Another terrorist video was released today...

In it, the founder of a religious group called for the assassination of a democratically elected President. Take a guess which religious group he founded.

(A) Al Qaeda

(B) Christian Coalition

If you guessed (A), you were wrong. Today, Pat Robertson, the founder of the Christian Coalition called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, the democratically elected president of Venezuela. You may think he's a leftist, and a communist, and whatever else, and indeed the world might be better off without him. I don't know if that's true or not. I really can't comment intelligently on the state of world without Chavez. What I can tell you is that calling for the assassination of a foreign head of state is wrong. And even Pat Robertson will tell you so.

http://www.cbnindia.org/200Questions/article.php?topic=18

The link above is to the website titled 200 questions: Pat Robertson answers life's most challenging questions. It's full of pearls of wisdom from Robertson about how to live a godly life. For instance, he doesn't eat meat, or drink alcohol, because "My conduct might cause someone else, who is weak, to stumble. The apostle Paul established a rule of conduct that I think is very good. He said he would not eat meat or drink wine or do anything else which would cause a weaker brother to stumble (see Romans 14:14-21)."

But I direct you now to the paragraph titled "What Does The Bible Mean When It Says, "Do Not Be Overcome With Evil, But Overcome Evil With Good?"

A direct quote...

"There is only one way that evil can overcome a Christian, and that is if the Christian returns evil for evil. If someone insults you and snarls at you, you are not overcome. You are overcome if you begin to snarl right back. Then the unpleasant person has become your role model. You are copying evil and evil is overcoming you. If someone hates you and you hate him back, then evil is getting the victory. If someone strikes you and you strike back, then you have become like the evil one."

Assuming Pat Robertson wrote this, which I believe he did, because he says that taking credit for someone else's work is also a sin, Robertson has fallen to the dark side. And it's not even like his words were taken out of context. He said, "If he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think we really ought to go ahead and do it." I'm not on a side here. Is Chavez a bad person? Maybe. But calling for the death of a foreign leader is illegal in the US, and I wonder what the government will do about it?

The question is why? Why should we "take out" Chavez. Pat Robertson seems to think Chavez will let Muslim extremeists into Venezuela. He doesn't elaborate, but he is concerned. Venezuela is also sitting on the largest oil deposit in our hemisphere. Robertson thinks it's very dangerous to let someone like Chavez control that much oil. Hmm, someone in the world has something we want. Let's kill them. That's what Jesus would do.

Speaking of oil, it's up over three a gallon. I remember back in my day, when you could fill a ten gallon tank for less than ten bucks. Oh, wait, that was 1997. What has changed so much in 8 years that gasoline has tripled in value. Demand up, supply down, right? Wrong. If you've taken basic economics you've been told that prices are controlled by supply and demand. When one goes up, the other goes down and prices change. Supply up, demand down, price down. As demand goes up, price goes up if supply can't keep up. Most people assume that's what's happened to oil. But it's not true. The reason prices are climbing is speculation. There could be an oil shortage sometime in the future. What drives the prices? The price of oil on the futures market.

Here's an article to explain it much better than I can.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,166038,00.html

I know it's from Fox News, but it's the best I could find.

On a personal note, I passed my Series 7 test, as well as my Series 63, so I officially registered to buy and sell stocks for y'all.