major cable TV network (CNN, MSNBC, CNBC), and every major wire service (AP, Reuters, UPI) are not just Democratic-leaning and liberal in their political philosophies, but unabashedly so. I should also toss NPR and Time and Newsweek in there as well. And what do conservatives have? FOX News Network (a channel I would hardly describe as overly conservative, but then again, if you deviate one iota from the Democratic-leaning mouthpieces of all the organizations and institutions I just listed, you’re automatically tagged as “right wing”) and, by and large, syndicated talk radio. And that’s it.

(Note: It would be easy to dismiss the Moveon.org effort as a bunch of kooks, but remember that it is the Democrats in Congress who have recently raised the idea of bringing back the Fairness Doctrine - all because they know that conservative talk radio is the only remaining media they don’t own just yet. They weren’t able to succeed in the talk radio market with their pathetic and juvenile Air America initiative, so now they want the government to force that kind of crappy lunatic programming on independent broadcast stations.)

So what to make of Moveon.org’s effort? In short, they’re afraid - afraid that 1) people are waking up to the fact that the only thing right the government has ever done is the U.S. Postal Service and that it is a cesspool of waste and fraud, 2) that our elected officials - from both parties - have never been more clueless or reckless with the taxpayers’ money, or 3) that the Democratic Party is philosophically bankrupt, still treading out the same old tired ideas left over from FDR’s “New Deal” and Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society”. In the end, what liberals fear most is the marketplace of ideas and individual thought. Don’t believe me? Why, then, are liberals and progressives so in bed with the trade unions, the public school system, and organizations like the United Nations? It’s because they’re afraid that in a free marketplace - practically and philosophically - people know the public schools suck and would gladly take their children elsewhere if given the opportunity to do so, that the only thing labor unions care about is fleecing the pockets of their members and preserving their own protected (and declining) state of affairs, and that the United Nations is nothing but a bunch of money-grubbing, corrupt hacks supporting tin-pot dictators from the crappiest places on this earth.

(This is not to say that Republicans or conservatives don’t have their own personal and/or perfect agendas - they do. But conservatives and Republicans by nature [there will always be exceptions to the rule and wackos in every political stripe] have, by and large, never been afraid of sharing their ideas as part of a bigger marketplace, whether it’s the free-market economy or the marketplace of ideas.)

The fact that left-wing organizations like Moveon.org are seeking to stifle that marketplace at the same time their influence in Democratic Party politics has never been greater should be enough to give everyone pause; if they’re doing this kind of thing now, what would happen if they take control of the White House along with the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives?

Just something to think about.

P.S. It’s not just me who sees the absurd irony in this; Pejman Yousefzadeh does as well.

This story from the July 18 Boston Globe, passed along to me by Goodboy Goose, BTW, (thanks, Goose!), illustrates the severe challenges being faced by the powers-that-be in today’s Episcopal Church (TEC) as it desperately seeks to hang on to its once-considerable prestige, influence, and power in the face of challenges both old and new - challenges that seem to confront it almost on a daily basis.

Ah, the good old days! There was a time when TEC, like all other mainline Protestant churches (Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, etc.) were pretty much battling the same forces faced by most religious denominations in the 1970s and ’80s - declining membership resulting from various societal changes and trends coming out of the ’60s and early ’70s, and an inability to articulate an effective, coherent, and relevant message in response to those trends. The Episcopal Church of the post-Vietnam era, especially, prided itself on promoting a socially-progressive Gospel that - at least at the start - distinguished itself in a number of ways, especially when it came to worldwide mission and permitting and promoting the ordination of women as priests and bishops.

Somewhere along the way, however, TEC began to lose its way, as it slowly and increasingly became infiltrated by people - men and women, bishops and lay people - possessing a radical anti-Christian bias (go figure!), a progressive view of human sexuality, and a watering down of the Church’s sacramental traditions and teachings on sin to the point where not only was it OK to be gay or lesbian and a priest or bishop in the church, but a non-celibate gay or lesbian to boot. This radical agenda reached its apex in the ordination of the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003; since then, the worldwide Anglican Communion (of which TEC is a member) has increasingly drifted towards schism, and TEC has become a den of controversy and infighting to the point where so-called “orthodox” parishes and priests have found themselves increasingly under attack by progressive bishops and TEC’s new Presiding Bishop, the Rt. Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori. Since then, requests by orthodox members of TEC seeking alternative Episcopal oversight by other TEC bishops and/or Anglican churches have, by and large, been rejected as Schori and her progressive hardliners seek to stamp out every vestige of orthodoxy in their midst. And why not? After all, the altar she and those like her worship at - the altar of the god of tolerance, acceptance, and diversity - wouldn’t, well, tolerate or accept such a thing!

Enter several African churches of the Anglican Communion. These churches, growing by leaps and bounds on the African continent even while living on the bleeding edge - literally - given their close proximity to radical Islam, have become increasingly bold in asserting their own increasing power, influence, and voice in response to TEC’s attack on those TEC priests and parishes who believe as the Africans do, and the Africans have even begun ordaining Americans as bishops in their churches and planting congregations within the boundaries of TEC dioceses. The Boston Globe story mentioned above provides the latest instance of this kind of thing happening:

The Rev. William L. Murdoch, rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in West Newbury, will fly to Nairobi next month for his consecration as a Kenyan bishop, then return to Massachusetts to minister to other disaffected conservatives who are leaving the Episcopal Church over its 2003 decision to ordain an openly gay priest as the bishop of New Hampshire.

The extraordinary act is part of a new national movement, in which a handful of Episcopal parishes and priests are leaving the 2-million-member Episcopal Church USA and affiliating with the more conservative Anglican churches, called provinces, of Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Uganda.

To the dismay of the Episcopal Church, the African provinces are now developing church organizations in the United States to reach out to those looking for an alternative.

Will it work? The fact is, the African churches stand for and boldly proclaim a Gospel that celebrates a traditional Christian message and view of the Church’s sacraments and moral teachings - teachings increasingly lost or forgotten in today’s TEC churches. TEC’s increasingly bold acceptance of the radical gay, lesbian, and transgender agenda, to the rejection of every moral teaching and sacrament traditional Christianity has ever stood for, needs to be shown for what it is - a pathetic and losing message promoted by worn-out has-beens of the 1960s counterculture seeking to celebrate their own narcissistic worldview and alternative lifestyles. Like teenagers left alone for a weekend by their parents with kegs of beer to keep them company, these so-called “progressive activists” are drunk on their own freedom and corrupt view of the world, and now that they have the power in TEC, they want to make sure anyone who stands counter to them are destroyed.

Fortunately for traditionalists, conservatives, and orthodox Episcopalians, they don’t have to put up with these juvenile idiots anymore. The power of the Gospel has come into their midst and to their rescue in the face of these African churches, and for TEC, life will never be the same again. Welcome to the marketplace of ideas and religious choices, Bishop Schori - in such a marketplace, your and TEC’s watered-down Gospel and oh-so-tired message of tolerance, acceptance, and diversity stands no chance. For you and those in TEC who think like you, the intervention of African churches and their powerful message of traditional Christianity serves as a one-way ticket to continued, assured irrelevancy and slow institutional death.

And it couldn’t happen to a better bunch of people.

…sad news about that tragic helicopter crash that occurred today in central Phoenix. When I saw the photo up at the Drudge Report, it was strange to see the helicopters - just after they apparently had collided - behind the building I used to work across from - that blue glass building is the centerpiece of the Gateway Center complex where our Phoenix office is located.

When things like this happen, it just makes you realize just how fragile our hold on life is. We all have a tendency to go through life as if we’re somehow indestructable and immune from all the kinds of tragedies - big and small - you read about and hear about on TV. And we always seem to think stuff like that only happens to someone else - it’s just human nature - and act as if we’re the center of our own little universes. Today, I was in a meeting with one of our customers, and their CIO is being a total jerk - I mean, an absolute total jerk, and while he’s going on about everything, I couldn’t help but think how little all of this really matters in the end. Think about the four men killed in those helicopters today - they got up, did their normal thing, and went to work not even realizing he would never see his home ever again.

You just never know - life is incredibly fragile.