Personal Musings category archive

vs. crass acts, over at the Booman’s place.

This one is worth 30 seconds–60 seconds on dial-up–folks (well, maybe I should say “folk,” but that’s neither here nor elsewhere).

It lays out in three column inches the difference between the two campaigns and their adherents.

Addendum, Later That Same Evening:

Balloon Juice has more.

One thing I don’t get is the modern mania for decorating for every holiday. Hallowe’en may be the second to Christmas in terms of what persons do to their houses (though it’s sixth in terms of spending).

I wasn’t going to decorate for Hallowe’en.

But I’m having second thoughts.

Thinking he was being funny, Second Son, whom I’m in the process of disinheriting, brought this . . . this . . . this . . . thing into the house that is so appalling in its appearance and so bone-chilling in its implications that I’m thinking that, if I put it on a frame next to the front step, I won’t have to worry about trick-or-treaters; they’ll just go screaming into the night.

It’s carries such an aura of malevolence that I don’t want to put it here on the front page.

But you can see it (parental advisory) here.

Man, I’m glad I don’t live some place where it gets really cold, like, say, for example, Colorado.

. . . in the posts that got lost when my database went screwy, so I’m mentioning it again.

I didn’t used to be a card-carrying, money-contributing, rabid Democrat.

The Republicans turned me into one.

This country and its ideals are too important to be abandoned to the likes of them.

After working nine straight days, I just had to bag it today and get out of the house for a while.

Now, note, that’s not eight hours a day. In my world, you don’t get paid for lunch or for hanging around surfing the net or for thinking about starting to work; you can bill only for when you are actually working (including, of course, reasonable breaks).

So on the way back from mailing a package, I stopped at Blueberry Hill Resale. When I got divorced, Blueberry Hill was where I re-furnished the house for all but one or two items. I was a frequent visitor for a couple of years, because, frankly, it’s a really neat shop.

How’s business? I asked.

Lousy, she says. Traffic is way off. She started babbling, the same way I babble when I’ve been working at home without talking to an adult for a couple of days. I babbled right back.

She said she’s lucky to get three visitors a day and is afraid she might lose her business. She had to give up the garage across the street that she had rented for years to store large pieces of furniture. She couldn’t afford it anymore.

And, ya’ know what?

Nobody’s going to bail her out.

Just like nobody’s going to bail me out. We’re not rich.

We each have only one house and one car. Not seven or eight of each.

Not important enough for Bernanke to care.

She also said that, if McHack wins the election, she’s just going to pack it in and move back to Finland. “I can’t take four more years of this,” she said.

None of us can take four more years of this.

Never hire a law firm that advertises an 800-number on the telly-vision.

Or, as John Cole titled his post, from which I shamelessly stole this, “Elections Have Consequences.”

While I was waiting for someone–anyone–to show up at the Bellefonte Cafe this evening, I got into a tangle with someone who was surprised that I support Obama (frankly, if the Democrats had nominated a dachshund, I would vote for it against any Republican).

(Based on stuff I overheard later, I think she might be favoring some Libertarian nutcase.)

I pointed out to her that “elections are not about who’s not running” and later offered her an Obama sticker.

Remember that my son has been in the line of fire for two tours because of Bush’s lies. He has served honorably a dishonorable regime.

So has this man.

Dammit, elections matter.

And vote right, which means vote Left.

Unless you like having blood on your hands.

. . . but I have stayed away from it because, well, as my mother used to say, just because.

Yet the Booman phrased it so well:

Yeah, I know that Democrats sometimes cheat on their spouse (sic), occasionally even with someone of the same sex, but why is it that Republicans are so consistently the ones preying on children, trolling in public bathrooms, and asking prostitutes to put them in diapers?

Oh, yeah, and don’t forget to check out the list.

Family values my anatomy.

It is all sounding brass and tinkling cymbals, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, created solely to distract voters from the truth of Republicanism and to attract votes from the unwitting.

“Republican Family Values” is marketing, with no more sincerity or conviction than a commercial designed to get you to buy Cover Girl rather than Max Factor (which, incidently, are both made by the same manufacturer).

To quote that prescient philosopher, Mr. T, “Pity the fool” who bought their line of snake oil.

There is a sad, delicious irony in watching Republican economic theory and practices push the nation towards state ownership of the means of production.

If I hear one more commentary containing the words, “The market hates uncertainty,” I shall scream.

As I watch the Phillies game, I realize that the Fox Sports announcers are really really bad.

Bring back Harry Kalas for the playoffs.

At least he understands baseball.

Over at ASZ, Steve muses about what the phrase “overtly white” means, as the antonym to the phrase “overtly nonwhite,” as used below:

OK, maybe it is the English teacher in me, but that “overtly” is bugging me. I found it in this usage in the Washington Post this morning, in a quotation from a White Supremacist. The Post article is about the explosion of activity by racist groups on the internet in the last year or two, and how that explosion is being spurred by the candidacy of Barack Obama. Here’s the quote from the WaPo:

Neo-Nazi, skinhead and segregationist groups have reported gains in numbers of visitors to their Web sites and in membership since the senator from Illinois secured the Democratic nomination June 3. His success has aroused a community of racists, experts said, concerned by the possibility of the country’s first black president.

“I haven’t seen this much anger in a long, long time,” said Billy Roper, a 36-year-old who runs a group called White Revolution in Russellville, Ark. “Nothing has awakened normally complacent white Americans more than the prospect of America having an overtly nonwhite president.”

What the heck does that mean? If I’m having a hard time figuring out what “overty white” means, I’m having the devil of a time figuring out what “overtly nonwhite” means, especially as concerns Barack Obama. Let’s not parse this too much, but Obama is just as much white as he is black. Is that What Roper refers to, afraid that people will come back at him with the line I just used? “Overtly nonwhite,” then, means to him the mere color of his skin? Well, duh! That’s exactly what Roper means as he mangles the language, something the Harvard educated Obama is not likely to have done.

Well, this looks to me like what “overtly white” means in the context of Mr. Billy Roper’s statements and beliefs:

Racial epithets were spray-painted on the lawns of two houses and a playground in the Colton Meadow community near St. Georges on Friday night and Saturday morning.

Racial slurs in bold, yellow print were found on the lawns of homes of black and Hispanic families sometime Friday night, said county police spokesman Cpl. Trinidad Navarro.

The nearby children’s playground was marred with the words KKK, Jews and racial epithets as well as toilet paper.

Link to the full Washington Post story here.

My little three-bedroom one and half bath split clocks in at 1425 square feet. It’s plenty. In fact, as the kids have grown up and moved away, it’s gotten bigger.

And there’s no rule that says that every kid has to have his or her own room. Bunk beds work just fine.

When Martin Focazio and his wife were house-hunting in 2000, they fired some real estate agents unwilling to help them find exactly what they wanted: a small place.

“They couldn’t get out of their heads that, according to their calculations, I should have been able to buy this monstrous estate,” says Focazio, a consultant with Magnani Caruso Dutton, a digital-media agency. (He and his wife, who teaches part time, moved to this area after renting in New York City.)

“They were pushing us into these six-bedroom, five-bath, four-Jacuzzi monstrosities. It was fairly obscene stuff,” Focazio says.

Instead, the couple, since expanded to a family of five, settled into a 1,200-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bath house on several acres in Upper Black Eddy, Bucks County.

I am extremely disappointed in Senator Obama’s position on Stinky Hoyer’s F. I. S. A. bill.

I won’t bother to go into the reasons. For my two or three regular readers, they will be obvious. For others, check here and here and here; their arguments are not necessarily my arguments, but close enough.

I sent the following email to Senator Obama:

I am extremely disapppointed with the Senator’s position on Mr. Hoyer’s FISA bill.

It is time to stop selling out our civil liberties and civil rights to the Bush Administration. They have demonstrated that they act in bad faith. Democrats should no longer be complicit in their misbehavior.

Every time I think the Republic Party can’t sink any lower, it proves me wrong. Apparently, the Honorable Mark Steven Kirk (R.-Ill.) thinks assassination is a joking matter.

Mr. Kirk looks young. He no doubt has no memories of waking up to his clock radio in 1968 and hearing news when there should have been music. And knowing, at that point, that something must be very wrong. And learning in a few minutes that Robert Kennedy had been killed.

Follow the link if you think you have the stomach to listen to the audio (emphasis added).

Surely the Don Wade show should be taken off the air. And maybe Congressman Kirk ought to be called out by the MSM for a “mistake” the GOP seems to make a bit too often.

Transcript:

DON WADE: In fact, yesterday in a conference call, Barack Obama’s advisers were asked, “If Osama bin Laden were caught, should he get to challenge his detention in U.S. courts?” And the advisers said that — should that right to challenge detention that they get at Gitmo based on the Supreme Court ruling, should that be applied to bin Laden? — and Obama’s advisers said, “Yes.”

KIRK: Yeah, and I would much rather have a policy where if we see Obama there’s a shoot-on-sight order.

DON WADE: Well, okay. I’m with you, but I don’t know whether that’s going to make 67 — well it might —

Scum.

Someone made a comment to this post to the effect that there was validity to conclusion that “we have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” because persons can have differing opinions.

Here is my response (slightly edited):

The way news is treated today has convinced a lot of people that opposite opinions are somehow equal opinions.

The facts make it clear that Iraq had nothing to do with Al Qaeda before the American invasion, despite the statements of the Current Federal Administration. They also make it clear that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction prior to the American invasion (that’s why the inspectors kept finding nothing–and why Bush kept advancing the deadline; Bush knew they were finding nothing and wanted to cut them off before the findings were conclusive.)

Bush lied us into this war. And a certain number of fools drank the Kool-Aid with him.

It is one thing to have differing opinions.

But, if one of those opinions is based on falsehoods, there is only one word for it: Lie.

If someone chooses to base his opinions on lies, I reserve the right to call him or her out for being a fool.

The largest mall in Delaware has banned kids who are not accompanied by adults on Friday and Saturday evenings:

Teenagers in the habit of whiling away weekend nights in Delaware’s Christiana Mall are about to get a new crowd to run with: their mall-walking parents.

As of July 11, unaccompanied minors will be barred from Delaware’s largest shopping center after 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday nights.

Christiana is the first mall in the Philadelphia region to move to a teenager curfew, which has spread into dozens of malls nationwide since its inception in the mid-1990s. No mall in Pennsylvania or New Jersey is considering a similar policy.

(Full disclosure: I don’t like Christiana Mall and avoid it whenever possible. When I have to go to a mall, I go to Concord Mall, the Small Mall That Has It All.)

(Aside: You know what a mall is. It’s a place with one or two department stores, 50 clones of the Gap, and one men’s store. Except Christiana Mall is a large mall. It has 100 clones of the Gap and a Williams-Sonoma–where you can pay far too much money for cooking equipment you will never need for dishes you will never cook–and one men’s store.)

Over at DelawareLiberal, liberalgeek seems to have decided that this is some kind of discrimination, even equating it with discrimination against black persons.

I’ve reared my share of teenagers.

Actually, more teenagers than I ever expected to rear.

And I think liberalgeek is missing the point.

The point is this: Parents shouldn’t use malls as dumping grounds for their kids, on weekends or any other times. Even if it gives said parents a chance to relive why they decided to become parents in the first place.

Furthermore, kids should not be left roaming around unsupervised for hours at a time, singly or in groups. It is not the job of a store or a group of stores or a mall to supervise other persons’ kids.

And if the parents are not using the mall as a dumping ground, but rather the kids are dumping themselves there, a whole nother list of questions arises, like, for example, say, “Where the hell are the parents?”

My kids were not allowed to go to the mall to hang out–at least, not until they got their drivers’ licenses and could go there on their own legally. And by then, of course, they had almost attained the age of majority. And they still had to have permission to use the family vehicle or they had to find their own damned ride.

By then they had learned to amuse themselves in ways that did not require hanging around at the mall.

(And, no, I don’t want to know what those ways were.)

. . . is a training charlatan’s dream.

Diversity, Inc., on the other hand, is a pretty good magazine.

I submit this column for your consideration, especially if you are one of those folks who just don’t get what the fuss over race is all about.

So I’m not going to bother writing my own post.

I’m just going to refer you to Noz. I pretty much agree with what he said.

A few days ago, I accompanied my girlfriend to the doctor’s office–she was on light duty and not allowed to drive.

There was an older gentleman there–yeah, even older than me. Apparently he was a regular customer, because he was joking with the secretary. In the course of his comments, it came out that his grandson was in the Navy.

So I mentioned that my son was in the 82nd.

As the conversation progressed, I mentioned that I didn’t think much of my son’s boss.

And off he went. “We’re fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here blah blah blah.”

I said that, as regards Afghanistan, I agree completely; as regards Iraq, we’ll have to agree to disagree, and went back to reading Samuel Pepys Diary.

Later, my girlfriend complimented me on my restraint.

I said, “There’s no point in arguing with a true believer.”

But there is a larger point.

How can he believe that we are fighting them in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them here, when there is no evidence that they (by which I assumed he meant Al Qaeda and their allies, as Iraq never posed a threat to the United States) were there in the first place?

Because he believes Bushie lies. Even after all that has happened to expose them.

That point is that there are persons out there who simply don’t pay attention to what’s going on in the world.

It is that ignorance which is the enemy.