The temerity of this Alaskan governor to actually place her constituents before ambition. Shame, shame, for making the rest of the system reek of the rottenness that it consists of.

Throughout all this latest flap, I have thought about Danny Bonaducci and a comment he made several years ago. I’m not sure what the connection is, my mind works in strange ways at times. Perhaps you can figure it out.

But here’s what I’ve been thinking about:

I’m sure most of you will recall several years ago when Tom Cruise jumped up on Oprah’s couch during a taping of her show. This was his illustration of being in love with his new wife. He bore a huge amount of ridicule over this manuever. In fact, one could say that the phrase ‘jumped the shark’ (in allusion to when the t.v. series Happy Days began its inexhorable demise with the episode of Fonzi jumping a shark on skis) could well be updated to the phrase ‘jumped on the couch’ (in reference to the beginning of the inexhorable slide of Tom Cruise’s career).

Danny Bonaducci, who you may recall as ‘Danny’ the middle child on The Partridge Family and who has led a somewhat checkered life from his point of early fame on (and who is currently a radio host),had this to say when asked his opinion on the Tom Cruise incident (paraphrasing): The only reason people took notice is because they didn’t expect it from Tom Cruise. Now if I had been on Oprah, I could have lit the couch on fire, and everyone would just say, “Oh, that Danny Bonaducci, he’s so crazy!”

So what does this have to do with Sarah Palin? I think, I think, people need to realize that she is not going to do the expected simply because it is expected.

In other words, with Sarah, as with Danny Bonaducci, one needs to expect the unexpected, then one is not surprised.

He was surprised when I emailed him back so promptly, as he hadn’t expected a response until Monday. Just goes to show that neither of us know when to quit.

In addition to supplying him with his numbers, I also checked the sales numbers and found to my immense surprise that Easter Sunday was a very good day for sales on Amazon for Skylar Hamilton Burris’ Conviction. She had nudged her way to #19 in best sellers for Religious Romance. Although she had been in the top 10 for three months running in 2007 for that category, the course of her sales had dropped over time, and it was nice to see her in the same territory as her original heyday. As Amazon has not yet dropped their discount for buyers down any further in correspondence to our dropping our discount through distribution to 70%, I can’t credit the rash of sales to the lower discount. But I’ll still take them, thank you very much.

What the sales on Easter or my being online to observe them says about me and society in general, I’m not certain. I imagine nothing good. Commerce today truly is a 24/7, 365 day a year activity.

Whatever it says, however, is small potatoes when compared in the light of our fearless leader, Barak Obama, and his stated intention of no longer backing Israel as a nation. In fact, as Hal Lindsay reports in his video of 04/10/2009, Barak is sending strong warnings to Israel to back off from defending itself against Iran.

To clarify what this means for America, read this quote from the accompanying article on the same page as the video (article posted 04/03/2009):

“And Israel Today is reporting that the Obama administration is not just cool to Israel. It alleges that President Obama “is about to break America’s long ties of friendship with Israel, and maybe even take steps toward the dissolution of the Jewish state.” If true, America is in even more serious trouble than even the most pessimistic assessment can reflect. If America betrays Israel, then America is rejecting the Word of Israel’s God. The Bible warns, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” (Hebrews 10:31) Fearful? That is an understatement of Biblical proportions.”

Cozying up with a country that views us as an enemy and declares us the Great Satan to stab another country that has backed us unwaveringly is dirty under any circumstances. Doing it to Israel, conspiring to tear apart a country that God ordained, is beyond dirty. It’s suicidal.

Everyone have a nice day.

Here’s one if you write in the same genre as George Orwell’s 1984 or Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (funny, the classic future society gone mad tales all have numbers in them. . . hmm):

Let’s take a look twenty years into the future. Let’s make it the year 2020. Embryonic stem cell research is going full speed ahead. In fact, the touted benefits of embryonic stem cell miracle cures is so much in demand that the current abortion rate can’t keep up. So the health industry, probably entirely government ran by then, begins paying women to have abortions. The more enterprising of those women quickly realize that they can make a decent living simply doing what comes natural: getting pregnant. Then doing the unnatural: having an abortion. They collect the bounty on their fetus and start the process all over again.

Mankind has been reduced to a herd of cattle, producing calves for the slaughter.

Jeremiah 19:9 (King James Version)

 ⁹And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend in the siege and straitness, wherewith their enemies, and they that seek their lives, shall straiten them.

 Back to the Present. The current prevailing argument agains embryonic stem cell research is that there is no scientific evidence supporting that embryonic stem cells are any more beneficial than stem cells taken from mature, live subjects. I really hate that argument. Why? Because, eventually, I’m sure, they’ll find something that an embryonic stem cell can do that one taken from a living, mature, consenting donor can not. What then? Do we as a church and a nation then give it our blessing? We can not win this argument based on scientific evidence. This is an argument that can only be won on moral grounds.

In the end, alas, I think we will lose. That does not excuse us from fighting the good fight. The last thing we need is to go from abortion being an unsavory choice of last resort to a desired and lucrative industry for the mother (we already know that it is a desirable and lucrative industry for the abortion providers).

If you think I’m being overly pessimistic and fantastic in my futuristic book idea, I beg you to simply observe the changes in how a woman’s pregnancy is referred to today. When I carried my children, I was having a ‘baby’. Today’s women refer to their child as a ‘fetus’. One young pregnant mother I was recently acquainted with referred to her pregnant belly as the ‘fetus’ so often and so consistently, that when she asked my recommendation on a name, I suggested she name the baby Fetus. Why cause confusion?

If you’re wondering, no, she didn’t appreciate my comment. But my point is the thought of a baby not being a baby is now so prevalent in our younger society and the act of abortion is now so normal in our society, that I don’t think it’s such a leap for it to go from being a dirty little secret to being a ‘heroic act of generosity’ to offer up your child as a sacrifice for someone else to have improved quality of life. The media already holds those who donate organs up as near saints, and, indeed, one can argue that they are uncommonly generous, but never forget that the agenda extends much further than getting a willing participant’s liver or kidney. The preferred source of organs and stem cells, from an industry profit point of view, needs to be much more consistent, much less sporadic, and inexhaustible. How ever is one to make money on a resource that is frustratingly inconsistent?

Profit, my friends, is always the end of the game. And if one can make a profit on a product that is simultaneously extending your lifespan to unheard of possibilities (which gives you more time to enjoy those profits), than why should a little thing like the morality of taking human lives be of any consequence?

As if history hasn’t proven that philosophy correct on far too many occassions.

Everyone have a good day.

All that being said, I have the luxury of being able to say that other than the official trip to the accountant’s office on Saturday, our taxes and all that goes with them are done. Royalty statments are ready to go, and as soon as I have checks to print up payments, they also will be out the door and out of my hair.

But all this accounting has brought me to musing about the state of our economy, the bail-out package, and bean counters.

My husband has an unflattering term for bean counters (yes, even more unflattering than calling them bean-counters — and before anyone truly takes offense, allow me to just point out that in my former life I was a full time bean-counter as opposed to being part-time bean counter for our business now). My husband calls the accountants in his ‘real-world’ (not our pub house) work’s accounting office leeches. He calls them leeches because they get paid, but they don’t actually produce anything. They add nothing to the bottom line. They are strictly an expense.

He has a point.

One can argue that a company must know how many beans there are, and where those beans are going or coming from, but accountants do not make any beans, nor do they make anything else of which the sale of would generate beans. They merely organize beans.

With this concept in mind, does anyone else find it ironic that the first and biggest recipients of the massive amounts of money that we as tax-payers are being asked to part with is going to bean counters? Banks, Financial Institutions, Mortgage Companies. Nary a single product have any of these companies created, manufactured, or supplied. The only thing they have ever done is organize beans.

And, damningly enough, their organization of the beans seems to have been somewhat lacking. They appear to have lost quite a few.

So why were we giving them more beans, again?

Just saying.

Oh, crystal ball, what do you have to show me about publishing? How does an ultra-green, ultra-cut-the-waste president now in office affect the publishing industry? Does he affect the publishing industry?

Slowly a picture emerges:

There is our president. He is going over waste: in the budget, in the govenment, in how we as American’s use energy and resources. He comes upon the publishing industry. “Why are we still printing tens of thousands of books and then having them returned and destroyed? Think of the trees, man! Think of the energy wasted in printing, shipping, shipping back, destroying! There is an alternative. It’s called print on demand, where every book printed is already sold.”

He adds an item to his list: government mandated POD.

Sound far-fetched? Wait until he decides that even that is too many books, and mandates that all books be electronic and read on a reading device. Okay, maybe that last is far-fetched. But taxing wasteful publishers and by default forcing them to invest more in a POD business model I think is just a matter of time. Not if, but when.

Obviously, the prez has other pressing matters on his mind in the time being: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the economy, killing babies, things like that. But sooner or later, he’ll get around to waste. After all, he has the world to save, and how can he do that if we’re all wasting resources like it’s a world without end?

Everyone have a lovely day.

On the one hand, I think we should let them drown. Bye, bye, big three. Let some one else have a chance.

After all, I don’t have anyone bailing me out when my business model isn’t working. Why should they? The very art of business is anticipating and reacting before you’re in a crisis.

One can very well argue that the big three have been struggling under government mandates and the unions for years, and one would be right. In many ways, you could compare the big three to a large, failed government program, just like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The answer to that is to go out of business while you still have some capital to work with to start another.

What we’re looking at now, if the government bails them out, is the officialization of the big three becoming government programs. We, as taxpayers, will be essentially paying welfare to a group of workers for the privilege of getting to buy a product that is overpriced and no longer viable on an open market.

But that is very likely what is going to occur. And it’s a lose-lose situation all the way around. Even for the auto-workers. I’m sure they would rather be doing something with their lives besides being essentially handcuffed by ’security’ into a job that is ultimately pointless.

I mean, if you’re going to pay welfare, make it welfare. Give these poor saps a chance to move on with their lives into something else and get off it eventually. But this, my friends, would be a ‘for life’ welfare program. The recipients are simply making too much money where they are to move on.

I could write paragraphs on how unions kill the entrepenurial spirit. Nothing like a good paying, secure job to convince someone they don’t want to start a business, even if they have a good idea. Smart businesses, even without unions, understand that the best way to cut back on competition is to hire them, and pay them well.

But we’ll leave that exploration for another day. What I really want to talk about is SUVs.

If you’re like us and have a sizable family, you probably own a good sized SUV (in our case, we have a Ford Expedition). As I listen to the ongoing argument of whether to bail out the big three, I think about the value of my SUV, and how the value of it was nearly worthless this past summer in spite of being only two years old. At the peak of gas prices, about $4.49 in our neck of the woods, I couldn’t have given that car away. We even had little use for it. We pulled money from my hubby’s 401K (just prior to the market tanking — how’s that for timing?) and purchased a much more fuel efficient, small SUV: a Nissan Pathfinder. The Expedition was retired for family trips only, when all six of us had need to go somewhere together. The Nissan became the everyday, run-around vehicle.

But now I listen to the gov bailout plan and begin to realize that my Expedition’s value may go up, and go up considerably. In fact, it may be highly sought after in as little as a year.

Why?

Because it is indisputable that IF the gov bailout goes through, that the major agreement the gove will be demanding is for the big three to begin producing fuel-efficient, eco-friendly cars, and as quickly as possible. In other words, goodbye to producing SUV’s, or much of anything over the size of a matchbox, for that matter.

People will be downsized into these vehicles the next time they need a new car. Our Nissan Pathfinder will be about as large as they are going to come for quite a few years, until the technology reaches a point where they can again build large cars capable of burning less fuel.

The problem is, there are still families out there, families like ourselves. We don’t fit in a Pathfinder. It only seats five. And even if they come out with a slightly larger SUV for six people, believe me, when you have four teenagers, you don’t want to go anywhere of any distance crammed together in a ’six seater’ that is actually designed for two adults and four small children.

So how will a family of six or more go on vacation? How will they go to grandma’s house for the holidays? Do they take two cars (that’s hardly fuel efficient)? Or do they scour the want-ads for the soon to be dinosaur: the full sized gas-guzzling used SUV?

Two of my kids are going off to college in the next two years. I smell a good resale value on my SUV.

And what if the gov doesn’t bail out the big three and lets them sink? Then I won’t sell my Expedition. I’ll park it in a garage with a tarp over it. Give it a number of years and it will be a collector’s item, like the Edsel. Because they will quite simply be extinct.

Enjoy them while you can, folks, because either way, they’re going bye-byes.

We’ll see you all in four years

Despite the election, business didn’t stop, nor did it slow. In fact, we just seemed to get busier.

Here are some highlights:

Gail MacMillan emailed me with the news that she landed a VERY NICE full color spread in Canadian Dog Digest, a major Canadian magazine. She got this spread by swapping a well-written article on dog-training for free advertising for her books Biography of a Beagle and Ceilidh’s Quest. Smart girl!

Jim Spurr has emailed me to say that he just finished the first chapter for his third and final book in his “Great Lakes, Great Guns Historical Series”, which already encompasses Book 1, Sworn for Mackinaw and Book 2, One Sloop and Slow Match. He was very happy with his start, and believes it to be his best first chapter thus far. I’m anxious to see it and am very much looking forward to publishing this final book, titled Reflections in the Wake (love the title!) and being able to offer the entire set as a package as well as individual sales.

The final bit of news is about the publishing house and myself. I was graciously (and surprisingly!) offered an invitation to participate as a faculty member for the 2009 Annual Writer’s Conference of the Florida Writers Association in Lake Mary, Florida. I enthusiastically agreed, and will be conducting two workshops, one on publishing, where it is going and what that means for the writer, and one on writing. In addition, I will participate in a round of speed interviewing, where writers who think they may be a good fit for Double Edge (and vicey-versey) will have an opportunity to present their work and pitch their concepts to me for a quick ten to fifteen minute period each.

The conference is still a year away, as they just concluded the 2008 conference this past month, but I am very much looking forward to it. I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with Kay Hopper-Smith, a board-member of and editor for the Association, for probably nearly an hour yesterday, and found her to be wonderfully engaged and passionate about the writing process and her place within it. If the 240 writers they already have signed up for next years conference share her enthusiasm and good nature, I should have a really great experience.

Tomorrow, I should like to write a bit about what I consider ‘Intelligent Writing’ which is something we strive to publish, and the tightening vision I have for Double Edge Press, much of which I have already blogged about and implemented prior to this, but some of which I haven’t addressed yet. Basically, I call this further vision the ‘oooh’ factor.

Everyone have a wonderful, wonderful day.

What Mao didn’t realize was that his programs which consisted of growing the infrastructure of China on one hand and mandating that all citizens study his ‘little Red Book’ on the other hand set the table for Christ to do a huge movement in China, using the groundwork Mao unwittingly laid.

First, the modern-day infrastructure allowed penetration into regions of China that had long been remote and isolated. Second, the forcing of education of Mao’s little Red Book brought forth a community of small home-based study groups. Groups that in many instances found studying the little Red Book a waste of time, and eagerly latched onto studying the Bible instead.

So what was the point the program hosts reached, and which I reached right along with them, before the words were even out of their mouths? That politics are not the answer to our problems. That even if this election doesn’t go the way we hope or think it should, that God is still in control, and all things work to His good.

I bring this up not because I think McCain is going to lose, I still firmly believe he is going to win. I do bring it up because none of us know the full extent of God’s Will or the workings in which he uses to bring it about. Win or lose, Obama or McCain for President, we can rest assured that the end is still God’s glory, one way or the other.

In brief, here is what I am hearing:

Lack of Hope: this is the Barrack Obama Message. You have no wealth. If you had wealth, now it is gone. You will never have wealth in your future. So, my solution is to take what wealth is left out there, divvy it up, and give it to you and everybody else. I am also taking away all incentive for you to hope that you may someday have wealth by punishing you with onerous taxes if you should by some miracle achieve wealth under my tax plan.

Hope: this is the John McCain message. Yes, things are tough. But I’m confident they are going to get better. You can still attain wealth if you work hard and make good decisions. I refuse to take the incentive of hope for future wealth away from you. I will not tax you for working hard and achieving.

Blessed Hope: this is the Jesus Christ message. Follow Me, and you will have the wealth of eternal life. Non-taxable.

Everyone have a good Thursday.

Survivor tonight!

How many times can you use the tired excuse of, “I didn’t know?”

You said you didn’t know Tony Rezko was into shady deals when you let him help you with your house purchase.

You said you didn’t know that the Reverend Wright was preaching something other than the Gospel despite sitting in the pew of his church for 20 years.

You said you didn’t know that ACORN was abusing voting registration.

NOW you tell us you ‘didn’t know’ that Bill Ayres was of bad character. You ‘assumed’ he was reformed?

Please.

And we haven’t even hit upon your campaigning for your Kenyan cousin Odinga while doing your 2006 ‘fact-finding’ tour of that country, on our dime. I suppose you will tell us that you ‘didn’t know’ that Odinga was an agitator of violence and condoned the burning of over 800 churches, one of which had over 50 men, women and children inside, and any trying to escape were hacked to death with machetes.

You claim to be a smart man. Is it possible that you really ‘didn’t know’ all this crucial information?

Everyone have a good Monday.