Urban Onramps

Lighten up, it’s Monday morning.

Shane Claiborne and others are going around the country on a bus, challenging people to think about the heart of Jesus when they consider the upcoming presidential election.

Gramm said all of the following to the Wall Street Journal (To me, this is convincing stuff. But I’m open to being persuaded otherwise):

Most of his former colleagues probably can’t fathom why Wall Street bankers make tens of millions of dollars in salaries and bonuses each year. How would he justify these fat pay days? “It’s simple,” he lectures, sounding very much like the Texas A&M economics professor that he was in the 1970s: “In economics, we define labor exploitation as paying people less than their marginal value product. I recently told Ed Whitacre [former CEO of AT&T, who retired with a $158 million pay package] he was probably the most exploited worker in American history because he took Southwestern Bell, which was the smallest of the former Bell companies, and he turned it into the dominant phone company on earth. His severance package should have been billions.”

Mr. Gramm says that today there is “a lucrative premium for talent. When we were all hunters and gatherers, and you were better with a bow and arrow than I was, there were limits on how much more game you could kill than me. Today, CEO decisions about whether to acquire or not acquire a company, to shut down one part of the company or not shut it down, get into a market, get out of a market, where those decisions mean billions of dollars, is it surprising that people are willing to pay tremendous amounts of money for people who make those decisions right?”

So what if a President Barack Obama were to impose 50% or 60% tax rates on these CEOs and other big earners? Mr. Gramm pounces: “When you help a company raise capital, to put its idea to work, and you create jobs, those jobs are the best housing program, education program, nutrition program, health program ever created. Look, if a man in one lifetime is responsible for creating 100 real jobs, permanent jobs, then he’s done more than most do-gooders have ever achieved.”

I agree with Cortes:

President Bush was warmly received Thursday morning at the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast and Conference, where he was lauded by the top organizer and spent about a quarter of an hour after his speech shaking hands and chatting one on one with audience members.

Latinos of faith are proud of President Bush’s accomplishments during the past eight years, said the Rev. Luis Cortes, Jr., president and CEO of Esperanza, the largest Hispanic faith-based evangelical network in the United States.

While introducing the president, Cortes lauded his “commitment to comprehensive immigration reform” and U.S. aid to the economies of Hispanic countries.

The National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast and Conference was a three-day event held at the J. W. Marriott Hotel in Washington, D.C.

“We are proud that you have, and have had, the largest bilingual education budget in American history,” Cortes said. He also praised the president for his defense efforts and his HIV/AIDS policy in Africa.

Bush called the gathering an “important event.” He cited his administration’s support of faith-based and community groups like Esperanza, and he credited them with providing hope to people that the government cannot give.

via CNS News

(above) Somewhere along the Chilean coastline. PLUS: Surfing in the Amazon. Both found at TowSurfer.

I kid you not: The man himself had trouble downloading and installing a new program on Windows. He suffers like the rest of ya’ll who use Windows. (Note: this email is about five years old).

I don’t think it is, but I do think that the dynamic of blogging, and it’s place in social networking and e-communication, has definitely changed. When blogs started (for me, at least, early 2002) we didn’t have Twitter, Facebook, Linked In or any of the other social networking tools. It was this great cool way for people to find you and learn all sorts of arcane things about your life. Now I’m trying to figure out the proper role of a blog in my own communications. Twittering is fun and pretty interesting. Myspace, who needs it. Facebook, people keep emailing me on that system, maybe it’s good for something. Linked In, not one good thing has come from that. Anyway, got some thoughts you’d like to share?

… and it didn’t quite work. I installed the plugin, then killed. When I have some time to work on it, I’ll get a twitter thingy up in the right sidebar of this blog.

I can do a data merge inside an InDesign doc, something I’ve never been able to do in a Quark Xpress doc. I’ve used Quark for as long as I’ve been at Harambee (just about), and whether I was too cheap or what, I’ve never been able to do a data merge in a Quark file. I design and write the Harambee donation receipts using Microsoft Word, which is known not as the creative page designer’s software of choice. But it merges docs. So I’ve stuck with it. Well, a few months back we bought InDesign CS3 for $60 via our TechSoup account (normally $200), and just tonight I probed the Data Merge question. I messed around with InDesign when doing our last newsletter, but ran out of time and reverted to Quark 6.5, as the InDesign user interface and menus required more learning time than I had at that moment. Anyway, I’m feeling really good. If you are a Harambee donor, expect some page layout that’s a little more, uh, not-like-Microsoft-Word in your next receipt.

I close, randomly but somewhat related, with the list of software I use heavily each day:

– Firefox browser
– Gmail
– Google Calendar
– Adium
– Stickies
– iTunes
– Photoshop Elements 4
– iPhoto
– Preview
– Acrobat Buzzword
– Fetch 4
– Microsoft Word

It passed abou 3 weeks ago, but here’s a photo from the day. That’s Sam about to blow out the candles, surrounded by his friends from Harambee Prep:

Here’s a shot of Micah at the portrait studio:

Here’s Sam at Open House, next to his Cheetah report:

and here’s Sam sitting at the feet of Dr. John Perkins. Sam is in the lower left corner. We are at Fuller Seminary, where JP was giving a Monday night lecture to a packed room.

Prof. Bainbridge has antibiotic-resistant soil bacteria, hygience hypothesis, and an interesting comment thread.

Gang involved and gang associated young people are all around my home. Lately I’ve been connecting with a number of them, helping them to help themselves. On Monday, a great pre-apprenticeship training program kicks off, with the focus of helping young adults that are unemployed to connect with great opportunities in the trades. One young man I know said, “I’m tired of going in and out of jail.” And he’s willing to make some changes, so this might be the right thing for him.

I really do have more pictures around here. We’ve shot a ton of pics lately. The pictures tell the story of what’s been happening lately.

My good friend, Derek, and his son, Michael, are driving to Indiana as I write this. Derek and his family will be in Valparaiso, where Derek is a new staff pastor at Valparaiso United Methodist Church. Last night we had a tearful end of this chapter in our relationship. Samuel is going to miss Derek’s daughter, Shelby, as well as Mike. Karyn, Derek’s wife, is staying behind for a few more weeks as she wraps up her duties as principal at Pasadena Christian School. I have some pictures around here somewhere.

I dropped my Sidekick into, uh, water. It’s a goner. I’m using this freebie phone that came from T-Mobile for some weird reason. I estimate that it’s worth about seven bucks. But it’s mine, for now. I called T-Mobile and they said that I’m out of contract right now. And tomorrow a certain something gets announced…

The fed (i.e. Dept. of Justice) has put a NOFA for a Latino Youth Mentoring Program at the DOJ web site. The link is here. The deadline is June 20, heh. That’s how the government rolls, fast turnarounds.