Personal Musings category archive
I Have High Blood Pressure 0
I skipped the debate and watched an episode of Midsomer Murders. It was coherent, well-written, logical (if a bit outre), and well-performed.
I’ll read about the debate tomorrow, after I take my blood pressure medicine.
Sleazy Is as Sleazy Thinks 0
I have two daughters. I never ever thought–I cannot conceive of having ever thought–of dating either one of them.
Guess I’m not Republican Presidential candidate material.
Pardon me now while I take a few moments to stop my skin from crawling.
Afterthought:
Today’s Republican Party is a vile and loathsome thing.
Coda 0
Donald Trump has done one positive thing.
He has verified that the Republican Party and the religious right are what those of us to the left of the late Senator Everett Dirksen have been saying they are for three decades or more.
Afterthought:
Oh, my. The wheels are coming off the Trump train.
Whatever will tomorrow bring? And whatever will “Republican Family Values” voters have to say?
(I can answer the latter question: Nothing. Because “Family Values” is nothing more than a marketing slogan for “Republican.” On that statement I shall take a strong and wide stance.)
Symptomatology 0
Trump is the symptom, the boil on the body politic, that has brought America’s worst to painful prominence in the polity.
If anyone can be named as the cause of the eruption, it’s Richard Nixon, Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes, and their vile vortex of villainy that valued victory, however venal the vector, over virtue.
The Tarheel Potty Police 0
One wonders whether those who see God’s revenge in random weather events will see this as God’s revenge for North Carolina’s HB2 Pervy Potty Patrol Peeper Law.
Nah.
Trumpling Women (Updated) 0
Really, now, aside from its having been documented, was anyone at all surprised?
Afterthought:
It will be interesting to see whether this will prove too much for the self-proclaimed “Christians” who have so loudly supported him.
I’m betting it won’t. I expect that they will decide that, whoever the woman in question was, she was a fallen woman, she was asking for it, she was no better than she should be (whatever the hell that means), boys will be boys, and–oh, you can fill in the rest of the blanks.
Addendum, Later That Same Day:
Stray Question 0
If little eagles are called ‘eaglets” and little pigs are called “piglets,” why aren’t little chickens called “chicklets?”
Stray Thought 0
From time to time in these electrons, I have urged my two or three regular readers to “watch what they do, not what they say.”
Occasionally, though, it is sufficient to watch what they say.
I Can Never Remember Birthdays 2
This blog turned 11 last week and I didn’t notice.
A. Twenty Dollars 0
Q. What is the difference between “food” and “cuisine”?
Stray Thought 0
It’s not a “resealable package” if you can’t figure out how to open it without using scissors in the first place.
Furrfu.
Minority Retort 0
I have from time to time noticed that one mark of a really good idea is that, once someone else thinks of it, it seems blindingly obvious.
Driftglass and Bluegal point out, in their latest podcast, that, thanks to the Fox News/Wingnut talk radio bubble, the hate-full Republican base likely believe they are the majority, even though they are not, because they have insulated themselves from other views.
Hence the coming rage when their candidate loses.
Aside:
I got a dollar to a doughnut that the husband in the second letter here is a Fox News devotee. Takers? (Krispy Kreme only, please. Delivery directions upon request.)
Defending the Indefensible 0
If I’m ever hauled into the court of public opinion, I want to be represented by the same PR firm that’s representing kale.
Stray Question 0
Will Hamilton, the Musical be for rap what Benny Goodman’s Carnegie Hall Concert was for jazz?
Stray Thought: On Walls 0
The Great Wall of China worked out so very nicely, did it not?
. . . the Great Wall never effectively prevented invaders from entering China . . . .
Follow the link for details.
Stray Thought 0
Like the wind chill, the heat index is a number created by sadists to convince us that we are more miserable than we are.
Conventional Bloggery 0
Don’t expect much about events at either the Republican or Democratic conventions in these electrons. I’ve long considered what happens at political conventions, like election results, to be something to read about over coffee the next morning.
Besides, at least this week, I couldn’t bear to look, even if I wanted to. Cleveland is already turning uglier than I feared it might.
Aside:
I wonder how long the corporate media can maintain their fiction that the Republican convention is “politics as usual” and that “both sides do it” in the face of events in Cleveland? Yesterday, the headlines at Raw Story and Crooks and Liars looked like stuff the Onion Mad Magazine would not have dared to make up.
(Indefinitely, I suspect. It’s what they are paid for.)
Sanity Break 0
No, despite what you may hear, the whole country is not going crazy.
It’s the Republican Party and its dupes, fellow travelers, and symps that are melting down. The rest of us are okay.
Keep that in mind.
Stray Question 0
Why do the manufacturers of sneakers (“trainers” in the UK) default to using laces long enough to moor a boat (or get tangled in your bicycle chain)?
The Berned-Over District 2
From the Bangor Daily News, William M. Daley poses a question for Bernie Sanders. I’ll paraphrase it:
I’m a member of the Democratic Party for a very practical reason; I even volunteer in my own small way.
I realized that, after decades of voting, I had only ever voted for two Republicans (Larry Coughlin when I lived in Pennsylvania and Bill Roth when I lived in Delaware, both of them good and decent men, though Roth was in his dotage when he ultimately left political life); neither would be welcome in Today’s Republican Party(TM).
As I try to live in the real world, whatever the details of my ideology might be (trust me, it’s much farther left than you might think-I might even be willing to voter for Franklin Roosevelt, were he on the ticket), I decided that I had to cast my lot in the real world. I joined the party that better represented me, as there are only two realistic alternatives in the USA. (If you have a pipe dream of a third party* in the United States, all I can say is that I want a drag on that pipe, because it must be some really kick-ass stuff . . . .)
Parties are organized and have rules; it’s part of what makes them “organized” “parties.”
You just joined the Party, Bernie, solely so you could run for the nomination and for no other reason. Hell, I’ve been a Democrat longer than you have, and I’m nobody who is younger than you and who officially joined the Party just a few years ago.
You knew the rules going in, and now you want to dictate new rules because your grapes turned sour.
If you lose according to the rules, you have lost. The rules didn’t beat you.
You lost.
Forget the Corvair; Ralph Nader’s legacy will forever be President George the Worst. It would be a damned shame if Bernie Sanders’s legacy is President Ronald McDonald Trump.
Give it up, Bernie; you’ve worn out your welcome. Don’t be another Nader.