Mitt is not a serious candidate. No sane person would consider putting a Bush on the ticket.
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Monthly Archive for March, 2007
If you’ve been following the questionable details in the Ryan Skipper murder, add the Pensito Review to your bookmarks — the team there is promising to stay all over the story.
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I’m going to do something a little different this week — a Before, During and After series of Friday Creature photos. These images follow the faithful hound through last weekend’s grooming fun.
In the first shot, she’s very hairy, probably suffering from the heat, and definitely having some trouble seeing beyond the tufts of hair sprouting around her eyes:
Then we see her in the middle of the process, looking like she has the mange. Her tails wags as she takes a break from the grueling sessions with the trimmer. Note that we have found her face:
And then finally, we find her in repose, relieved to be done with the trimmer, and waiting to have her ears done and for touchup with the scissors. She’s cool and comfortable, she can see now, and we can make out her huge brown eyes, but alas, her legs now look like chicken bones. We’ve discovered under all that hair was a much smaller dog:
That’s it for this week. If you don’t feel sated, head on over to the Modulator’s Ark for a veritable smorgasbord of creatures! As always, have a great weekend. And if you’re in the Northeast, please consider sending us some rain! You guys have been hogging it long enough! It’s our turn!
(BTW, I think our 8-year-old Wahl KM-1 trimmer has had it. If anyone out there is knowledgable about such things, I’d love your recommendation as I shop for a new one. I’m thinking I’d like to go cordless this time around…)
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Here we are in the 21st century, and yet we’ve found someone who believes that “married women cannot be sexually assaulted by their husbands.”
“By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don’t think you can call it rape,” she said.
(via O Dub)
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Whoops. Just kidding.
Well, someone did actually make the suggestion, but the person proposing such a ridiculous idea was none other than the deranged James Dobson, who is famous for encouraging parents to beat their children to tears and then stop, unless the children cry too much, in which case they should be beaten some more.
Why anyone takes this medieval throwback at all seriously is a mystery. Check out these other examples of “insight” from Dobson:
“[P]ain is a marvelous purifier. . . It is not necessary to beat the child into submission; a little bit of pain goes a long way for a young child. However, the spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely.” (from Dobson’s Dare to Discipline, pages 6-7)
“If children cry for longer than five minutes, the child is merely complaining…I would require him to stop the protest crying, usually by offering him a little more of whatever caused the original tears.” (from Dobson’s “Complete Marriage and Family Reference Guide”)
“I strongly recommend that parents of strong-willed and rebellious females, especially, quietly keep track of the particulars of their daughters’ menstrual cycles.” (from Dobson’s “Challenges In The Family Years: Understanding Early Adolescents”)
Yikes! Is it any wonder, then, that Dobson’s favorite 2008 candidate is the ethically challenged, thrice-married, admitted philanderer, Newt Gingrich? What a shining model of evangelical Christianity!
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It’s getting to be a real problem here in Chattanooga. The trees have been spewing their sperm for over a week now, and we’ve seen absolutely no rain in that time. Cars and sidewalks and trashcan lids have all turned bright yellow. People can’t open their windows. I don’t suffer from allergies, but even I am feeling sinusy and hitting the visine pretty hard.
On the other hand, it’s also breathtakingly beautiful out there. Everything is in bloom and color is everywhere. I walk down the street and encounter the sweet fragrance given off by so many wonderful blossoms.
A bit of rain would be nice, though. Just a nice, steady 30 or 40 minutes worth would be great, and having it fall in the middle of the night would be even better.
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Salon.com published an interesting piece today by Gary Kamiya, titled How Bush helped the GOP commit suicide, which is largely based on the results of a long-term study by the Pew Research Center which shows Americans are turning away from the Republican party (and, though, not necessarily turning to the Democratic party instead).
The Iraq War, regressive taxation, Enron, Katrina, and scandal after scandal after scandal — there are many reasons to blame Bush, Cheney and Rove for recent GOP tribulations, but there are also structural issues at work.
The Republican party as long relied on intolerant right-wing Christians to turn out their vote, without giving that crucial base much in return. It was easy for the GOP to put off this group by blaming the evil liberals for their own lack of action on abortion and “family values” issues back when the Democrats still had some power in DC, but once Bush and Republicans took over all three branches of government, they didn’t have that excuse anymore. And what we saw was that the real problem was a lack of support for the Republican base’s extreme positions on those issues. No one wants to live in a world of James Dobson’s making — probabaly not even James Dobson, if he was really being honest about it. Or Jerry Falwell, or Ted Haggard, or any of the rest of the flabby, white men who claim moral superiority over the rest of us. These are people who live in the shattered remains of glass houses with their third wives and secret lovers and offshore bank accounts while they preach conservative values to the rest of us.
In the meantime, the rest of us go about life. And the rest of us are, by and large, good people. We’re Democrats and Republicans, Christians and non-Christians. And we’re starting to figure some of this stuff out. Just because George Bush mumbles something about Jesus once in a while doesn’t mean that he’s a good Christian man, or that the Republican agenda is a Christian agenda. But we’re not there yet, as demostrated by this disturbing tidbit in Kamiya’s article:
The survey does not paint a uniformly flattering picture of America. A scary 43 percent of Americans think torture can often or sometimes be justified — perhaps a tribute to the work of “24″ creator and Rush Limbaugh pal Joel Surnow. In a singularly telling finding, 45 percent of those who identified themselves as liberal Democrats said torture was never justified, compared to 18 percent of conservative Republicans. These contrasting responses should be deeply troubling to traditional conservatives; they show how badly their movement has degenerated under Gingrich and Bush. When did being a conservative start meaning signing off on torture? Isn’t there a ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” in the Eighth Amendment of some old document drawn up by some geezers in powdered wigs that conservatives are supposed to care passionately about? And what would Jesus think about torture? Apparently being a conservative no longer means believing in a transcendental morality.
Torture, people? Really? Have you seriously thought about this, read about it, prayed about it, discussed it with your mom and your preacher and your philosophy prof and your kids and decided, yeah, torture — that’s what we need? I don’t think so. I think y’all have been letting Karl Rove get to you a little bit too much. I suspect if you really think about this, America, you’ll realize that torture is not a place a Great Nation goes. We’re better than that. We don’t have to go there.
We might be stuck with this twisted, immoral administration for another 665 days (at most), but we don’t have to sling ourselves down there in the gutter with them. Let’s not go there, OK?
And you may ask yourself
What is that beautiful house?
And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway go?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right? …am I wrong?
And you may tell yourself
My god! …what have I done?
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Tonight on David Letterman: a very special goodbye to Calvert “Larry ‘Bud’ Melman” DeForest.
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That’s how many days are left until our long national nightmare is over (at most).
In other news, I just looked at the forecast and it is calling for highs in the 80s all week long. Gosh, those two days of spring we had were wonderful.
Happy Monday, everyone!
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It’s been a hot, dry, busy weekend here in Chattanooga. I was up early on Saturday morning for the reorganization of the local Democratic Party. And then after lunch, DH (dear husband) and I drove down to Scottsboro, AL to visit Unclaimed Baggage.
It was a beautiful day for driving around in the rural south. The dogwoods, forsythia and numerous spring flowers are in bloom, so the roadsides were filled with color. The drive took us beside and across Nickajack Lake and then all along one of the tendrils of Lake Guntersville.
There is one very incongruous feature of the landscape along the trip that I always find jarring in the midst of the bucolic countryside. Along the right side of Hwy 72 North near Hollywood, FL, the twin towers of the Bellefonte Nuclear Plant rise up out of the hillside looking as though they’d been dropped from a spaceship into what otherwise appears to be old country farmlands and forests. I wonder what will become of the towers — after an investment of $6 billion, they were abandoned without ever generating a single watt, though they may now be on track to become water reactors.
Today has been more mellow, but stuff is getting done. I shaved the dog (finally! this was her first haircut since before Thanksgiving and she needed it!) and then she and I went for a walk (it’s hot out!). I’ve done some laundry and we’re still working on the bookshelf project that started last weekend. It’s been nice to hang around the house today.
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